Entity visibility

McGlaspie

Yo,
Just wanted to ask some of the folks here that have had more experience with NS2 than I have (pertaining to Lua). Is there a simple way to determine if an entity is visible on screen? I don't really care if the entity's model should be visible or not, but rather if the entity is currently visible in a player's camera viewpoint.

Thanks.

yimmasabi

All entities are visible with objects e.g. red box for the team location but only in Spark Editor. Also Opening doors and hive locations (power grids) are visible in player mode too.

Only some of them are invisible, why do you need to see them ?

McGlaspie

I'm interested in getting a table of objects that are currently visible to X player. I then want to perform a few actions on those objects based on which team a player is on.

McGlaspie

I've looked through the current Lua code and there isn't anything like what I'm looking for. So, thanks anyways.

MCMLXXXIV

You might be able to use the function that the grenade explosions use to work this out? Not peeked in there yet myself but there may be a hint on how to check for entities in an area.

McGlaspie

I had similar thoughts. I found the closest thing to what I'm looking for in the Entity.lua file:

<div class='codetop'>CODE</div><div class='codemain' style='height:200px;white-space:pre;overflow:auto'>function GetEntitiesInViewFunctor(player, functor)
local entities = {}
local startEntity = nil
local currentEntity = nil

repeat
currentEntity = Shared.FindNextEntity(startEntity)
if currentEntity and currentEntity:isa("ScriptActor") then
if(functor(currentEntity)) then
if(player:GetCanSeeEntity(currentEntity)) then
table.insert(entities, currentEntity)
end
end
end

startEntity = currentEntity
until currentEntity == nil

return entities
end</div>

I think it should work with some very minor modifications. Now, I wonder if I can tag this inside of Client.OnPostRender()...we'll find out soon enough.

Edit: Btw, I realize how potentially slow this could be, and I see it will poll damn near every active entity in the game. That's why I said "with some modifications".

fsfod

The PostRender hook doesn't exist anymore sadly

McGlaspie

Oh man, I think I'm going to go cry in a corner somewhere. That makes me a sad Panda... *sigh*
So much for that idea.