Esoteric Update #72 - Testing The Waters

Ending this week, I find myself in a pretty curious situation in terms of sharing something with you. That is to say, I'm in the middle of making a system that can generate random NPCs on the fly and then insert and maintain them within a particular conversation structure.

It's basically my "Phase 2" of having randomly generated conversations, sadly without the conversations being randomly produced quite yet. But! If you want to know more about that, you can read about it on my blog.

For the moment, however, I have a bit of a mess. Most of the work on the systems is done (though putting the system to practice still uncovers little things that can be changed here and there), but the part that's visible in the game is still somewhat lacking, running on test data and seriously incomplete. At the moment, this is how it looks like.

Of course, once it finishes, all the debug data will no longer be visible. But for now, it's useful for me to know what's happening inside of the system. Now, this isn't quite a simple thing to explain, but this module is quite unusual, it contains complex logic, yet it doesn't use a code file. There's no explicit .state file that runs the operation. It functions by populating anonymous .states with code generated from a formal grammar... kinda on the fly. Which gives it the rather unusual property of being possible to insert literally anywhere in the code, as it carries out its operations kinda inside of the printer (you might want to check this article) instead of the whole nested automata structure that runs the game. Don't get me wrong, it still interfaces with all of that, including the memory systems. But it does so by making stuff on the fly rather than being explicitly directed to do so.

This is still a pretty simplistic example of this principle. However, back when I started this game, I assumed it will be eventually possible for me to do this. I'm glad I was right, and over time I'll get better at managing it.

It's funny how I need to learn the tools that I made for myself, but I guess that's how sufficiently advanced systems go?