currentUILevel is now primaryLevel.
For ZScript, currentVMLevel was added. This is also exported as 'level' and will change as needed.
This also means that no breaking deprecations will be needed in the future, because in order to sandbox a level only 4 variables need to be handled: level, players, playeringame and consoleplayer.
The remaining global variables are not relevant for the level state.
The static 'level' has been mostly removed from the code except some places that still need work.
I think these were the last two still missing it, all remaining uses of the global level variable are in code that doesn't get run through a level tick and are supposed to access the primary level.
There is one exception in ACS for a net arbitrator check.
Aside from this the bot_observer CVAR was also removed. This was never implemented properly and could stomp upon custom player settings.
The Map loader may not access any global state at all - everything it can touch must be exchangable.
Furthermore, if we want to sandbox each level, there may be no direct access to any kind of global state whatsoever from the play code.
- moved parts of the render setup out of the separate render functions.
Things like particle and polyobject linking were duplicated several times for rendering different things in different renderers.
These things only need to be set up once before the renderer is started so it makes a lot more sense to consolidate them into one place outside the actual rendering code.
This had two different flags that were checked totally inconsistently, and one was not even saved.
Moved everything into a few subfunctions so that these checks do not have to be scattered all over the code.
There is no need to do this deep inside the renderer where it required code duplication and made it problematic to execute on multiple levels.
This is now being done before and after the top level call into the renderer in d_main.cpp.
This also serializes the interpolator itself to avoid problems with the Serialize functions adding the interpolations into the list which can only work with a single global instance.
Since currently there is only one level, this will obvciously only run once on that level for the time being.
This is mainly used for CCMDs and CVARs which either print some diagnostics or change some user-settable configuration.
This was done to ensure that this code only runs when the thinker itself is fully set up.
With a constructor there is no control about such things, if some common initialization needs to be done it has to be in the base constructor, but that makes the entire approach chosen here to ensure proper linking into the thinker chains impossible.
ZDoom originally did it that way, which resulted in a very inflexible system and required some awful hacks to let the serializer work with it - the corresponding bSerialOverride flag is now gone.
The only thinker class still having a constructor is DFraggleThinker, because it contains non-serializable data that needs to be initialized in a piece of code that always runs, regardless of whether the object is created explicitly or from a savegame.
This doesn't really write out any info for the pointer, if the level does not match it just errors out.
This is both for quick detection of badly used level data and for automatic restoring of the pointer from the serializer's working level.
This also removed the temporary workarounds in DAutomap and DLevelScript to restore these pointers when a savegame is loaded.
This was a relatively cheap change but removes a significant batch of references to the global variable, only making the entry points to the ACS interpreter relevant.
UI always runs on the primary level, so this does not need the ability to operate on multiple levels. Additionally, this can later be set to null when running play code so that scope violations result in an abort.
