Esoteric Update #321 - Light Mode

I'd like to start by saying that the time I spent at the hospital has, so far, given me a better quality of life. It's only been a week, so it's still hard to say how things will be in the long run, but I've so far experienced a lot less discomfort, and that's despite still recovering from things. Anyway, I managed to get a lot done, at least on a technical level; unfortunately, much of it involved correcting some errors that popped up.

I'm a bit at a loss as to where I can start, so let me begin here. As I've mentioned a long time ago, I intended to give the game customisable colour themes. They're here now:

Some examples:

In its own right, this required some lateral thinking to get working because, as it sadly sometimes turns out, WebView2 is not very smart. (I needed to implement something called cache busting to get around inconsistent behaviours that also have no API exposure to control manually, ugh!) But now that it's done, it works well, and I think the available choices got a pretty good reaction from the people on my Discord. I am open to adding more if someone throws a good idea my way, too.

Now for the error issue - while working on a few things, I encountered problems with string delimiters across languages. There are moments where they get layered pretty hard, i.e., my language contains a string with an HTML attribute value in quotations, which in turn includes a JS string with string delimiters inside of which are again string delimiters for my language. While this situation might seem pretty ridiculous, it's an actual thing that has to be accounted for if the UI is to be reactive and for any interaction with the game not to require reloading the view. Note that this is the situation with the Alpha version, but the Beta uses reactive elements (modals, mainly). I've managed to work out a solution to this, but it required me to review some older code to implement a stricter handling of quotations.

I've also had to make some changes to the settings menu (the lion's share of them) and a few other minor adjustments (in modals) to get things working correctly.

Additionally, I implemented a very different take on the noun menu, which will also be used for the character creator. Instead of a step-by-step process, as it was before, you can edit all nouns at once, review them in any order (or as selectively as) you want, and add custom nouns on the fly as I've been discussing before. The menu also reactively checks constraints on the form (i.e., ensures enough nouns have been selected - which has been limited to just one in each category).

I've put a lot of work into re-designing the character creator, and some of the work above has served as a proof of concept for some of those ideas. So I'm excited to move to that now. The work so far has been pretty technically demanding due to the WebView2 transition (I blame Google!) and the higher implementation standards I'm trying to uphold, but as things are clearing up in that regard (and they absolutely are), I feel I'm on a good path to some faster progress now.