Learning ACS

I would like to learn ACS, but there is a lot on the zdoom forum. Where should I start? Also, in some of the tutorials there are thingnames like "T_SHOTGUY" where can I find the thingnames that DB2 recognizes?

DB2 doesn't know anything about ACS. It doesn't recognize any name. It just lets you type text in something, and then send that something to ACC.

These names are actually constants declared in zdefs.acs. Keep in mind that the latest version of the .acs files can be downloaded from DRD Team.

A full list of constants for the spawn numbers can of course be found on the ZDoom wiki; and in addition, each actor page shows this information, when relevant, in the actor's header. For example, look at the shotgun guy.

As for ACS itself, you should find everything you need to know here.

What if I want to spawn in one of the decorate monsters that I am using. How do I define them?

It pays to read the sites behind the links...

Note that new actors need not be assigned a spawn number to spawn them from an ACS script. Nearly every spawn function that takes a SpawnID has an equivalent function that uses the actor's name directly instead. This allows for the creation and usage of more than 255 actors without the possibility of conflicting SpawnIDs.

Anyway, if you really want to define a spawnid, you do it with the spawnid property.

Alright. Also, I want to put the double chainsaw in a level, but i guess it works a little differently than adding a monster because I keep getting errors when I try to load the level. Like "Error expected "{" but got ":" instead, or "doublechainsaw needs to be defined as a weapon for some property". It shows up in decorate, but I can't get the map to load because of these errors

There are decorate examples for weapons and adding new ones. Find them.

Your first error was just a punctuation problem.

Why don't you post your code? We can't tell you more than the error messages themselves if you don't.