houndeyes killing each other Created 5 years ago2019-02-02 06:11:07 UTC by tschumann

Okay this is a bit of strange one. I'm programmatically creating monster_houndeye entities with CBaseEntity::Create
After they are created I ALERT their pev->classname values and can see monster_houndeye
In the houndeye's SonicAttack method, all entities in a sphere around the houndeye are looped over. In this loop the pev->classname of neighbouring houndeyes is garbage so the houndeyes end up killing each other and themselves.

Somewhere the pev->classname is getting messed up. Any ideas?
If the houndeye is just in the map it doesn't seem to have this problem.

How are you setting the classname?

I'm not setting it at all - something in CBaseEntity seems to do that and it looks okay when it is spawned, and I think I tried setting it with MAKE_STRING but that didn't work either.

I see that some entities have it set manually with MAKE_STRING though.

Then how are you creating the houndeyes? The string passed to Create will be used, but if the string is not allocated or a string literal it'll end up becoming garbage.
You can use MAKE_STRING( ALLOC_STRING( pszName ) ) to make sure it'll work, but if this code runs often you'll end up running out of memory in the engine since each ALLOC_STRING call allocates more memory.

Ah, that'd be it - I use a value from CMD_ARGV which will get tidied up.
I guess I can cache the strings to stop running out of memory.