Dropped weapons & Dead bodies disappearing

[Quack]

I was testing my map with seven bots and I noticed that dead bodies and dropped weapons were disappearing within a few seconds. It doesn't happen all the time, but it's frequent enough that a weapon disappearing resulted in me running out of ammo and dying. I only have 300+ entities in the map file, but I'm guessing it has to do with the number of dynamic entities in game, i.e. rockets, grenades, items, players, etc. Maye I'm hitting the 1024 entity limit in game? I'm not sure if this is the fault of the renderer, or my fault for not optimizing something properly. What types of dynamic entities are considering to be 1 entity? Would these dynamic entities result in reaching a limit that requires the engine or server to "clean up" unnecessary objects?

[^misantropia^]

Is this VQ3? Bodies disappear in five seconds but dropped weapons should be around for thirty seconds.

EDIT: Right, I sorta misread the question. Yeah, the game will clean up temporary entities if it needs to. Does your map have a lot of triggers, movables, etc.?

[InsaneKid]

maybe u got a fog or another absorbin texture in there,
that doesnt allow drop!?

[Quack]

@InsaneKid
Thank you for pointing that out! I have fog that contains nodrop under my tower, which is a central convergence point for the main paths, so players are constantly passing through there and dying there. This explains why it was happening some of the time, but not all the time. I guess it's always important to look at the shader scripts when you copy them and omit any unwanted surfaceparms I thought the dead bodies & dropped weapons were related, now I know they are not. So yah, disappearing weapons problem solved w00! I still would like to know why the dead bodies disappear so quickly though.

I'm running Q3 1.32, no mods. The dead bodies disappearing happens every time. They disappear within a couple seconds after hitting the ground, unfortunately that isn't enough time to shoot a rocket at the body. If I change to a stock Q3 map, bodies stay for a long time then fade into the ground like they should. My concern with the bodies is that there is too much going on within the map and maybe this will cause crashes or unexpected problems going forward. I just want to know what is causing this and if there is a server setting that will allow the game to keep dead bodies for the default amount of time.

[^misantropia^]

No, but you don't have to worry about it. The game internals has a FIFO queue for dead bodies with a fixed length of 8. When the queue is full, the oldest body is removed from the game. If there is a lot of action happening, it'll cycle pretty quick.

[Quack]

Thank you ^misantropia^ This makes sense because there were 8 players. The queue must constantly be cycling because of the proximity of spawns to players. And thinking about it now, it's actually a good thing that this cycle does happen, because there would be a massive amount of overdraw with all the blood. The scene hits 6000+ tris in some places, with players shooting grenades & rockets all over, it hovers below 10k. I've had enough trouble optimizing for viz & reducing r_speeds, so it's good to know that the game has something in place to prevent excessive amounts of overdraw.