Esoteric Update #134 - Eeeeeehhhhhhhh...

I'm not feeling too well, so excuse me for being a bit laconic here. Firstly, no lore today. I'm just not feeling up to messing with WordPress to upload something. I'm sorry. Not to mention I know from my stats that no one reads them anyway, so this isn't a huge loss for anyone.

Now then, what have I done over the last week? A few things, but it's been a bit of a scatterbrained effort. Let's talk about the main stuff, the goal-based AI. I've managed to get some more data together, but I still need to finish designing Corny's apartment. After that, I can focus on doing a sketch of the interactions, and once I have some sketches, I can start filling them out with different data. I think this is going well. I just wish I had someone with who I could bounce ideas more often. Unfortunately, the kind of tech this involves is a bit too much for a lot of people. This might change soon too, and we might have a 4th team member. I don't want to talk about this much more until I'm sure it goes through.

Now, I managed to get a few odd things done as well. Firstly, a pretty long time ago, I wrote an article about generating conversations between NPCs. As of last week, I now have a complete, functional implementation of the system built around my random NPC conversation system. Wait, wait, what's the difference between the two, I expect some of you confusedly asking yourself. Well, the initial random NPC conversation system was made to generate random NPCs and play out predefined conversations between them. This is an upgrade that lets the game generate random NPCs and also generate random conversations between them. The system is not dissimilar to what you can find in the good old Elder Scrolls Oblivion, but... well... a lot more fleshed out. Though honestly, to begin with, the issue with that conversation system was the content, not the concept behind it. Anyway, I posted a tutorial on my Itch about making the conversations if anyone wants to see more in-depth as to what's happening there.

Secondly, I ended up playing with some CSS, of all things. After having randomly bumped into a feature with 9-path style border images on the Internet, I decided it would be a good idea to implement it for my document/book system. I've made a bunch of different styles, some more classic, some more modern to use with it.

Overall I'm not happy with this week, but I'm not satisfied with life either. I'm not going to bore you with that, though. I'll just try to get more done before the following Monday.