question about what this line might be trying to accomplish

I'm not entirely sure about this line of code, its from the original gl quake's source code. Carmack does a lot of funny things at the bit level and I have no friggin clue what they are supposed to be

the actual part of this is the
rand()&3) & 1

the entire context is this:
any clue what the bitwise and operator is being used for? If i remember correctly if bit A and bit B are 1, then the resulting bit is also a 1, otherwise its a zero if either are 0?

Code:

	if ( ((rand()&3) & 1) ||  abs(deltay)>abs(deltax))
	{
		tdir=d[1];
		d[1]=d[2];
		d[2]=tdir;
	}

Oh and this is actually monster code, I guess it randomly chooses a dijrection to move in somehow?

Thanks if you can help explain this to me

EDIT: is doing operations on variables faster on the bit level?

((rand()&3) & 1)

Why would he do that? That's the same as (rand() & 1). maybe he isn't so almighty as we first thought...

Anyway, I'd guess that rand() snippet creates a random True/False statement with a 50/50 chance for each.
What the whole part is doing i have no clue. Swaps two values when something occurs.

so all rand() does is produce true/false? I honestly did not know that. I never understood how rand()%upperbound works. Like rand()%20 creates a random number to 20. I know what the modulus operator does but it still doesn't make sense completely.

//rand() produces true/false with 50/50 chance of each
//& bitwise operator produces 1 when A bit AND B bit are 1, otherwise it is 0
//11 is binary for 3
//01/00 & 11 -> 01/00
//01&01 -> 01
//00&01 -> 00

that still doesn't make sense in terms of any useful functionality

what he is doing is masking out the 0 bit (in a bad way as magos pointed out since ((rand()&3) & 1) is the same as (rand() & 1) )
he might be using it because mod or floating point division can be expensive operations.

Originally posted by Silvercord
so all rand() does is produce true/false? I honestly did not know that. I never understood how rand()%upperbound works. Like rand()%20 creates a random number to 20. I know what the modulus operator does but it still doesn't make sense completely.

I didn't say rand(), I said rand() snippet, and by that I refered to the code you posted.

What other languages allow you to manipulate bits directly/one at a time?

Originally posted by Silvercord
What other languages allow you to manipulate bits directly/one at a time?

c, c++, java, and probably many more have bitwise operators such as...

&, |, ~, ^