Esoteric Update #169 - Improving Rendering For A Text Based Game

Wow, this was a weird week. Anyway, let's start with the lore:

Lore: Ontological Manifestations
Lore: The Purple Child

Now let's go over what happened over the last few days. Because there was a lot and some of it was rather interesting, at least on a technical level.

First off, I ended up extending interoperability between the base engine and JavaScript running in the display. It's a massive weight off my shoulders because it allows for a few things I've had planned that I was worried about for a while now. Plus, it was always somewhat weird how one-directional the communication between JS and ES could be, which has changed now.

Secondly, I worked some more on the leftover data from last week. I'm still left with a few more images to process, but it's mostly done now, and I'm probably going to just leave it as is now. It's already a rather impressive set, and I can use it for book needs right now. So I'd like to present a pair of images here - the difference between a book seen in the original templating system and what I've achieved since then.

Makes a difference, doesn't it?

And if you want to see how this looks with a few more of the options enabled at the same time:

But apart from just implementing more assets, fixing errors and testing the options, I've also implemented a... not that great but functional replacement for 9-patch borders. It requires separate images for the parts, but once implemented in the game, it allows for the whole frame to be constructed using a single non-terminal.

That said, there might also be a different reason why the game might look a bit differently to you. Though it's something you'll only catch if you take a good look at the images. The engine is now enabled for high-DPI mode rendering, which changes a lot about how the game looks in practice. The fonts are much crisper, and even the images look sharper. 

And if you want to see how this looks in practice, I'm releasing a very, very in-development version o the game on my Discord. It's not a content update, don't come into it thinking about it like that. But if you want to see how the engine changes have panned out, you can help us test that and hunt for any possible bugs. Unfortunately, due to the high variability of the Windows ecosystem, there's only so much we can do on a limited number of test machines.

Now, I don't want to continue working on the books at this point. I'm going back to converting and expanding events. That is to say, mostly writing.