Esoteric Update #209 - A Mod Loader, Of All Things?

And now we're back to our regular update schedule.

I don't have any lore, and I don't have any interesting articles... but I do have some Ink:

Scripting: Ink – Part III – The Other Arrows
Scripting: Ink – Part IV – Variables And (A New) Logic
Scripting: Ink – Part V – Variable Text
Scripting: Ink – Part VI – Functions And The Other Things With Parameters

I've gone over all the crucial elements of the language, but more so, I'm close to done with the adaptation needed to seamlessly jump in and out of Ink while the GB system is running. Which is more than I was hoping for at first, but to some extent, it makes working with Ink harder. I'll present the specific issues at some point, maybe in a week or two.

I will also say that the amount of bugs in Ink's IDE and "compiler" bothers me. And I will likely need to write a bit about that too.

Apart from that, I've worked on a few specific things I've worked with over the last few weeks. Unfortunately, most of them are technical. I don't want it to come off as not working on anything else, but this is the nature of what I can describe here.

So firstly, the game now has a full-featured mod loader, which allows multiple packages of data to be hooked up and loaded, a way of running code for mods during specific triggers (on engine launch, game start, game load), and a way of addressing data from particular packages, so that files can reference the files they are overriding. It's a similar system to what you might be used to from modern Bethesda games or (my actual source of inspiration) the Neverwinter Nights games.

I also had an idea that seemed great at first but turned out to be a bit of a dud. I wrote code that allows the game to retrieve data in base64 encoding (this can be used for quite a few things, but usually, it's used to embed images into text. I have used the approach in the past to embed fonts into CSS, but in this case, I was foiled by an unsuspected twist of fate. There's a hard cap on the length of the URI C# is willing to tolerate, and some of the intended uses for this approach exceed that cap. It's still helpful code, just precludes the kind of use I initially intended.

Unfortunately, the time of the year comes when I need to consider paying taxes for the game and ensure that some subscriptions we use are renewed.

Ultimately though, I just don't feel too well today, specifically, so I'll end here. I'll try to have something more interesting to show off next week.