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".
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.
+* Muxh 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
projects / open-adventure.git / blobdiff