BYTEPATH #9 - Director and Gameplay Loop about blog HOT 4 OPEN

Regarding exercise 118, using while budget > 0 like it's presented means the game will tolerate "overspending" on the last enemy in the list. I believe the code as you present it can already be considered a solution to the exercise (it won't get stuck, it will simply overspend on whatever the next enemy costs).

Am I missing something, or should we be looking at code that wants to retry chanceList:next() until the cost of the picked enemy fits within the remaining budget?

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You can solve that problem in multiple ways. The most straight forward to me would be to just not spawn an enemy if it overspends by adding if points - self.enemy_to_points[enemy] >= 0 before doing the points = points - self.enemy_to_points[enemy] calculation. However this is the kind of thing that is really really small in the grand scheme of things so realistically I wouldn't worry about one enemy spending a few extra points.

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I apologize, I think I haven't made my point very well.

I mean that this statement in the exercise isn't true regarding the code provided in the lesson:

The while loop that takes care of finding enemies to spawn has one big problem: it can get stuck indefinitely in an infinite loop. Consider the situation where there's only one point left, for instance, and enemies that cost 1 point (like a Rock) can't be spawned anymore because that difficulty doesn't spawn Rocks.

It doesn't get stuck in an infinite loop because even if there's only 1 points left, it tolerates spending 3 points on the last enemy to bring points to -2, after which the while loop ends as expected.

By the way, thank you so much for making and distributing these lessons!

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Ah, I see. So the line that I mentioned in the previous comment should have been there in the first place and I guess I forgot to place it there. Now that I understand your question better:

Am I missing something, or should we be looking at code that wants to retry chanceList:next() until the cost of the picked enemy fits within the remaining budget?

I decided to not focus on that in the question because I wanted to make sure the reader understood the notion of stopping loops like that after a number of runs since it's a useful idea in lots of situations. But yea, in a real scenario you can change the probabilities of enemies as the number of points left changes. Although even in a real game I personally wouldn't do that because it's way more complicated than just using the naive solution.

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