Actually, I'm not running it thru a true event. The entity's action sets a skill which is caught by a switch in a c_trace pseudo-collision (game loop). This was a workaround for a totally unrelated problem (see this old thread ) that had serendipitous consequences for this particular problem.

But it seems my original diagnosis was correct, and I just needed to shut off my main while(1) loop while the level initializes, and once the player, level and sky entities have loaded, restart the loop.