Dumb sun lamps and zombie object outbreak

Game Engine Game Engine Support and Discussion
1

I am using blender 2.65a

Let us talk about the elephant, or lamp, in the scene. Before 2.6 the sun lamp has made scenes mad ugly. The lamp will sometimes put black lines and spots on object like there is z-fighting. Two questions, Is there a way to fix this, and why hasn’t it been fixed before? The error has been around for ages.

Now the zombie object outbreak. I am creating a terrain generator, and I have four planes parented to a cube. The plan was to use the cube to place terrain objects on the children and then die afterward without any calls to the objects after death. I constantly got zombie object errors and on the third try the game would always crash. Then I tried just changing a property on the children without adding terrain or ending any objects. When I exited the game I still got zombie errors.

The objects stay alive for the entire run and I still get errors, why? I’ll see if I can replicate the error in another blend and upload it this weekend.

2

  1. To my knowledge, it’s not really a bug, but rather a limitation of shadow systems in general. Even AAA games can have these problems. Try turning up the bias or turn down the shadow buffer size for the sun lamp. Do you have it spread across the entire scene? If so, it would be far more efficient to spread it just around the camera (or, more specifically, around where the camera will be looking) and parent it to the camera.

  2. “Zombie Object” sounds like what happens if you have debug properties enabled on objects that are destroyed. Try using the Python console to print out object properties.

3

I thought zombie errors were when a debugged object is ended.
I get that z-fighting look without shadows
Edit: Oh posted too late :\

4

I’ll try that SolarLune, thanks.

5

If you are referencing an object in python that might get ended, make sure to check if it is valid before using it:
http://www.blender.org/documentation/blender_python_api_2_65_3/bge.types.html#bge.types.PyObjectPlus.invalid