Leaderboard value: turning a non-zero number into one

[kdecks]

As a developer who loves making leaderboards I would like a means to turn any non-zero value, for the Value field into one.

This is needed only occasionally, but often without it sacrifices in design must be made.

Use Case

Recently I made some leaderboards for Metroid II, the weapon address stores the beam as:
0: No beam
1: Ice
2: Wave
3: Spazer
4: Plasma

I needed a way to count "had beam weapon", as a single unchanged value, but have no means to do so. This is one of a handful of other cases where I had to abandon my original intent.

Two possible solutions

1. Add support for exponents in value. As x^0 = 1.
   • Exponents would also value in other uncommon cases.
2. Add a special operator that turns any non-zero value into 1.
   (And still allowed that number to be multiplied by any value.)

[Keltron3030]

I think there's a function to invert bits... I can't remember if that was a current feature or a work in progress. Maybe that can possibly be made use of in this case. I'll try to find the reference.

Update:

So Jamiras explained it:

"~ is a bitwise not. In current code, it only works on single bits, but in rcheevos, it's been expanded to the entire memory read: i.e. ~0xH0040 would bitwise invert the entire byte: 0xA3 -> 0x5C"

Maybe this could help.

[Jamiras]

I believe this can be accomplished using a Measured/MeasuredIf construct.

Q:x!=0_M:y

The overall value y would only be captured if x was not zero. And you can still do the multiplication if desired:

Q:x!=0_A:y*1.5_M:0

Note: the multiplication must be AddSource'd to 0 as it cannot be directly on the Measured condition.

[Jamiras]

In addition to using the MeasuredIf logic mentioned above, it's possible to divide a value by itself to generate a 1, and division by 0 always evaluates to 0 to prevent an exception, so that's a secondary alternative.

0xH1234/0xH1234