pre-alpha-3 – Day 10

Not every post can have something exciting in it. This goes double for posts in pre-alpha phases, when often you must do the low level fine tuning. The devil is in the detail, as they say.

Changelog: 

• Coordinate system fully 3D now. Regular readers may be familiar with the fact that I already switched over to a 3D coordinate system for tasks. Well, this is a long and tricky process, and last time I made sure that interfaces were using 3D points and also the implementation was, when needed, but the really low level internals would still drop the Z coordinate. Now, the entire game uses 3D coordinates! Even the A* implementation takes such coordinates and returns a 3D path, but the actual path finding is still limited to a 2D plane. Trust me, having the game fully take advantage of all the Z levels will be a major announcement, not a small point in a changelog.
• Task lists now actually use lists. Another pending internal change. This should be more efficient and better suited for task lists, where items constantly jump around.
• Cleanup of DHCore continues. This package is starting to look pretty good and soon will be better suited as a general purpose library, rather than a single purpose (serve my game) library.
• New action: beautify walls. Even when testing this has happened to me: I want to engrave some walls, give the smoothing command, get side tracked and realize later that I forgot to give the actual engrave command when smoothing was finished. This will undoubtedly happen in a real game for a lot of people. So I added the beatify command, that can only be applied on natural non-smoothed non-engraved walls and is basically a smooth combined with an engrave action, but executed as a single task. It also costs only 80% of the time it would take to first smooth and then engrave. Just a little quality of life thing. PS: The wall option panel is getting very crowded. It is probably time to separate the carve options to their own menu.

• Started modularizing tasks resolution. Gah, I can't find a way to explain that in the language of mere mortals.
• Implemented a high resolution timer. I have been having this problem for a long time: most timer objects, including Irrlicht if I am not mistaken, use this little thing: GetTickCount. A very useful function, but as said also in its documentation, it has a resolution of 10-16 milliseconds. This is great for most tasks, but sometimes it makes this function unusable. Let's say you have an A* implementation that takes 30 ms to find a path, and you would like to optimize it to only take 20. With a 10-16 ms resolution, you are utterly incapable of measuring such an improvement. After scouring the Internet, I put together a high resolution timer that is even less portable than the above Windows API function. This timer is even capable of using multiple CPU computers to improve the precision of the measurement. In theory. In practice I have no way of telling that. I ran a few artificial benchmarks to test it. In these tests I ran a test 10 times: wait 30 ms and measure the precision of the timer, logging the absolute difference between the 30 ms known interval and the measurement, and determining the total and average deviation. Here are the results, first for a average test:

As you can see, the high resolution times is extremely precise, while the normal timer, during ten tests, accumulated a  total error almost equal to the duration of a single test. Once in a while, you get lucky and GetTickcount returns quite an accurate results:

But the HR timer still has it beat and is very predictable. I do not know what resolution the sleep function I am using has, but if the HR timer is to be believed, it is quite accurate. Using this timer I am going to try and greatly improve the A* and reachability calculation algorithms one last time during this pre-alpha phase.

A long long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, somebody on the Internet thought that such massive changes to the task system went over without causing any bugs. And he was wrong! Surely there are a few new bugs that will get squashed. On the other hand, the new system also probably fixed a few existing bugs, like when you give the same order on two different Z levels.

And if you still want something exciting, later today I should be introducing the donation system!