Esoteric Update #194 - Cartography Shmartography, Bah!

Oof, it's over, it's finally over.

Anyway, have some lore first:

Lore: Inhuman

Now, let's go over the update. First off, we have the map. It's done. I finished placing every damn building, and it was painful, but it's now over. So here's the map, as seen in-game, with all of the locations we're currently working on including:

And while it's a bit of a mess, you can mostly see what the names of the locations are here. Mind you, this isn't something you'll see in-game. I forced all of the tooltips to pop up at the same time:

We've also made good progress on fleshing out the locations; there's a lot of flavour and lore being packed into them.

But I've also had a chance to work on a few other things. I've slightly improved how tooltips are displayed, removing some problems with layering objects on the screen. This started popping up with the new map locations, so I revised some things to make it work smoother.

There are also a bunch of improvements to how NPCs are generated for random conversation. Now characters generate with language use features, and there's a full, proper inheritance of language features by children (from their parents or grandparents).

I've also improved the GB system's ability to self-recurse a little bit by automating some processes and making it possible to produce seamless recursion between scenarios. Recursion is also now handled by a dedicated token. A considerable improvement over what was there before, I'd say.

Finally, I did engine implementations for two functions, quite similar to the ones I did for neural network activation, needed for the agent AI I described some time ago. It's faster and more compact syntactically to do it this way, especially when a single agent might use it multiple times.

But, let me level here with you. The map work was a chore; it was not fun at all; I hated it; I am never going to make a map for a game ever again aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!