QuantumG's Blog

I've recently been working on some game related projects. First, there's the RPG engine I've started which I call Stallion . I've received just about no interested about this from anyone so I havn't been paying it much attention. Now and then I get the desire to hack on an RPG and none of the available codebases for graphical RPGs interest me as much as the ones for textual RPGs. So why not hack on a textual RPG? Because it's just so dry without players to consider, and with players to consider you've just gotta be so dedicated. Then there's my other project. I've always been a fan of Bullfrog's Syndicate. My fan page gets a lot of hits (probably because I give out copies of the game on it). If you've never played Syndicate you probably won't understand the attraction. You'll also think we're all crazy for fooling around with DosBox or old hardware to get the game to actually run and never consider doing the like yourse...

I received an email of inspiration from Mike a week ago outlining how similar conjunctions and disjunctions in short circuited if statements are at the binary level. After looking at the problem myself I found it was a pretty simple problem. If one of the two out edges of a branch node is another branch node which contains only a branch statement, and the destination of that statement is shared with the first branch statement then you can merge the condition of the second branch into the condition of the first branch. Exactly what combination of fall/taken edges are shared by the two branches is what determines whether an || or a && should be used. This is a pretty easy transformation to do just before code generation (or just after decompilation) and I'm about half way through implementing it. Unfortunately I got sidetracked. My work, you know, the people who pay me, they have me doing - wait for it - Java development. I moaned about not just being a one trick pony ...