Esoteric Update #127 - The Final Cog In The Infernal Machine

Alright, this will be a difficult update to write since I'm not sure if I can adequately convey what I want to say.

B.t.w. no lore today; Wordpress is having some kind of episode. I can't get things to load correctly. This includes the article editor. IDK, maybe I'll post something extra next week.

In any case, let's try to get through the update for now. The main thing I want to say is that I am implementing the goal-oriented AI I spoke about before. The further I work on Cornelius as a character, the more apparent it becomes that I need that system to properly build complex character interactions. Otherwise, it won't be feasible to do it in practice. There's too much minutia at work to make this bottom-up. The approach has to be top-down to put the most general systems in place first. I know this might not be what people want to hear, but I need to focus on this system for the time being.

I've spent the last week building one of the more critical parts of this framework - a system for tracking the relative positioning of characters (the PC and NPC they are interacting with primarily) within a small space. There are many issues related to complex nonverbal communication, idling and sex scenes that get solved with this. I've worked out a basis for the poses focusing on a single character and am some 60% done with poses that include two characters. Here, below, you can see the graph representing poses for a single character and how they navigate between poses.

This also obviously relates to the graph concepts I've been working on. I feel that's done for the moment. I can't think of any other operations I'd need that I've yet to implement. Though I've had a bit of a stint with a few other technical modules. Just small things. A few changes to the API and an ummm... a bidirectional multi-map that I essentially gave up on. It was just a solution too cumbersome for the simple issue it was trying to solve. Reversing a multi-map to form a matching pair is a straightforward solution giving me the functionality I needed.

We're also going back to do more clothing items and probably work on clothing stores and a few other side things for the game while I sort this stuff out for Cornelius. Leather fashion in particular, though not the bondage kind... yet.

For the goal-oriented AI, I'm feeling fairly positive about this whole design. I think this will be the component I need to finish the tech backend for the game and the scaffold for everything I wanted to do. I might take some time off from working on it to explain why it's so important and how having it affects game development.