Temporary Entity

Temporary entities are used by the server to create short-lived or one-off effects on clients. They are different to standard entities in that they are 'fire and forget'; once one has been created, the server has nothing more to do with it. TEs have no entity handle or index and To do: confirm whether they count towards the global entity limit or not.

Implementation

On the server:

• Derive from CBaseTempEntity
• Create a global 'singleton' instance to spawn further instances (see g_TEMyEffect in the example below)
• Create a global function that fills in any requisite data then calls Create( IRecipientFilter filter, float delay )

On the client:

• Derive from C_BaseTempEntity
• Create void PostDataUpdate( DataUpdateType_t updateType ), which is called whenever an instance spawns

Shared/predicted TEs

Temp entities are used quite often, also in shared game code (same code that is compiled into server.dll and client.dll). For shared code we need a shared interface that allows creating temp entities the same way on the server as on the client. This common interface is ItempEntsSystem that provides member functions to create any temp entity. The ItempEntsSystem interface is implemented server-side by class CTempEntsSystem and class C_TempEntsSystem in client code. For new temp entity classes, this interface has to be extended as well as both implementations.

For shared predicted code these classes also handle effect suppression for clients that already spawned the effect in their own prediction code. E.g.: A client fires a predicted weapon and creates instantly a local, predicted impact effect. When the server runs the same weapon code again, this impact effect must be sent to all other clients, but not to the shooting client. Filtering these temp entities that are spawned by predicted code is handled by function SuppressTE(). See Weapon Prediction.

Example

Server

class CTEMyEffect : public CBaseTempEntity
{
public:
	DECLARE_CLASS( CTEMyEffect, CBaseTempEntity );
	DECLARE_SERVERCLASS();

public:
	CNetworkVector( m_vecPosition );
};

// Declare server send table
IMPLEMENT_SERVERCLASS_ST(CTEMyEffect, DT_TEMyEffect)
	SendPropVector( SENDINFO(m_vecPosition), -1, SPROP_COORD),
END_SEND_TABLE()

// Singleton to fire TEMyEffect objects
static CTEMyEffect g_TEMyEffect ( "MyEffect" );

// global function to spawn an instance
void TE_MyEffect( IRecipientFilter& filter, float delay, const Vector* position )
{
	// set effect data
	g_TEMyEffect.m_vecPosition = *position;

	// Send it over the wire
	g_TEMyEffect.Create( filter, delay );
}

Client

class C_TEMyEffect : public C_BaseTempEntity
{
public:
	DECLARE_CLASS( C_TEMyEffect, C_BaseTempEntity );
	DECLARE_CLIENTCLASS();

	void PostDataUpdate( DataUpdateType_t updateType )
	{
		// temp entity has been spawned, do something
		Msg("Created effect at position %.1f,%.1f,%.1f\n", m_vecPosition[0], m_vecPosition[1], m_vecPosition[2] );
	}

public:
	Vector	m_vecPosition;
};


// declare the client receive table
IMPLEMENT_CLIENTCLASS_EVENT_DT(C_TEMyEffect, DT_TEMyEffect, CTEMyEffect)
	RecvPropVector( RECVINFO(m_vecPosition)),
END_RECV_TABLE()

See also

• Networking Events & Messages