Esoteric Update #126 - Being Sick Is Bad For Productivity

Alright, two weeks passed. As I mentioned in that quick announcement last time, I managed to get sick. It was bad. Very bad. In fact, while I feel on the upswing right now, I'm still not totally fine. Unfortunately, due to the sickness, there was only so much I could do during this time. But, let's get through it step by step.

And we'll start with the lore for today:

Lore: Ghost Marriage
Lore: Human Book Binding

Additionally, I've written a pair of discussion pieces for mechanics I'm working on:

Mechanics: Discussion – Skill Checks In Summary
Mechanics: Discussion – Goal Oriented Sex

Now, that said, we can move on to what got done. And first, up, let's talk about the previous update and what I mentioned there. I did finish up the social skill modifiers, at least to the extent of working with things that are implemented right now, including implementing support for a handful of traits to get that system rolling. I've also extended the system to contain support for magic and sex skills, although more work is needed, mainly because NPCs do not support magic skills yet, including traits.

I've also extended the API with some functionality that was missing so far, I really don't know how I managed to skip some of these things. This exapnsion primarily hit arrays, which now have the capability to look up values and behave as stacks. (In case you are wondering, a stack implementation running on an array list is actually pretty good.) Part of this has to do with preparing to take on the goal-based AI implementation, although stacks tend to be generally useful so I'm expecting them to pop up elsewhere now that I have them available... oh wait... they already have!

Right, I've used the stacks for something already. So first off I designed a file format for graphs, as well as a few different approaches to pathfinding between two selected points on the graph. While pathfinding is generally associated with video characters moving about a virtual space (and that is part of the reason why I've prepared these methods), it can actually be applied to a broader set of AI related use cases. It's not the most optimised of systems, but considering I don't plan on using it it with massive graphs, it will do for now. If efficiency becomes an issue, I'll revisit it. Alltogether it has some interesting features and approaches to solving specific problems, so I'm happy with it. And I'll likely be extending it sometime in the future to add a few more features.

Finally, I'd like to do something uncharacteristic and talk for a moment about my current plans concerning development. I'd like to try taking on a sketch version of the system for lewd scenes. So far I've taken it in a very bottom-up fashion, fleshing out specific scenes and then combining them together. This approach will be a lot more top-down, with a larger structure covered, but without the detailed writing... at first. The goal is to sketch things out, get feedback on the features and then move on to fleshing it out with narration on par with... or hopefully better than what can be seen in the current test scenes.