Hopefully without sounding like I am trying to boast or anything... I find the difference in readability and clarity dramatic between those two on one hand and my own deobfuscated, refactored and commented version of the OP. https://gist.github.com/ctsrc/fef3006e1d728bb7271cff0656eb02...
I worked a little bit more on it, and thanks to my refactoring I have identified a bug in the original code (which I have intentionally retained in my own code because the point is to produce the same output as the original version, all the way down to and including bug-for-bug compatibility).
Description of bug, which I also posted as a comment on the OP gist:
> Player and other entities will never be placed on the rightmost column of the room floor, nor on the bottom-most row of the room floor. See https://gist.github.com/ctsrc/fef3006e1d728bb7271cff0656eb02... [...]. In my refactored version of your code the bug is explained at the line I linked to in this comment.
https://gist.github.com/femto113/28f69626acddc70a002ecead0b3... (from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19290841 )