Issue with RemoteAction.

So this issue could just be me completely misinterpreting what A_RemoteAction is supposed to do. But basically what I'm trying to do is set up a boss fight of mine so that one thing, the actual main boss itself, can tell another thing, which is a separate object used to represent his tail, to perform an action. But everytime I do do this it either ends up with the thing disappearing, not doing anything at all, or the main boss instead just resets back to it's original state.


So here the main part of the boss plays his tunneling animation to make it seem like he's burrowing underground. Then he's supposed to randomly pick which spot the Tail should pop up at.


Here there's supposed to be two spots the tail can spawn at, but it only has one spot ready at the moment, so I just put the same thing twice so that it would pick the ready one no matter what.


So there the RemoteAction part is supposed to trigger the Tail to set it's target to the player, then the main part is supposed to just wait until the Tail finished up it's business, which then once I set that part up is supposed to make the main part start attacking again, and it repeats the cycle.


There's the thing for the Tail, just in case it this might be the thing messing it up.


Here's what it spawns as. I kinda assumed setting it to NOCLIPTHING would make it so that the player wouldn't get hit on it, because instead of actually spawning it it's actually just kinda sitting there all hidden waiting to be triggered by the main part. Unfortunately the player still takes damage, so it kinda made it pointless to do this, and I'm gonna have to figure something else out.


And here's the part where it always messes up. It doesn't go through the SetTarget and Emerge parts like it's supposed to, and it instead just usually stays in it's spawn state. Though sometimes it vanishes altogether but I assume that's because of the noclip thing. And also the main part of the boss instead of going to the Wait state instead just goes back to it's beginning state and redoes all of it's attacks instead of waiting. I'm probably missing something super obvious like having the wrong Next = state or something. But for the most part it seems to me that it would be the A_RemoteAction part.

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post for help on these sorts of issues, but if anyone can figure out what's going wrong, or at the very least explain A_RemoteAction since I'm probably messing that up, then I would be very grateful. Also if this is the wrong place to post for help on these sorts of things I'm sorry, just not really sure where else to ask about this.

Also whenever I say main part I meant the head, since the boss is essentially a giant worm creature.

Why are you using a slot number for VAR1 on remote action? If you're telling it to search for a mobj type, you should use the actual mobj name, since you don't necessarily know what order slots will be assigned in.

Haven't given this a full look yet. Generally when an object just disappears in SOC, it's either because it's trying to go to or access a resource that doesn't exist (like a bad state, object, sprite), or because an action like A_CapeChase which kills off its actor if a certain condition is met was used.

That said, as some general advice try to add some markers to the states you're using so you can find out exactly when things go wrong - verify that each step is being performed by tweaking it to have obvious results, extend state durations, put in different sprites, etcetera. The first step to fixing a problem is always to find out what the problem is in as much detail as you can.

As a more long-term thing, try to break into Lua. It is much, much, much more preferable for making custom gamelogic. Just because I and some of the other old timers around here learned and suffered through making rube goldberg machines with SOC doesn't mean you have to!

Prime 2.0 said:

Why are you using a slot number for VAR1 on remote action? If you're telling it to search for a mobj type, you should use the actual mobj name, since you don't necessarily know what order slots will be assigned in.

Haven't given this a full look yet. Generally when an object just disappears in SOC, it's either because it's trying to go to or access a resource that doesn't exist (like a bad state, object, sprite), or because an action like A_CapeChase which kills off its actor if a certain condition is met was used.

That said, as some general advice try to add some markers to the states you're using so you can find out exactly when things go wrong - verify that each step is being performed by tweaking it to have obvious results, extend state durations, put in different sprites, etcetera. The first step to fixing a problem is always to find out what the problem is in as much detail as you can.

As a more long-term thing, try to break into Lua. It is much, much, much more preferable for making custom gamelogic. Just because I and some of the other old timers around here learned and suffered through making rube goldberg machines with SOC doesn't mean you have to!

Click to expand...

Oh, did not think of putting the name instead of a number. Thanks.
And I'll probably at the least try to get into Lua, though it probably won't go very well. Thanks for the advice.