Script to find duplicate entities

[jonri]

Anyone ever done this in their maps?

Spoiler

 

It's easy to duplicate an entity, move it back on top of itself, and move on without even knowing it happened.  You can't visually distinguish them in DR, but in-game models will appear to be lit twice, lights will be twice as bright, sounds twice as loud, etc.

I created a script to scan your entire map for these duplicates: https://github.com/jonri/darkradiant-scripts/blob/main/find_duplicate_entities.py

If you drop this into your DarkRadiant scripts/commands folder, you'll get a new menu option called "Find Duplicate Entities".  This will select all entities that share the same origin, model, classname, and rotation.  Once selected you can either delete them, isolate them with ctrl-shift-h for further inspection, or just hunt down the selections manually.

I opened a handful of FMs in order to do performance testing on the script, and many of them have a few duplicated items.  One FM had a duplicated clock sound, another recent one had a whole duplicated bedroom set.  Others had non-visible items like location separators on top of each other.  And of course my own had a whole bunch, which is what motivated me to write the script.  So, I think this might be useful to others.  If enough people think this is valuable I could have this script included with DR by default.  I'd also welcome any suggestions for improvements, for example if this mis-detects any legitimate entities.

 

[greebo]

Nice, you might have addressed an old issue: https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=426

[jonri]

6 hours ago, greebo said:

Nice, you might have addressed an old issue: https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=426

Ha!  Well, I'll let this sit here a few days in case there's any feedback, and then I'll add this to the DR repo so we can close the 14-year old feature request

[HMart]

That happened to me once at lest, something similar happens when a entity lacks a material defined has well, but in this case they also get translucent. 

Btw not that is any useful today, with shaders and such but that could be a "poor mans way" to create a highlight effect, just hide the duplicate and unhide it when you frob the item, that is exactly how idSoftware created the (not used) item highlight but they do the duplicate dynamically in the c++ code.

[peter_spy]

I'm not saying that it isn't useful, but doesn't DR automatically move the cloned entity one grid unit in two directions by default? I don't think I even had this problem, thanks to this feature. Can't speak for others though, obviously.

[jonri]

1 hour ago, peter_spy said:

I'm not saying that it isn't useful, but doesn't DR automatically move the cloned entity one grid unit in two directions by default?

It does, but I'm really only talking about having 6 duplicates out of the 1200 entities in my map so far, and 1-5 duplicates in each of the large released missions I tested it on.  That means 99.5% of the time I didn't screw up (and others are 99.9%+) , but if you scatter enough junk around your map you're bound to make this mistake somewhere.  You might be more likely to create a duplicate when you're making a straight line of repeated objects, you accidentally have something else selected when you duplicate/move another entity, and/or the DR autosave butts in while you're in the middle of moving something.

 

 

[greebo]

8 hours ago, peter_spy said:

I'm not saying that it isn't useful, but doesn't DR automatically move the cloned entity one grid unit in two directions by default? I don't think I even had this problem, thanks to this feature. Can't speak for others though, obviously.

It's possible to disable that automatic clone offset (I think it's in the top toolbar). Not sure how many people use that option, but it's there.

[peter_spy]

It's a default behavior in other editors I know, so having it on was like an obvious thing to me.

[Dragofer]

You can actually disable the offset behaviour on an individual basis by doing the clone while you're in 'R'otate mode. I actually almost always clone like this because I want to move the clone in a different direction and sometimes only on one axis.

As Jonri says, most of the time cloning works without problems, but it's a definitely a boon to be able to track down the cases where it goes wrong.

[peter_spy]

In rotate mode it makes sense to stay in the same place, similar to what modeling apps do. In translate mode, not so much. It's kinda like with this toggleable option to turn off rotating an object using its pivot/origin. There's no point in having it off, as pivot point placement is a deliberate part of modeling, whether we're talking snapping modular meshes, deco props etc.

[geegee]

30.  I expected some, but yipes!  

I think near all of them were caused by my twitchy fingers and forgetting to check if "rotate" is active.    The bulk of them were from before I figured out that cloneselection works but doesn't offset when "rotate" active.  At first I just figured it didn't work at all...  

Anyway thanks jonri, greebo and all the TDM superstars for making the most fun games tool I've ever played with.