Some time ago I read an explanation of the key generation process of NTRUEncrypt, where it was stated that a polynomial $f$ should have "small" coefficients. It defined the number $df$, which configured the space of this polynomial to have coefficients in the set $\{-1,0,1\}$ such that $df$ is the number of 1s and $(df-1)$ is the number of -1s.
However, checking the submitted code in the third round of NIST competition, the sampling of $f$ seems to return coefficients in the set $\{0,1,2\}$. Is it because they are equivalent representations for the coefficients, being this one the best for making computations?
Also, the sampling function for $f$ needs a seed as a parameter called "uniformbytes". Based on the comments, I filled it with uniform random bytes from 0 to 255, but the number of 1s and -1s (suposing 2s are -1s) are really different from the $df$ and $(df-1)$ thing I read in the other work. Looking at how this sampling function is called in other parts of the code, I see that the seed is generated using some AES functions, which seemed pretty weird to me.
What is the correct way of sampling $f$, and what is that $df$ parameter that seems to be missing in the submitted code?
