Strife 9001-9010 Mystery Objects Deciphered

[Quasar]

Kaiser and I stumbled upon some dead code in the automap which runs the starting position for automap marks forward by a variable which is read from in multiple places but never written to, and I was wracking my brain trying to figure out what the hell it could have been for.

Then I thought about the 10 unused 9001-9010 objects that are stored into an array but never used, which matches exactly the available number of automap marks.

Evidently these were meant to be pre-placed automap markers for pointing out locations pertinent to the player's quest. I could imagine they initially intended for characters to refer to these in the dialogues ("I've marked the location on your map..." etc.), but decided that it interrupted the flow of gameplay too much, and that it was better to let the player find his own way around.

AM_Drawer declines to draw any of the points which are marked this way in the normal manner, so we can assume that they probably would have appeared differently than the normal automap marks, perhaps in a different numeric font or different color. Unfortunately none of the code that would have drawn them is still in any of the executables I've examined so far.

[DaniJ]

It certainly seems to add up conceptually and design-wise so yeah, sounds plausible to me. More evidence would be nice but we're unlikely to get it. How is your coverage looking atm?

[Quasar]

DaniJ said:

It certainly seems to add up conceptually and design-wise so yeah, sounds plausible to me. More evidence would be nice but we're unlikely to get it. How is your coverage looking atm?

100% of xref'd functions now have known purposes and have been assigned meaningful names, and about 90% of the data segment is determined. It's far more than enough to allow us to import everything into Choco Strife, which is why that work began last week :)