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[Rolan7]

I'm 8 episodes into the second (last) season, and feeling like things are wrapping up.

Spoiler: Nothing is wrapped up. Fucking nothing. Well, except Coop's Damn Good Cup o' Coffee(TM).

Edit:  Also I meant to express my amazement that someone actually made a Hivestation!  But I don't know if I'll find the time to, well, even figure out if it's actually dead or just looks dead.  Playing SS13 takes some commitment, especially after like 2 years away.

Homestuck in my spehsmans, though.  And especially the code, which is what I did far more than actually play...  Horn code, blood types...
Like I said, I worry about getting too involved with such a concept, even if it IS dead.

[Kagus]

Well, there's still about 400-500 people playing at any one time, so it's something... they are spread out across a multitude of servers though, so places like TG's EU server only have around 6-11 players for the most part. Weekends still see closer to 25-30, especially in the GMT evenings.

Colonial Marines still regards anything under 110 as lowpop, even though it's had some serious hits to popularity lately. Paradise is also still going strong, for some reason...

So, not as popular as it once was, no, but I don't think I'd call it "dead" just yet. It's still by far the most popular game on BYOND.

...And Lifeweb's server 1 still regularly hits its player capacity, but that's an entirely different beast...

Code readability and understanding is kind of an important thing however. I would prefer for a language to use too many reserved/keywords if it means I can avoid stuff like ..() and other silliness. You can always name your variables something else after all.

Code: [Select]

if(!..())
returnAlso, here, have a rant.

Hardly a fair review of the pros and cons, but it's entertaining.

[Rolan7]

Yeah, I meant the Homestuck variant specifically.  I checked out the code for a while, with glorious results, but didn't try the actual server.

I'm also glad that Space Station 13 is still a thing.  I was an incidental TG contributor, my absence meant little.
_{I made botany better though}

[Kagus]

_{I made botany better though}

Congrats, it is now horrifically overpowered.

Better chems than chemistry, more food than kitchen, deadlier traps than science, bigger bioterrors than xeno, and it's yet another way to clone people...

You'll need some stuff from science, but I believe it's also possible to print a circuit that automatically harvests plants for you, so you can clone yourself into a superior podperson without the need for trusting another person.

And that's not even getting into winning the strange seed lottery, getting overcapped stats from joke plants, and those fucking neurotoxin bees. Gah.


Ah, yeah, was never really a big fan of Homestuck, so I didn't pay much attention to the hivestation. I can imagine a lot of work went into it, though

EDIT:

Code: [Select]

...
if(A.properties["stealth"] >= 3)
reduced_hunger = TRUE
...

...
var/lost_nutrition = 9 - (reduced_hunger * 5)
...Right, so, I am definitely not a coder, so I don't know how common it is to multiply a number by a Boolean. It just seemed odd to me. I get that it's effectively interpreted as either a 1 or a 0, it just... It just looks weird.

Also, regarding the organization of the coders themselves, I just saw a variable with a starting value of 1, that under certain circumstances can be changed to 2. The only time that variable gets called, however, is to check and see if it's larger than 2.

I think someone may have made a booboo.

[heydude6]

Right, so, I am definitely not a coder, so I don't know how common it is to multiply a number by a Boolean. It just seemed odd to me. I get that it's effectively interpreted as either a 1 or a 0, it just... It just looks weird.

If I remember right, that was how poise used to work in dark souls 3. If you guys recall, at launch poise was disabled though you could still collect items that supposedly increased it. Turns out, there was a single variable called “poise_enabled” or something like that and by default it was set to 0. If you hacked your game and changed it to 1, then poise would start working again. What was happening coding-wise was that the game was multiplying your actual poise value by this number. So if poise was disabled, then you were effectively playing with a poise of 0. If you hacked it back in, then your poise would be working as intended.

You’re not multiplying by an actual Boolean, but it’s pretty close to it. I don’t like how it’s used in your SS13 example though.

[SOLDIER First]

Um poise works as intended in 3 it’s called hyperarmor /s

[Hanslanda]

I found Shellbugs in Skyrim after playing it through like ten times. I somehow missed them before.

[hector13]

Where do you find them? I have never seen them either.

[TamerVirus]

Aren’t they in caves, like rocks?
I remember you mined them with pickaxes

[Hanslanda]

In the Vale of Dawnguard. In Sharpslope and Forgotten Vale caves. They're fairly hidden.

[Reelya]

Right, so, I am definitely not a coder, so I don't know how common it is to multiply a number by a Boolean. It just seemed odd to me. I get that it's effectively interpreted as either a 1 or a 0, it just... It just looks weird.

There's really no such thing as a "boolean" there are only numeric values 0 and 1. Doing that sort of math is common because it reduces the amount of code quite a bit. In this case, they could have used 0 and 1 as the values, but since the only allowed values are "0" and "1" then using a true/false value prevents people from assuming that it could be validly set to "2" or "3". Can reduced_hunger be set to 2? If it was made numeric, the range of allowed values would need to be documented somewhere, and you'd have to have "if/then/else" checking any time it's used to make sure it's in the correct range. Forcing the type as BOOL means it's self-evident without documentation, and you never need to check it against a valid set of values. So, only 0 or 1 are valid values, so it makes sense to force the type to BOOL to prevent someone coming along later and changing the value to something invalid.

As for the multiplication, they could alternatively have written an if / then / else structure, except that would mean instead of 1 line of code you have 4-5 lines of code. Also, if/then/else statements are significantly slower than a basic math formula, since they introduce code-branching, where the multiplication does not. Code branching causes the CPU instruction pipeline to be flushed if the CPU doesn't predict the correct branch to start with.

So, forcing the value to be BOOL reduces the chance of later people introducing invalid value errors,  and using the bool as a numeric instead of introducing a branch statement reduces the amount of code, while also speeding up the game. Both are valid things to do.

[Eric Blank]

So, two of our dogs took an opportunity to go for a run while nobody was looking, only one of them came back. Good riddance to that little fuckhead i guess, he was almost totally untrainable and actively refused to acknowledge when he was being given a command, but i wonder how they could have gotten split up anyway. Those two did everything together.

[Billy]

Its quite obvious that your good dog killed the other one cause it was too clingy.
Its a dog eat dog world.

[Kagus]

Can reduced_hunger be set to 2?

Presumably you mean documentation in the sense of references that the engine checks to see what the value is, because nothing is documented by or for the coders outside of the occasional, outdated and mistyped comment (and big fancy box-shaped header signs constructed from dozens of comment slashes!).

As for the variable itself, it's just a plain "var", so it can be bool, real, string, null or whatever else. I don't think I've ever seen a variable have its actual type determined before the compiler gets to it and tries to work things out... Not even sure it's possible within DM.

So, sure, it keeps things clear for someone that's wondering what kind of variable it is supposed to be, but it still looks like a dirty fix in a sea of dirty fixes. Then again, everything else is a goddamn spidery mess of hidden references placed hither and thither in different files and variables that are only used to be given the value of another variable for shorthand, but then that variable is only ever called to replace it with another variable for even shorterhand, so I guess in the grand scheme of things it's not so bad.

Still, for a non-coder, which the language is nominally intended for, it's not readily apparent that everything is working as planned.


I can't find which file it's in now, but there was a line that asked the return function to decide which of two values to bring back. Like,

Code: [Select]

(some sort of call)
     if(!..())
          return
     return TRUE || .()
I believe that's the only place I've seen someone use "or" in a return function. And yes, the second option is supposed to be just the one dot, while the if check is looking to see if it's "..()". I'm not sure what either of those functions are, and ".()" is of course different from ".", which is yet another integral and unexplained piece of the whole. I don't know the extent of how different they are, but there's probably a third party tutorial that explains it.

[Reelya]

Presumably you mean documentation in the sense of references that the engine checks to see what the value

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Documentation means documentation. Stuff for humans to read.

I meant that if a variable has some allowed range of values, then it should be written down somewhere. If there are lines setting it to 0 or 1 then people can be misled that it could be change it to other values, whereas seeing it set to TRUE/FALSE makes it explicit that it can only be those values, without needing separate documentation to make that clear. Using a bool as a numeric as in the other section is also perfectly valid because it speeds up the code and seriously reduces clutter. To give you an idea, the equivalent to the line "var/lost_nutrition = 9 - (reduced_hunger * 5)" written in "proper" code is:

Code: [Select]

if(reduced_hunger == TRUE)
   var/lost_nutrition = 4
else
   var/lost_nutrition = 9
Which is bulkier to read, takes up more memory for the CPU and is also slower. The compact version is just 100% better from an engineering point of view, and like I said, the TRUE/FALSE choice means that it doesn't require documentation to prevent dumb fucks from coming along and accidentally setting the wrong value.

~~~

The issue with using "var" and not having strong types ... well that's common to pretty much every language that's popular with "non-coders". e.g. Python and JavaScript. Try C++ type languages as the other end of that scale. Strongly typed languages are good at avoiding ambiguity but they're not very forgiving.

~~~

With .. vs ..(), the difference is that when you add () to something, you're getting the value from calling the function, whereas the name without () is a reference to the function itself.

.. is a reference to the parent function, whereas ..() is the value of calling the parent function. They're separate because you might want to do something like this

Code: [Select]

myfunction = functionName1
var a = myfuction()
myfunction = functionName2
var b = myfuction()
Where the "myfunction" variable can be used to store different functions, e.g. for plugging different behaviors into some object.

However that line "return TRUE || .()" looks like a mistake, since if the first value of an OR is true, then it just returns TRUE and doesn't call the second part at all. ".()" should be a reference to the current function itself, a recursive call.