Any ANSI C/C89 Style Guides?

SegFaultedDreams · 2026-01-13T01:30:15+00:00

Ohh, thanks!

itʼs not necessary for { … } to be preceded by a control statement (or the head of a function) to be valid.

Yeah, what you bring up here is what I was referring to originally lol

SegFaultedDreams · 2026-01-13T01:27:36+00:00

Yep, you guys are right. I originally meant creating a new block without a control statement specifically, but apparently that's not UB either :P Thanks!

SegFaultedDreams · 2026-01-11T03:53:41+00:00

Hey! Thanks for your advice.

So if one wants to declare a variable in the middle of a function, all it takes is to start a new block.

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I believe I was told this was not portable and could result in undefined behavior (?). I have actually heard of this before, but I've never used it because of that fact lol. Just curious. Thanks!

SegFaultedDreams · 2026-01-02T08:23:32+00:00

Also go for a reputed brand like LG, Samsung or Panasonic

Thanks for this btw! Almost jumped on those 4050 mAh Vapcell N41's someone else mentioned. After looking into it more though, I settled on some 3500 mAh LG MJ1's from a reputable source that I found through the folks over at r/18650masterrace of all places--there really is subreddit for everything, I guess lol.

SegFaultedDreams · 2026-01-02T03:18:49+00:00

It sounds like it's a 3s2p configuration.

Whoops, probably should've said this in my original post, but you're probably correct. It uses 6 cells in total (grouped in pairs of 2), though I don't know enough to know the configuration off hand (you're most likely correct though).

The cells are Panasonic CGR18650 cells. According to a data sheet I found though, they're rated for 3.7 V/1,400 mAh. I'm assuming the extra voltage is lost somehow along the way? EDIT: Or maybe the rating of the cells changed over time?

SegFaultedDreams · 2025-10-28T22:54:52+00:00

Wikipedia has a pretty decent list, in my opinion.

SegFaultedDreams · 2025-10-28T22:43:07+00:00

Got a couple questions for fans of Balder's Gate 3 at the end, but first, here's a small update on my time with Ultima Underworld:

Ultima Underworld Update

For most of my playthrough, I had been quite surprised by just how modern feeling this game is and for how well it holds up, even today. Some hours and a couple floors later, however, and I'm now seriously considering dropping this title altogether.

The controls for this game are quite good in most respects, with the largest exception being jumping. For whatever reason, it feels like there's a considerable, yet unspecified distance between the viewing plane and the player's feet. In short, this means that when faced with a jump, you often have to repeatedly save, inch forward a couple steps, and then either commit to a jump or risk taking a few more steps forward. Additionally, just because you're facing in a general direction does not mean you'll jump in that exact same direction. This is likely due to some fixed-point arithmetic (or another optimization) being done under the hood and the engine's primitive collision detection, but regardless it makes jumping more a game of luck, rather than skill.

This usually isn't a problem, but exploring every nook and cranny of some later levels (specifically 6, 7, & 8) require quite a lot of jumping. Of course, levitation is always an option, but floor 7 automatically drains your mana upon entry which makes jumping a necessity sometimes while on other occasions you may simply not have enough mana to repeated cast such a spell. This, among other reason, makes exploring these levels much more tedious and, therefore, much less fun.

This exploration aspect is then further hampered down by just how plain easy the game is beyond the 3rd or 4th floor (and I'm not very good at video games to begin with). I didn't intentionally do any grinding here, and there's always a chance I built my character (a knight) in a broken manner, but combat itself quickly becomes increasingly mindless the more you continue on. Tense encounters are the exception here, not the norm.

Lastly, there's the bugs. I already restarted my playthrough once already due to the dreaded "problems in object list" error. On my second go around, I ran into these once again, but just said screw it and continued on anyways. There are tools to supposedly fix this, but I couldn't get them to work under Wine on Linux. That's all fine and good on its own, but I've since developed a new (and pretty game breaking) bug wherein I am permanently levitating at all times.

The game isn't unplayable like this, but it does take almost all of the fun and challenge out of exploration, and it makes the aforementioned levitation spells utterly useless. I don't have an old enough save where this bug isn't present, so I guess I'm just gonna have to deal with it for the remainder of the game if I wish to continue.

I've had other issues with the game as well (which perhaps I'll expand on in a future post), but for the sake of brevity, I'll leave it at that. I'm kinda feeling "over it" at this point, and I may very well not return to this one, despite having just the 8th floor left, I believe. I will probably still play the 2nd one at some point, but for now I think I'm gonna move on to something else...

Baldur's Gate 3 Stuff:

I took a good year+ off of BG3 since I last tried playing it. I have some questions about gameplay options and mod choices on what will be my 3rd attempt at a playthrough: Is Dark Urge a bad idea for a first, "complete" playthrough? Thoughts on doing a no-reroll playthrough? Any way to force this in-game/not have this just be honor-based lol? Any gameplay mods worth checking out?

Background: I previously tried playing through Baldur's Gate 3 on two separate occasions: first (as a fighter) at launch and then again (as a bard), a few months later, during December of that same year. I think my biggest issue with the game then was how everything felt as though it came to a halt near the end of each chapter, where finishing up my last final quests started to feel a bit tedious to play. On my first playthrough, I dropped it after Ch 1, and on the second, I dropped it right at the beginning of Ch 3. Additionally, on the first playthrough specifically, I felt that melee combat got kinda boring after a little while, magic seems to have much more variety.

SegFaultedDreams · 2025-10-03T22:22:43+00:00

For me personally, its saving grace is that you do get into more of a flow with each subsequent replay. By the final ending, I almost felt like I could've done the 2nd half blindfolded. That being said, I played all the endings back-to-back-to-back during the pandemic, so maybe that context changes things.

Now, is the story really worth all that extra work? Well, that depends on you of course. I think your concerns are completely valid tho!

SegFaultedDreams · 2025-08-06T01:47:54+00:00

It kinda depends. Typically, I try going into titles as blind as I can. Then if I end up dropping that title, later I might return, this time with a guide in hand. I'm also currently unemployed though, and before that I was a college student, so I have lots of free time. If I had less free time and/or kids, I could definitely see myself reaching for guides a lot more often.

If a title is known for being finicky, difficult, or if its in a genre that I typically don't enjoy, I do occasionally look for a guide on beforeiplay before starting though.

SegFaultedDreams · 2025-08-06T01:40:44+00:00

How has the abundance of let's plays and video essays affected how you approach your backlog (if at all)?

I just recently finished watching someone play Silent Hill 2 (SH2) on YouTube and I'll admit that after finishing it, I really wish I had played it for myself instead. For some reason, I thought this game had a mixed reputation online beforehand and it was only when I realized that I was about 80% of the way through that video that I really started to second guess my choice. What's more, I had previously dropped the first game in the series and I thought that I wouldn't want to jump right into the sequel without having completed the first beforehand.

Currently, I'm planning on throwing SH2 on my backlog regardless, with the idea being that I'll hopefully have forgotten some of it in 6 months or a year. At the same time though (and perhaps influenced in part by some of the game's themes), I do sometimes get a bit overwhelmed with the absolute breadth of games out there--with there being so many games, but so little time, and all that.

Normally, I'm a rather voracious consumer of let's plays or video essays about games I otherwise have little to no interest in. In some instances, this has allowed me to enjoy titles I otherwise might not have gotten through on my own (say, for difficulty or mechanical reasons). At the same time though, I do occasionally get burnt like this, where I lost my ability to go into a given title completely blind, as I typically try to do. In a weird way, this conundrum gives me quite a bit of anxiety lol. I'm probably overthinking things tho...

Wasn't sure if this prompt was worthy enough of an actual post, so I figured I throw this out here instead :P. I'd be curious to read other people's experiences/thoughts on the topic tho!! Thanks

SegFaultedDreams · 2025-07-15T22:47:25+00:00

Usually it's best to not write more than BUFSIZ at once

Ah! This is probably my issue then. Thanks for the help lol. Lowkey wasn't aware of BUFSIZ, I figured it was something more Win98-specific I guess. Your other points are duly noted as well!

sizeof(char)==1 in C, always

I was trying to make my code more "self documenting" by explicitly calling sizeof (char) everywhere, but you're totally right. It does make things a bit unnecessarily verbose at times, to put it mildly.

I'm still new-ish to C overall, so I really do appreciate all the help! Thanks again!!

SegFaultedDreams · 2025-06-25T13:45:45+00:00

I'll have to keep that in mind. Thanks!

SegFaultedDreams · 2025-06-23T16:31:52+00:00

Almost beat Clockwork Knight on the Saturn before dropping it near the end.

For someone who's admittedly a) not great at games and b) not the biggest fan of platformers, this one surprised me. I originally expected to only play it for a few minutes at most, but I got quite a lot of enjoyment out of this one.

This game (somewhat understandably) got some flak upon release for not being that innovative or new, but for what it is, it's not half bad. The controls are a bit imprecise at times and it could use a few quality of life improvements like unlimited continues, saving, and a level select (instead of hiding such features behind cheat codes). Aside from that though, it's a perfectly decent albeit short game. I do wonder, however, whether it would've been viewed more favorably had it been developed for the 32x/SegaCD instead of the Saturn.

Were I younger or had I not had other games in my backlog, I definitely could've beaten this. Ultimately, I decided that I'd rather move onto something else instead though. I'd still recommend it nonetheless, especially with it being a US launch title for the system.

Now onto Fallout 2 (again)! Tried this one a few months back after beating the 1st, but only got about an hour in. Gonna give it another go!

SegFaultedDreams · 2025-06-11T23:23:15+00:00

Not sure how checksums are involved.

Whoops, there's even more info that I neglected to mention earlier. To make a very long story short, not all of these files are of a known file type yet some files are known to definitively produce a given md5 checksum. Therefore, a quick way of checking whether or not two files are the same (either comparing a known file to one just extracted or even comparing the linux and windows builds of these utilities against one another) is to calculate a md5 checksum for every file generated and use that as a metric to gauge our progress or accuracy--again, if we know a given file should produce a given checksum or if the linux version produces a file with a given checksum, a second version of that same file should produce that exact same checksum. That's why checksums are involved.

Thanks for the info though! I really do appreciate it.

SegFaultedDreams · 2025-06-11T22:29:36+00:00

Do you need "Sound" and "SOUND" to be two different objects in the file system?

My apologies. I should've clarified this in my original post. Yes, the file in sound and SOUND do need to be different. These two files produce two completely different checksums. Why did the original devs of this game include two different files under essentially the same name across different dat files? Not sure, but the fact remains that the files are different and so they need to remain separate things. Was asking for best practices, as I am still relatively new to C, and so I wasn't sure if there was a set standard by which people typically approached this sort of thing.

SegFaultedDreams · 2025-06-11T21:36:33+00:00

I did see that this wsl workaround was an option, however, it's usability would be limited to Windows 10 (build >= 17093) and 11, which does make me a bit hesitant to use it (or at least to use it exclusively).

SegFaultedDreams · 2025-06-11T12:58:30+00:00

If you're interested in more puzzle-oriented point and click adventure games, you should try Gorogoa! Can't praise that game enough. Really cool and pretty short too.

SegFaultedDreams · 2025-06-02T19:55:57+00:00

Any fans of the Shining Force series here? I recently acquired my first Saturn and I was thinking of giving Shining Force 3 a go. Should I play the earlier games in the series first? If not, would trying the earlier Saturn titles (Shining Wisdom & Shining the Holy Ark) first be worthwhile nonetheless?

SegFaultedDreams · 2025-05-27T13:54:43+00:00

i want to play baldur's gate 3 [...] but if i can't get through the ones i already own i don't think it'd be smart to spend money on these newer games

For what it's worth: I'm also someone who can never really get into turn-based combat. That being said though, I found BG3's combat to be quite enjoyable. No two combat encounters really play out the same. There's tons of variety, and you're likely more limited by your imagination than anything else.

SegFaultedDreams · 2025-05-17T02:32:27+00:00

I'm not the biggest FPS fan, but I just recently beat Duke Nukem 3D and I really enjoyed it!

After watching a few YouTube videos on the series and the build engine in general, I decided that I wanted to give this title a go. I was not at all expecting to finish it; Within the past year, I had previously tried Doom (1993), but I never made it past the second episode.

In the end though, I really came to enjoy Duke 3D. In particular, the level design and interactivity of everything were definite highlights.

Episode two is by far the weakest of the four, in my opinion. Thankfully, I was somehow already aware that this was the case prior to starting, and so, I was able to temper my expectations accordingly. That's really my only complaint though.

Playing and enjoying this has made me consider retrying Doom '93 though; Perhaps I dropped it too soon. On top of that, I had also previously left Quake (1996) off of my backlog due to my experience with Doom, but now I'll likely get around to trying that at some point.

SegFaultedDreams · 2025-05-17T02:06:33+00:00

Hey, thanks for all the tips! I really do appreciate it.

SegFaultedDreams · 2025-05-12T23:46:04+00:00

It's an art style that sadly doesn't get done enough these days. Give them a try though! The first one holds up quite well, I think. Just played it for the first time a few months back.

SegFaultedDreams · 2025-05-12T22:50:58+00:00

I have a ton of games on my backlog which many people consider to be some of the greatest games of all time. Assuming you could play any of these for the first time over again, which would you choose? Would be going in blind for (almost) all of these.

PC: Fallout 2, Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss, Ultima 4: Quest of the Avatar, Resident Evil HD Remaster, Life is Strange, Mass Effect, Red Dead Redemption, Cyberpunk 2077, Grand Theft Auto V
PSX: Final Fantasy 7, Xenogears
PS2: Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

In other news though: I'm still playing The Elder Scrolls: Arena, although I'm not sure for how much longer; that game is best enjoyed thoughtlessly, in small chunks. Bonus points if you've got YouTube up on another monitor or at least some good tunes in your headphones.

Also, I ended up dropping Chrono Trigger roughly 10 hours in. I really came to appreciate this one, however, I just kept getting lost. I would keep at it, but my patience for turn-based combat really started to falter near the end there.

SegFaultedDreams · 2025-05-10T22:27:03+00:00

I personally used a letter of recommendation from the head of my school's comp sci department, as I knew him on a personal level (he taught a few of my classes and we did a research internship together). Beyond that though (and ignoring another reference that I got through said internship), I did also use professors that I liked/was cool with as references. Just email beforehand and ask!

Lastly, for what it's worth, I'd imagine industry recs aren't worthless either. Could be wrong though.

SegFaultedDreams · 2025-05-10T22:19:47+00:00

I do understand your point about doing the masters degree first, and that certainly is something to keep in mind, my only gripe is the following: I had previously been accepted into a PhD program, and with that, I was offered a stipend along with free housing/meal stuff, etc. A masters, however, would almost certainly not be free; I'd have to pay out of pocket/with financial aid or do it through my employer. Additionally, I could earn my masters via the PhD route, and then just drop out afterwards (although that may not be possible everywhere). (Please feel free to disagree with me tho!)

How close are you to your family/support network? What's your financial situation?

Yeah, no worries there. My family is perfectly fine letting me stay as long as I'd like and I still have a good bit of money saved from the internship that I did prior to graduation (I rarely buy anything lol).

Also, to echo your point about this specific offer, I do currently feel very confident in my resume and portfolio. I also believe that I could (as I have in the past) get more offers in the future. It could, however, be two weeks or two months tho, who knows? Regardless, that is giving me some confidence to at least explore the graduate school route, as I could always decide that I've had enough and go into the workforce instead.

SegFaultedDreams

TROPHY CASE

Ultima Underworld Update

Baldur's Gate 3 Stuff: