Today I mostly cleaned up some bugs and fixed some technical debt ahead of my next short project.  Kyren and I have been cleaning up the Item interfaces and streamlining and defining a better, smaller internal API to deal with Items.  Today, I removed explicit functions for fuel and removed the critical item flag (which was kind of a hack and we’ve solved the problem of losing your pickaxe).  I moved direct access to all parameters into protected.  And then I move instanceValue (which checks parameter and then config for a key) to public from protected.  I also exposed instanceValue to Lua and unexposed parameter.

There’s still some mess in Item, like a list of augments and such which should be parameter values.  But I think I’ll leave that to my next rampage through this area.

The second half of my day was mainly spent on a negative money bug that metadept brought to my attention regarding money underflow.  After examining the code I realized that the money could easily overflow as well.  So I spent most of the rest of the day creating a completely bullet proof no overflow signed/unsigned integer multiplication method, which surprisingly wasn’t something that was already in the language or documented somewhere.  I’ve copied it here for posterity.

template <typename Int>
typename std::enable_if<std::is_integral<Int>::value, Int>::type noOverflowMult(Int a, Int b) {
  if (!a || !b)
    return 0;

  if (b == std::numeric_limits<Int>::min()) {
    if (a > 0) {
      return b;
    } else {
      return std::numeric_limits<Int>::max();
    }
  }

  if (a == std::numeric_limits<Int>::min()) {
    if (b > 0) {
      return a;
    } else {
      return std::numeric_limits<Int>::max();
    }
  }

  Int maxInt;
  if ((a < 0) != (b < 0)) {
    maxInt = std::numeric_limits<Int>::min();
  } else {
    maxInt = std::numeric_limits<Int>::max();
  }

  if (abs(maxInt / a) < abs(b))
    return maxInt;

  return a*b;
}

Which has been tested as working against every possible pair of uint16_t and int16_t.

I also put in a “normal” maxMoney limit, and set it to 9,999,999 pixels, this is super subject to change of course, considering I just pressed 9 for a while.

I also removed our custom range function that actually had broken behavior (on every number of the form -n + .5 it rounded the wrong direction).  It was there because MSVC didn’t have it at the time, but again, we’re probably not going to target that platform.

I also created the beginnings of a math test suite to make sure our custom math functions work properly.

Today for me was mostly finalizing the new monster spawning logic, which is a huge departure from the previous way monsters were spawned.  Now, monsters are spawned as part of “spawning profiles” which describe what monsters should be spawned in what conditions, and also in what density.  The spawning profiles are then connected to biomes, and each biome can actively have a different spawning profile.  This enables more interesting divergence of biome environments, because specific biomes (and detached sub-biomes, layers, etc) can have not only different monster types but also different numbers of monster types and densities and parameters, which was very difficult to achieve with the old system.

This is part of the effort to make biomes more unique, and to make it easier to have, as an example, a field full of bunnies appear in the middle of a forest.  There will also be added weighting and just generally more configurable monster spawning to increase variety and make exploring more interesting.  The previous system simply spawned X number of “things” around each player, regardless, and then what thing was being spawned was based on where the “thing” happened to fall, which is not too flexible.

The algorithm to spawn monsters around each player in a specific density per spawning profile is somewhat tricky, so it’s taken me a bit to work out how exactly it should work.

Other things today included helping omni with some item issues that needed sorting out and untangling a couple of messy bits of code, and also spending about 2 hours talking with the people setting up fiber in our office, getting information from them, and configuring our new internal network.

Hello. It’s GeorgeV again.

Today I fleshed out and got the new A.I. UI ready for testing. As always it’s tentative and temporary in every way. We even took some suggestions from the forums on what we might call it.  :)

Keeping it short. See you again soon!