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📝 Posted:
🚚 Summary of:
P0057, P0058
Commits:
1cb9731...ac7540d, ac7540d...fef0299
💰 Funded by:
[Anonymous], -Tom-
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So, here we have the first two pushes with an explicit focus on position independence… and they start out looking barely different from regular reverse-engineering? They even already deduplicate a bunch of item-related code, which was simple enough that it required little additional work? Because the actual work, once again, was in comparing uth05win's interpretations and naming choices with the original PC-98 code? So that we only ended up removing a handful of memory references there?

(Oh well, you can mod item drops now!)

So, continuing to interpret PI as a mere by-product of reverse-engineering might ultimately drive up the total PI cost quite a bit. But alright then, let's systematically clear out some false positives by looking at master.lib function calls instead… and suddenly we get the PI progress we were looking for, nicely spread out over all games since TH02. That kinda makes it sound like useless work, only done because it's dictated by some counting algorithm on a website. But decompilation will want to convert all of these values to decimal anyway. We're merely doing that right now, across all games.

Then again, it doesn't actually make any game more position-independent, and only proves how position-independent it already was. So I'm really wondering right now whether I should just rush actual position independence by simply identifying structures and their sizes, and not bother with members or false positives until that's done. That would certainly get the job done for TH04 and TH05 in just a few more pushes, but then leave all the proving work (and the road to 100% PI on the front page) to reverse-engineering.

I don't know. Would it be worth it to have a game that's "maybe fully position-independent", only for there to maybe be rare edge cases where it isn't?

Or maybe, continuing to strike a balance between identifying false positives (fast) and reverse-engineering structures (slow) will continue to work out like it did now, and make us end up close to the current estimate, which was attractive enough to sell out the crowdfunding for the first time… 🤔

Please give feedback! If possible, by Friday evening UTC+1, before I start working on the next PI push, this time with a focus on TH04.