Security Camera issue

[joebarnin]

I've got an FM under development (actually it's in Beta test). There's something I've noticed over the course of developing and testing the mission. One large room contains several security cameras. Most of the cameras are configured to rotate. Usually, when I test the mission, they work fine. But occasionally, one of the camera's rotations will be off by 90 degrees. For example, a camera that is pointing "north" (up in the XY view), with a sweepAngle of 90, will typically rotate between 0 and 90 degrees (i.e., from 12 to 3 if you think of it as a clock). But, once in a while, I'll be testing the FM and when I get to this room, the camera is sweeping from 270 to 360 (9 to 12 on a clock). It happens very infrequently, but I have noticed it several times over the past few months of testing.

I guess my first question for the developers is, is this a known issue in 2.09? I know that security cameras have undergone significant changes in 2.10; my hope is that perhaps these changes include a fix for this?

This bug is maddingly difficult to recreate. I'll test the mission a dozen times and all works fine, and then the next time I start a mission one of the cameras is pointing the wrong way. I've noticed it with a couple of cameras. The problem is that if it does happen, it can make the mission impossible to finish.

One option is to switch to 2.10 and hope the problem goes away. But it happens so infrequently that it might be weeks of testing before I'd see it again, or convince myself that it isn't going to happen on 2.10 (and even then that's no guarantee).

Any ideas or suggestions? Thanks in advance.

[Dragofer]

The old 2.09 security camera had a fairly simple movement model, simply fetching the spawnargs for sweepAngle and the sweep duration, then adding a gradually growing fraction of the sweepAngle to the starting angles, multiplied by -1 if negativeSweep is true for that sweep. I could imagine that there's sometimes a problem with setting the initial value for negativeSweep based on the value of the sweepAngle spawnarg.

The 2.10+ security camera still makes use of sweepAngle and negativeSweep, so I wouldn't exclude it still happens there, but altogether the movement code has changed a lot to allow the camera to horizontally and vertically track the player's position and later return to the closest sweep position.

negativeSweep is now calculated every time the camera initiates a rotation, based on the sign of - in most cases - the shorter route towards the targeted position. In exchange, the two ends of the regular sweep are calculated and stored at spawn based on current angle + sweepAngle, so negativeSweep no longer plays a role for setting the camera's sweep range.

It'd be interesting to know if any of your beta testers happen to be using 2.10 builds, and also how the room fares for you yourself if you were to use a 2.10 build yourself. Its release shouldn't be that long off in any case.