Thinkers are always part of a level if they are linked and active, so this reference needs to be kept so that a thinker can unlink itself on destruction.
This time there was one important exported script function: Actor.Spawn.
Since this will require a level pointer in the new scheme of things the old version had to be deprecated, because it is static with no argument that allows retrieving the level. However, since this is probably one of the most widely used functions I added a workaround to let it continue to work if used from inside an actor class, which should constitute >95% of all uses. This required a little bit of hackery in the compiler backend to swap out the function if appropriate.
Aside from that there were 5 places in the internal ZScript that needed handling, which mostly consisted of making a formerly static internal function non-static.
This can see some heavy use in iterators where saving several hundreds of function calls can be achieved. In these cases, using a function to do the job will become a significant time waster.
- added new VARF_Transient flag so that the decision whether to serialize a field does not depend solely on its native status. It may actually make a lot of sense to use the auto-serializer for native fields, too, as this would eliminate a lot of maintenance code.
- defined (u)int8/16 as aliases to the byte and short types (Can't we not just get rid of this naming convention already...?)
- exporting the fields of Actor revealed a few name clashes between them and some global types, so Actor.Sector was renamed to CurSector and Actor.Inventory was renamed to Actor.Inv.
This appears to be the only case where an actor was set to a state owned by a completely unrelated actor which would present some problems with state owner checking in AActor::SetState, so let's better get rid of it ASAP.
I believe the only reason this wasn't changed when all actors were exported 8 years ago was that old binary DEHSUPP lump.
This could cause problems with functions that take states as parameters but use them to set them internally instead of passing them through the A_Jump interface back to the caller, like A_Chase or A_LookEx.
This required some quite significant refactoring because the entire state resolution logic had been baked into the compiler which turned out to be a major maintenance problem.
Fixed this by adding a new builtin type 'statelabel'. This is an opaque identifier representing a state, with the actual data either directly encoded into the number for single label state or an index into a state information table.
The state resolution is now the task of the called function as it should always have remained. Note, that this required giving back the 'action' qualifier to most state jumping functions.
- refactored most A_Jump checkers to a two stage setup with a pure checker that returns a boolean and a scripted A_Jump wrapper, for some simpler checks the checker function was entirely omitted and calculated inline in the A_Jump function. It is strongly recommended to use the boolean checkers unless using an inline function invocation in a state as they lead to vastly clearer code and offer more flexibility.
- let Min() and Max() use the OP_MIN and OP_MAX opcodes. Although these were present, these function were implemented using some grossly inefficient branching tests.
- the DECORATE 'state' cast kludge will now actually call ResolveState because a state label is not a state and needs conversion.
- added support for global variables to the code generator - not the compiler, though. For the handful of entries this is needed for it may just as well be done manually. So far FLevelLocals level is the only one being exported.
- fixed: The VM disassembler truncated 64 bit pointers to 15 digits because the output buffer was too small.
- resolve entire FxSequences instead of aborting on the first failed entry. This allows to output all errors at once.
- exported thinker iterator and drop item chain to scripting. Unlike its native counterpart the script-side iterator is wrapped into a DObject to allow proper handling for memory management.
- fixed: The VMFunctionBuilder only distinguished between member and action functions but failed on static ones.
- fixed: FxAssign did not add all needed type casts. Except for purely numeric types it will now wrap the expression in an FxTypeCast. Numeric handling remains unchanged for both performance reasons and not altering semantics for DECORATE.
- exported all internal flags as variables to scripting. They still cannot be used in an actor definition.
- make ATAG_STATE the same as ATAG_GENERIC. Since state pointers exist as actual variables they can take both values which on occasion can trigger some asserts.
- gave PClass a bExported flag, so that scripts cannot see purely internal classes. Especially the types like PInt can cause problems.
Todo: we need readonly references to safely expose the actor defaults. Right now some badly behaving code could overwrite them.
- fixed a few problems that were encountered during conversion:
* action specials as action functions were not recognized by the parser.
* Player.StartItem could not be parsed.
* disabled the naming hack for PowerupType. ZScript, unlike DECORATE will never prepend 'Power' to the power's name, it always needs to specified by its full name.
* states and defaults were not checked for empty bodies.
* the scope qualifier for goto labels was not properly converted to a string, because it is an ENamedName, not an FName.
