Esoteric Update #222 - Learning Pains

Sorry for the late update. Yesterday was the 1st, and as such, Patreon was timing out for me, as it usually does on the 1st. In any case, I used the time to work on some coding...

Anyway, let's start with the lore, and I did say last time I'll try to do a multi-feature for this update:

Lore: How To Study The Arcane For Beginners
Lore: The Dolphin's Dream
Lore: The Golem – An Unanswered Question of Ethics

Now, for the update proper.

Last week we started working on a functional arcane knowledge mechanic, and we did manage to get the basics done, but we were left with a data structure that wasn't easily manageable. As such, addressing that was the first thing we had on the agenda for this update. Unfortunately, it took me some time to bash out something fully functional; I've kept making changes to it until yesterday, making it more and more automated by building the whole data structure from just one collective file. And I do mean the entire thing. So that's good. Maintaining that one file is much more manageable than managing all the files individually, especially with line-access style optimisations.

However, there was still some functionality that I needed to bash out. Code for learning and checking facts and some interfaces for doing this in a somewhat visual manner:

There's a bit more to it than it might seem, especially for learning facts. You are not always capable of learning any given bit of information (which we need to check), and additionally, when a new fact is checked, that requires some additional actions to get triggered, like this:

Finally, because some tools have huge menus, I've decided to test out introducing a roll-up feature where specific segments can be opened or closed.

This still requires some visual improvements, I think.

Anyway, I will admit I did get a bit less done than usual, but Warframe's big new expansion came out, and I did spend some hours playing it. It is quite good.