Explanation:
~v1 is the distance that the enemy is in front of Torque. ~v2
is the distance that the enemyis to the side of Torque. If both of these
are between -1 and +1, then the enemy must be on Torque's perimeter, so
he jumps to his discharge-energy routine.
One part of this line appears to make no sense at first glance. This
is:
-
... if value #enemy_x <> 0 then if value ~v9
= ~v9 then...
The reason behind these two statements is as follows:
When cloaking was being introduced, it was at first suggested that a cloaked
enemy's variables (#enemy_x
and #enemy_y)
would be zero. This explains the first part. If the enemy is cloaked then
no matter where it is, its x- and y-coordinates would be between -1 and
+1, so Torque would think that the enemy was on his perimeter. Torque doesn't
want to discharge energy needlessly, so this check was to prevent this
from happening.
In fact, the idea of having a cloaked cybug's
status variables set to zero never actually happened. When an enemy cybug
is cloaked, you just see the next-closest enemy as if it were actually
the closest enemy.
The second part is just a pointless always-true
expression, so that Shea could use a find-and-replace tool to add any necessary
extra checks, once the cloaking situation had been finalised. If no extra
checks were needed, then this expression would make no difference to Torque's
operation.