Hi everyone, hope you had a wonderful weekend.

Today, I worked on a bunch of little things. First, is I fixed a few issues brought up by you guys in the code I posted yesterday. Special thanks to Forum user Andrey_P_P.

Next, I fixed a crash bug regression dealing with us removing the unused twitch code. I also fixed a long standing bug dealing with bow animations being invisible to everyone else.

Finally, I got the animation for staff charging working. There’s a webm video below, because the gif version is unaccountably around 4.8MB.

Today I took a little break from ground monsters to work on everyone’s favorite part of the game: birds! First, I replaced the current “swoop” attack with “dive bomb,” which is more effective in hitting players and also brings the monster within range of melee attacks. I tweaked the state behavior such that they tend to switch between dive bombing and ranged attacks so that even with the current, limited selection of attacks, combat feels much more dynamic and interesting. Next, I dug into their out-of-combat behavior. I re-enabled and improved several of their unused behavior states so that they will fly up, glide down, wander in different directions and even land on the ground to rest. There’s plenty of work left to do on these monsters, but they feel more lively now, and fighting them is actually fun!

Other than that, I’ve been continuing to improve ground monster behavior, fixing bugs, learning the game’s inner workings, and planning new additions to the Lua API. I’ll post more about my progress with ground monsters next week, so stay tuned and have a great weekend!

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.