Monster Teleport Limit?

[QuaketallicA]

In one section of my map I was riffing on the famous "Barrels O' Fun" level from Doom II, where you have to run before the alerted enemies set off a nuke that kills us all. Only in my version, the lone opening in the barrel maze is  a shotgunner or an imp, and you have to beserk your way through them. Except, if you punch the first one of these enemies blocking the bottleneck, you won't have enough time to make it out. The player learns that the only way to survive is to intentionally not harm the first guy, but walk right up next to him so he gets triggered but nobody else does. Once he walks towards you, you see he teleports away in a monster-only teleport. As a clue, I have spectres off in the distance teleporting around.

 

Anyway, long story short, I was wondering why my shotgun guy wasn't teleporting around when I intended him to, despite him crossing right over the line. He was in a box, so it is theoretically impossible for him not to teleport, yet it seemed very random sometimes he would and often he wouldn't.

 

Then I figured there might be some monster teleport limit in the map, so I deleted a few monster teleport linedefs so the spectres in the back wouldn't teleport as often, and that seemed to fix it. So this shotgunner can safely teleport away as intended.

 

This leads me to conclude a discovery I was previously unaware of: Is it only possible for a single monster to be teleporting at a time? Or is there some upper cap limit on how many monsters can teleport simultaneously? That seems to be the reason in my example.

[NightRiding Doom]

Does shotgun guy have enough room to teleport? Cause if he teleports to where spectres are, he needs to use a different teleporter tag and closet in a different place where he has enough room.

The shotgun guy also needs to be able to trigger the teleport line when the player is close. So, if the marine himself is on the line, the shotgun guy can not teleport. Try to use more, monster only teleport lines in a sequence so the shotgun guy does teleport even if he crosses one linedef. just make sure they are spaced out more than 8 map units.
 

Unless you have 20 fuzzies running around teleporting all at once, I have not yet hit a cap even with 20+ monsters porting in at the same time in Crispy Doom

Edited September 10, 2023 by tumedaskihutaja_37685

[plums]

I vaguely recall reading something on these forums about how excessive numbers of teleporters (probably at least > 64) can cause problems, because of the order they are processed in or something? Can't remember details at all so hopefully someone who knows will contribute.

 

What format/port are you using, and how many teleport lines/destinations do you have?

[QuaketallicA]

21 hours ago, plums said:

I vaguely recall reading something on these forums about how excessive numbers of teleporters (probably at least > 64) can cause problems, because of the order they are processed in or something? Can't remember details at all so hopefully someone who knows will contribute.

 

What format/port are you using, and how many teleport lines/destinations do you have?

 

That could be it also. I am in GZDoom (ZDoom in UDMF). It is a big map so I do have lots of teleports elsewhere as well.

 

Like I said, whatever was responsible, deleting a few of the teleport linedefs seemed to fix it.

Edited September 11, 2023 by QuaketallicA

[Edward850]

22 hours ago, plums said:

I vaguely recall reading something on these forums about how excessive numbers of teleporters (probably at least > 64) can cause problems, because of the order they are processed in or something? Can't remember details at all so hopefully someone who knows will contribute.

There doesn't appear to be any such thing. EV_Teleport is a simple static lookup for map sectors to find a possible destination with a matching tag, there's no storage of information involved in the process and thus no limit that can come into play.

https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM/blob/master/linuxdoom-1.10/p_telept.c#L48

 

However that aside:

1 hour ago, QuaketallicA said:

That could be it also. I am in GZDoom (ZDoom in UDMF). It is a big map so I do have lots of teleports elsewhere as well.

GZDoom aggressively removes limits. Unless they somehow added a limit that vanilla never had to start with, which would be quite silly and would guarantee people would die from laughter, I highly suspect this theory is nothing more then a red herring.

And indeed I can find no such limit in its teleport destination selection:
https://github.com/ZDoom/gzdoom/blob/a44f7a72cabd503e530957de3e24610f674da4f9/src/playsim/p_teleport.cpp#L259

 

Edited September 11, 2023 by Edward850

[baja blast rd.]

This is basically always "unnoticed user error."