Esoteric Update #142 - Fashion Digression

Time for our regularly scheduled update~

First, the lore:

Lore: The Red Pyramid
Lore: The Godavari Journal – A Transcription

Now, for the more recent developments. Maybe let's talk about the AI first. I've done a fair bit of tinkering with it, mostly with modularity and ensuring that the usage of the system is actually sustainable. Right now, it has basic implementations for running "scenarios", which define the starting parameters for the interaction. This currently goes through everything needed for conversations (previously handled by the conversation module, but there's some mixing and matching here), in addition to characters being located on a node map of the immediate area. In a bit, I'll also be adding variables required for sex and intimacy as well, but I want to run a few simple scenario elements through it first. Not an update I can show off that much, but a step forward nonetheless.

Mostly, I've been distracted by the clothing system. I took a deep dive into it, and there were some data-entry related issues. Some items were miss-named (and did not show up in the wardrobe), and some items had problems with how they were defined. Fortunately, all issues were straightforward (if sometimes time-consuming) fixes. The big issue was definitely the corset items getting stuck on the character and becoming impossible to remove. That required some mental gymnastics to figure out, but it turned out to have been just a tiny error in the item definition. Anyway, this isn't just about fixes. There are more items in the game now. Currently, there should be about 2500 clothing items generated from 120 templates. There are a few new materials for existing items, and whole new classes of clothes as well. The update hit pants, legwear and armware, and there's another pending update for tops and lingerie that I've not gotten to yet. For example, we added some cute knee-length pants:

But that's not all that came from this. So I've decided to revisit the unpack action and give the player a few more options for that.

You can see them here:

Free choices allow you to select any 5 items from the game's clothing library through an interface similar to the debug wardrobe. The rest are pre-defined outfits, each consisting of more than 5 items (to balance them against the free choices), matching either a theme, a pop culture reference, or (for the last one) my own taste in clothing. So let's use that outfit as an example of what you get:

Of course, this is given to you as individual items that you can mix and match however you want. None of the pre-defined outfits contain anything that isn't available in the free choice option. It's just a quick and easy way to get a set of pre-selected clothes.