Coding Standards

Following a set of coding standards benefits a module by making it easy to maintain, troubleshoot, and integrate and helps one organize code for better consistency. The NWN Lexicon project tries to follow all of these coding standards and naming conventions in order to maintain consistency across the reference. It is strongly recommended that, if working in a group project, all members of the group agree to use some kind of coding standard and naming conventions, even if they are not the ones presented here.

1. Indenting and Overall Structure
   • BioWare is not completely consistent in brace placement or indentation; in most places a starting brace appears on a new line (not the same line as the function prototype or "if" statements for example), so an "if" statement would be structured as follows:

     if (TRUE)
     {
          // ...
     }
     

   • Only a single statement should appear per line. An exception would be when readability is greatly enhanced, for example in a "switch" statement:

     switch (nCondition)
     {
          case 1: sVariable = "one"; break;
          case 2: sVariable = "two"; break;
          case 3: sVariable = "three"; break; 
     }
     

   • Statements should be indented an appropriate number of levels according to the nested depth. So, an "if" statement in our void main would appear as follows:

     void main()
     {
          if (TRUE)
          {
               // ...
          }
     }
     

   • Smart use of white space and carriage returns can help break up a large function call or nested function call, making it easier to make changes to and read.

     action aConvo = ActionStartConversation(
          GetObjectByTag("SOME_TAG"),
          "Hey you!",
          FALSE
     );
     

2. Identifier and Function Declarations
   • In general, identifiers should be declared at the top of the function. This makes it easy to find the identifier's type and it's initial value. If an identifer is only used once, inside a small block, it can be declared at the point where it is used.
   • The names of functions should be lower case, with the first name of each word capitalized, except for the first word (camel case or intercapitalization). This helps distinguish between official BioWare functions and user-defined functions. For example:

     int doSomething(int nKills)
     {
          return nKills - 9;
     }
     

   • Variables should follow the standard naming conventions.
3. Boolean Conditionals
   • BioWare is inconsistent in their usage of boolean conditional tests. Sometimes "bCondition == 1" is used, some times "bCondition == TRUE" is used, and other times the generally accepted standard of "bCondition" (or "!bCondition") is used. Use the generally accepted standard when dealing with identifiers that begin with the int (boolean) prefix of "b"; use equality tests for numeric data types.

     int bTest = TRUE;
     int nTries = 3;
     // boolean test:
     if (bTest)
     {
          // ...
     }
     // numeric test:
     if (nTries > 0)
     {
          // ...
     }
     

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 author: Charles Feduke, additional contributor(s): Steve Mosely, Michael Nork, pcfung