Valve Developer And Community Tidbits

Use this page to post any information from Valve developers made on mailing lists, forums, or emails. This information should also be sorted into specific pages.

Using external libraries with source

Q: Mailing List

In order to do certain things in my mod I need to use some third-party libraries which need to do some initialization/termination work. Is there a certain place where I can call these functions as the mod is loaded?

A: Yahn Bernier

Anyway, you are free to add a DllMain to the server or client .dlls. In addition, you might look at dlls/GameInterface.cpp at DllInit(...) and put your init code in there. I believe there is a corresponding shutdown section. The other possibility is to create a new CAutoGameSystem and implement the Init/Shutdown methods (see IGameSystem.h and numerous examples in the game and client .dlls).

Finding Entities On The Client

From steven_m64

This is a nice little function that will search the current clientside entities for the specified class name.

C_BaseEntity *GetEntFromClassname( const char *searchent )
{
  C_BaseEntityIterator iterator;
  C_BaseEntity *pEnt = iterator.Next();
  while ( pEnt != NULL )
  {
     if ( FStrEq( searchent, pEnt->GetClassname() ) )
     {
        return pEnt;
     }
     else
     {
           iterator.Next();
     }
  }
  return pEnt;
}

Vector To Screen Space

While trying to "put" a graphic on the screen while only having the entities vectors available I needed a function to convert vector space to screen space. I got a bunch of great answers but this is from Robin Walker.

If you have a clientside entity that you'd like to position a hud element around, use these utility functions in cdll_util.cpp:

      bool GetTargetInScreenSpace( C_BaseEntity *pTargetEntity, int& iX, int& iY, Vector *vecOffset );

And

      bool GetVectorInScreenSpace( Vector pos, int& iX, int& iY,Vector *vecOffset );

They'll return true if the target/vector is onscreen, and fill out the iX, iY with the screen X/Y position.

KeyValues writing

If you want to create a new key you need to use this gem from ts2do:

KeyValue->FindKey("WhatYouWant",true)->SetInt("stats",25);

If the keyvalues can not find the key name "WhatYouWant," it will create a new key with an integer subkey with the name of stats and a value of 25

Useful Forum Threads

• Chatbear: Crashing when spawning a client