GZDB: find things/linedefs without flags

Is there a way to search for things that don't have flags, i.e. find all things that are not on easy skill, or all linedefs that aren't marked as blocking sound?

I feel like this has been asked before but my searching is not coming up with anything.

You can use the things filter like this.

Search for all things that do have the respective flag, move them outside of the map's main area (so that you will later be able to easily move them back), and all things that remained in the map are those you wanted. :)

Use F3

scifista42 & rdwpa: good workarounds, better than nothing anyhow. Doesn't work for linedefs though, unfortunately.

Kappes Burr: AFAIK you can only search for flags that are set, not flags that are unset. Unless newer versions of GZDB let you do this?

With linedefs, you might be able to pull off this trick: Assume you want to search for linedefs without flag X. So, first search for linedefs with flag X. Once they're selected, cut them (Ctrl+X). Select the remaining linedefs in the map, and give them flag Y, which should be such a flag that none of the linedefs in your map has yet. Then paste (Ctrl+V) the original selection of linedefs with flag X back into their place. Then search for linedefs with flag Y. :)

Success of this trick might (?) be thwarted by the editor's automatic geometry merging/fixing features upon pasting a selection, unless you can disable that behavior.

scifista42 said:

With linedefs, you might be able to pull off this trick: Assume you want to search for linedefs without flag X. So, first search for linedefs with flag X. Once they're selected, cut them (Ctrl+X). Select the remaining linedefs in the map, and give them flag Y, which should be such a flag that none of the linedefs in your map has yet. Then paste (Ctrl+V) the original selection of linedefs with flag X back into their place. Then search for linedefs with flag Y. :)

You can also use Ctrl+[0-9] to assign the remaining linedefs to a group (Edit -> "Add Selection To Group" will work too), and then press the respective number to select that group. Would be nice if there was a way to select everything not in a certain group.

scifista42: Yeah I thought of something like that, but it sounds like a recipe for disaster tbh.

Better workaround is maybe to tag everything with a temporary flag, a rarely-used flag such as not shown on automap, search for linedefs with flag X, untag the temp flag from that selection, search for the temp flag again.

Hey, that's totally better! I should have thought of it. :)

plums said:

AFAIK you can only search for flags that are set, not flags that are unset. Unless newer versions of GZDB let you do this?

Well, the newest one does :)

Hey, thanks MaxED. But I have a problem: my computer is ancient and doesn't support SSE2, and I think the Scite/Scintilla libraries that you use are compiled with SSE2 support, so while new GZDB versions will run, they crash as soon as I open any dialog that uses Scite.

I am probably literally the only person using GZDB that has or will ever have this problem, so I don't really expect you to recompile all the GZDB libraries just for me. It looks like the only things that cause a crash are trying to open the options menu or the script editor, neither of which I really need, so maybe I'll give it a go anyways?

In any case hopefully others will find this addition useful too.