Spawners that just refuse to spawn

[Brad_tilf]

I've seen this a bunch as I'm developing maps - suddenly and for no reason I can ascertain, the spawn function on say, just one, spawn will fail. And for me, that kind of means, that already, I'm in for trouble if I don't go back to a previous version, because - you know, rebuilding after you've been working on it for awhile can suck.
So, who else is seen this? Any known cause?
If it helps any, my network is at about 62%, objects are at 45%, memory is at 35% and Demons are at less that 15% at this point. So I find it difficult to believe that I'm pushing the game to hard.

Any thoughts?

And, keep in mind - these are just straight up spawn events - on "die" spawn Demon Horde 3 or whatever. Nothing fancy - nothing that can confuse the logic.

I don't get what gives.

[Brad_tilf]

Also, I played through that same part twice in a row. On the first try, that spawn event I mentioned occurred but one of the demons I had set up to be there on start, wasn't. On the 2nd attempt, the Spawn didn't occur but the demon was back. WTF?

[MasterFuton]

Sounds like an error that happens to me when I hit the demon limit without realizing it. You could try placing a kill all enemies command before the event starts to figure out if that's the case; something like: on door open > ai iterator > for each ai > kill ai > ai proxy. Then have the event occur immediately after. That's the workaround I've been using to juggle the campaign conductor with events without having issues.

[Brad_tilf]

MasterFuton said:

Sounds like an error that happens to me when I hit the demon limit without realizing it. You could try placing a kill all enemies command before the event starts to figure out if that's the case; something like: on door open > ai iterator > for each ai > kill ai > ai proxy. Then have the event occur immediately after. That's the workaround I've been using to juggle the campaign conductor with events without having issues.

I've been playing with this for awhile since I posted this. I'd say out of more than half a dozen plays (to where I am so far) it has played more or less exactly as I expected it to once. The rest of the time, one or another of the things that should have happened, didn't. I guess it makes it more interesting in a way but also frustrating. And does your string kill things that are in the future?

I wish we could just place the monsters where we want them and have them do what we want but because of the bullshit limits, you have to spawn them in in one form or another.

[Brad_tilf]

MasterFuton said:

Sounds like an error that happens to me when I hit the demon limit without realizing it. You could try placing a kill all enemies command before the event starts to figure out if that's the case; something like: on door open > ai iterator > for each ai > kill ai > ai proxy. Then have the event occur immediately after. That's the workaround I've been using to juggle the campaign conductor with events without having issues.

Is there a demon limit when you're not actually placing demons but using spawn objects to create them because my actual demon percentage is still really low - around 15%

[MasterFuton]

Brad_tilf said:

And does your string kill things that are in the future?

In my testing it will kill enemies that are toggled as non-visible. The way I've gotten around that is to use single and custom group encounter events. If you want to have an enemy already be spawned when you enter a room, you can make a hallway and have the enemy spawn when the door furthest from the room opens. It generally takes between 1 and 3 seconds between the trigger and the event spawning.

[MasterFuton]

Brad_tilf said:

Is there a demon limit when you're not actually placing demons but using spawn objects to create them because my actual demon percentage is still really low - around 15%

The demon limit is 12 currently living demons, regardless of how they got there. Non-visible demons don't count towards the limit. You can actually make a map entirely packed with demons and have the demon percentage at 0% using events, spawns, and conductors; what matters is the quantity that is actively roaming the map.

[HmmNess]

How are you triggering these spawning points?

You need to make sure that you give the nodes some time to communicate with each other. If you do not add any delays to your inputs/outputs when you are activating a ton of logic, the engine cannot handle the stress and will fail at certain points. Let me give you an example:

I created a map that had 24 spawning points. These were single spawns that had a gate connected to them. On triggered, the gate would set A and B to true and test the gate; which would send a signal to spawn a demon. When the demon was killed, the gate would be tested again, and if A and B are set to true, it would spawn another demon. All 24 spawning points had the same logic/nodes.

I then created a trigger box that would set the Gates of 12 spawning points to A true and B false (this would stop the Gate from activating a spawn). The trigger box would also kill the demon belonging to the spawning point. I created a 2nd trigger box to perform the same actions to the OTHER 12 Gates. I set the demons to be on my team so that I could watch them spawn throughout the map.

I moved back and forth through both trigger boxes and the 1st few times, the spawns worked perfectly. After a few more times running through the gates, I seen a huge delay of demons being killed and the other side of demons spawning. Eventually, the logic would not work for 12 of the demon spawns from 1 side.

My whole point, is that the engine could not handle the logic after a while. It would work only a few times and then would start to delay, until finally not working at all. What I ended up doing, was adding a delay to the Gate tests and separated the amount of space between the trigger boxes. This gave the engine enough time to catch up with all the logic and spawn the demons correctly.

HmmNess

[Brad_tilf]

HmmNess said:

How are you triggering these spawning points?

You need to make sure that you give the nodes some time to communicate with each other. If you do not add any delays to your inputs/outputs when you are activating a ton of logic, the engine cannot handle the stress and will fail at certain points. Let me give you an example:

I created a map that had 24 spawning points. These were single spawns that had a gate connected to them. On triggered, the gate would set A and B to true and test the gate; which would send a signal to spawn a demon. When the demon was killed, the gate would be tested again, and if A and B are set to true, it would spawn another demon. All 24 spawning points had the same logic/nodes.

I then created a trigger box that would set the Gates of 12 spawning points to A true and B false (this would stop the Gate from activating a spawn). The trigger box would also kill the demon belonging to the spawning point. I created a 2nd trigger box to perform the same actions to the OTHER 12 Gates. I set the demons to be on my team so that I could watch them spawn throughout the map.

I moved back and forth through both trigger boxes and the 1st few times, the spawns worked perfectly. After a few more times running through the gates, I seen a huge delay of demons being killed and the other side of demons spawning. Eventually, the logic would not work for 12 of the demon spawns from 1 side.

My whole point, is that the engine could not handle the logic after a while. It would work only a few times and then would start to delay, until finally not working at all. What I ended up doing, was adding a delay to the Gate tests and separated the amount of space between the trigger boxes. This gave the engine enough time to catch up with all the logic and spawn the demons correctly.

HmmNess

I'll look into that. Maybe, but I'm still really early in the map and don't have that much going on yet

[VentedPennies]

HmmNess said:

How are you triggering these spawning points?

You need to make sure that you give the nodes some time to communicate with each other. If you do not add any delays to your inputs/outputs when you are activating a ton of logic, the engine cannot handle the stress and will fail at certain points. Let me give you an example:

I created a map that had 24 spawning points. These were single spawns that had a gate connected to them. On triggered, the gate would set A and B to true and test the gate; which would send a signal to spawn a demon. When the demon was killed, the gate would be tested again, and if A and B are set to true, it would spawn another demon. All 24 spawning points had the same logic/nodes.

I then created a trigger box that would set the Gates of 12 spawning points to A true and B false (this would stop the Gate from activating a spawn). The trigger box would also kill the demon belonging to the spawning point. I created a 2nd trigger box to perform the same actions to the OTHER 12 Gates. I set the demons to be on my team so that I could watch them spawn throughout the map.

I moved back and forth through both trigger boxes and the 1st few times, the spawns worked perfectly. After a few more times running through the gates, I seen a huge delay of demons being killed and the other side of demons spawning. Eventually, the logic would not work for 12 of the demon spawns from 1 side.

My whole point, is that the engine could not handle the logic after a while. It would work only a few times and then would start to delay, until finally not working at all. What I ended up doing, was adding a delay to the Gate tests and separated the amount of space between the trigger boxes. This gave the engine enough time to catch up with all the logic and spawn the demons correctly.

HmmNess

Thanks for your time and info. That's good stuff to know!
Cheers.