level_ent min, max?

Hi guys,

So I'm doing a large overhaul of the collision code in GRUNTS, and there's some level information that I need. Specifically, the collision surface with the greatest/least X value, the collision surface with the greatest/least Y value, etc. At first I thought that the min and max vectors for level_ent might provide me this information, but it seems that they only return the largest valid coordinate in the level, which is either 5000 or -5000 depending upon whether you're reading from the max or min vectors, respectively.

Anyway, does anyone know if/where the engine stores this information?

It seems to me as if one level dimension does not exceed the absolute value of 5000, the respective level_ent.min/max will stay at -5000/5000.
Seems like a bug to me, too.
The obvious solution is to add, f.i. one dummy entity per level that contains the information. You/ sPike has to enter it in WED manually, of course.

That involves more human interaction than I'd like this system to rely on, but I suppose it'll have to do.

Can I ask why you need that information?

I plan to implement my own engine's collision system into GRUNTS, because I know mine works very, very well. But my system requires that the data is in a special format whereby columns of obstacles are packed into a grid. Therefore I will have to generate my own collision map for a level before I can put my code to work.

I'm sure this sounds like quite a clumsy process, but Gamestudio gives me little raw data to work with, and I know this will work quite well once I get it all plugged in.

I've once coded my own AABB movement function for my sidescroller with box and polygonal collision detection on models as well as polygonal block detection.
All you need to know/ use is "ent_buffers". Using this function you could easily loop through all blocks (and their vertices) to calculate the information you need (min/max) manually.

Hmm. I was unaware that such a function existed.

Thanks for the advice, Superku! It's much appreciated.