Creatures Caves

yeah the checking radius is only 200... it uses an esee loop which enumerates over all objects it considers food in sight range, and before the loop, it sets the snotrock's sight range at 200 with that 'rnge' statement... really either way if you use 10000 or -1 it's a nonsense value in this particular case...

The only real reason to use a large value here is that it allows for simpler code and easier logic assertions... if you use something like -1, then you will need to check specifically for the -1 every time before making the 'less than' comparison because the -1 value will always be less than the distance, and we are looking for the minimum, so instead of one 'if less than' statement you would have a couple of nested ifs instead, like ('if ov00 not equal to -1 then check if distance is less than ov00, and if it is, set ov00 to the distance, otherwise, just set ov00 to the distance...). It would add about 3-4 lines to the script that isn't really necessary in this case...

But you definitely have a point, using a large value here is a shortcut... Something like you describe is semantically more correct for the general case... In a case where you don't know that much about the values in your set (For example, a critter whose sight isn't limited, or is using enum instead of esee in a very large map), then setting any arbitrary value for a routine like this can be dangerous (you run into this problem in coding when sorting a set of strings for example, or a set of real numbers that can be anything positive or negative). Then you want to make a kind of 'false' case that you can't really compare directly with any of the values, and do an extra check for the false case first before actually comparing... ('null' works well for things like this, and actually that is one major reason why many languages initialize variables to null at start... this exact problem comes up a lot, and making things null helps avoid logic errors with comparisons, since null can't be compared directly with anything that isn't null.

In this case, the script doesn't use the value at the end either way, since it just uses ov00 as a 'distance comparer' during the esee-next loop, where it goes through everything in range, one by one, and picks a new target the snotrock wants to look at if it's closer than the last one... If esee never finds anything in range, then the script never even gets to that part of the code because it passes over the whole loop, and the script never tries to set a target for the snotrock, never compares the 10000 to anything or looks at it again, and the snotrock just keeps wandering around.