On Map Generation (part 2): integrating everything

The end is nigh and I did not sleep much last night, because I was too busy integrating the entire map generation code to the main project. Fortunately, I managed to do it, here it is in action:

The linker did not like me

I was stuck for three long hours because of a tiny error that @yberreby fixed in five minutes.

Basically, I declared a global variable in global.h with FLOOR base_floor;, and called it from two separate .c files. However, the linker was not cooperative and assigned them to two different memory locations, one being right in the middle of another variable! How do you solve this problem? By adding the keywork extern in the declaration in global.h: extern FLOOR base_floor. That’s it!

Writing C code that poorly translates to assembly

Refactoring the room generation code was tedious because compiling took forever (15 to 20 seconds) compared to compiling the rest. Since I knew I was going to run it a lot, I investigated the resulting assembly code, and oh boy I wasn’t disappointed: 18k lines of code (LOC) for just one file, with one line of C requiring 10k LOC!! Alarm bells rang in my head: I needed to address this issue ASAP. Thankfully, by using one simple trick, I managed to reduce the number of LOC by a crazy amount: from 18k LOC to a mere 1.5k LOC!

For example, by changing this:

int main(void) {
    ROOM room = {
        .doors = {
            {0, {0, 0, 0}},
            {0, {0, 0, 0}},
            {0, {0, 0, 0}},
            {0, {0, 0, 0}},
        },
        .is_small = TRUE,
        .small_tiles = {EMPTY}
    };

    ...
};

to this:

ROOM room = {
    .doors = {
        {0, {0, 0, 0}},
        {0, {0, 0, 0}},
        {0, {0, 0, 0}},
        {0, {0, 0, 0}},
    },
    .is_small = TRUE,
    .small_tiles = {EMPTY}
};

int main(void) {
    ...
}

I managed to save 10k LOC. Yep. Ten thousand lines of code.

Moral of the story?

Just like written here, global variables should be used preferentially before local variables.