Ninneman. Eric received Don Woods's encouragement to update and ship
the game; Jason signed on early in the process to help. The assistance
of Peje Nilsson in restructuring some particularly grotty gotos is
-gratefully acknowledged. Petr Voropaev contributed fuzz testing.
+gratefully acknowledged. Petr Voropaev contributed fuzz testing. Aaron
+Traas did a lot of painstaking work to improve test coverage.
== Nomenclature ==
suite for the game. Any log captured with -l (and thus containing
a "seed" command) will replay reliably, including random events.
-The adventure.text file is no longer required at runtime. Instead, it
-is compiled at build time to a source module containing C structures,
-which is then linked to the advent binary. There is an adventure.yaml file
-as well; this is also compiled to C code, and will eventually replace
-adventure.text altogether.
+The adventure.text file is no longer required at runtime. Instead, an
+adventure.yaml file is compiled at build time to a source module
+containing C structures, which is then linked to the advent
+binary. The YAML is drastically easier to read and edit than
+the old ad-hoc format of adventure.txt.
The game-save format has changed. This was done to simplify the
FORTRAN-derived code that formerly implemented the save/restore
Jason Ninneman and I have moved it to what is almost, but not quite,
idiomatic modern C. We refactored the right way, checking correctness
against a comprehensive test suite that we built first and verified
-with coverage tools (we now have over 90% coverage, with the remaining
+with coverage tools (we now have over 95% coverage, with the remaining
confined to exception cases that are very difficult to reach). This is
what you are running when you do "make check".
+In the process we found and fixed a few minor bugs. Most notably, reading
+the relocated Witt's End sign in the endgame didn't work. Behavior when
+saying the giant's magic words outside his room wasn't quite right either.
+
The move to modern C entailed some structural changes. The most
important was the refactoring of over 350 gotos into if/loop/break
structures. We also abolished almost all shared globals; the main one
verb was one of these words, and what would be string operations in a
more recent language were all done on sequences of these words.
-We are still in the process of removing all this bit-packing cruft
-in favor of proper C strings. C strings may be a weak and leaky
-abstraction, but this is one of the rare cases in which they are
-an obvious improvement over what they're displacing...
+We have removed all this bit-packing cruft in favor of proper C
+strings. C strings may be a weak and leaky abstraction, but this is
+one of the rare cases in which they are an obvious improvement over
+what they're displacing...
We have also conducted extensive fuzz testing on the game using
afl (American Fuzzy Lop). We've found and fixed some crashers in
-our new code (which occasionally uses malloc(3)) but none as yet
+our new code (which occasionally uses malloc(3)), but none as yet
in Don's old code (which didn't).
The code falls short of being fully modern C in the following
to fix it because doing so would (a) be quite difficult, and (b)
compromise forward-portability to other languages.
-* Much of the code still uses FORTRAN-style uppercase names.
-
-* The code still assumes one-origin array indexing. Thus, arrays are
- a cell larger than they strictly need to be and cell 0 is unused.
+* Much of the code still assumes one-origin array indexing. Thus,
+ arrays are a cell larger than they strictly need to be and cell 0 is
+ unused.
* The code is still mostly typeless, slinging around machine longs
like a FORTRAN or BCPL program. Some (incomplete) effort has been made
to introduce semantic types.
+We have made exactly one minor architectural change. In addition to the
+old code's per-object state-description messages, we now have a per-object
+message series for state *changes*. This makes it possible to pull a fair
+amount of test out of the arbitrary-messages list and associate those
+mesages with the objects that conceptually own them.
+
// end