Esoteric Update #235 - Laplace's Trolley Funhouse

Well, the last week didn't go great. Instead of a single visit to the doctor, I've so far been there four times over the previous eight days, and it's not the end. So excuse me. I'm a bit cranky, and some things are unfinished.

There will be no lore today. I'm not feeling well enough to prepare an entry.

So let's start with the main thing - the release; when is it happening? Probably in two days from now. We've had some last-minute things pop up, which have pushed everything back, but will result in much more to check out with the thought experiments in return. We were thinking of one thought experiment and one errant thought, just as a proof of concept for things, and those things are done. But it seems we'll be presenting the mechanic instead using three thought experiments and three errant thoughts. 

There are also a lot of smaller updates from across the last two weeks to report on... let's go over the more important ones in no particular order.

So, a few things got added to the picture frames; these are features like grime, glass panes and broken glass panes. I realise, not at all exciting, but practical.

We've also made the first addition to cosmetics in a long while. You get new colours of lipstick, nail polish and eyeshadow. What are the colours? White, bronze, copper, silver, gold and platinum. A lot of these are specifically high-contrast options for characters with dark skin.

We've also introduced some interactions into the game that remove text from the drafting window. But it might not be what you think. However, doing so made us realise that the action and drafting mechanics are never really fully explained, so we dropped some info on them into the Index.

Furthermore, we did some work on the controls. Now, I'll not be surprised if you never knew that the game has keyboard support, but it was never particularly good. We've worked a little bit on that, leading to a few changes. The keyboard controls are now properly coded in, allowing us to do a lot with keyboard controls in the future. For the moment, it's just a tiny update consisting of three elements: updated keyboard shortcuts, keyboard shortcuts on menu tooltips and custom focus appearance for elements (note: this might change in the future.

There were also bug fixes, including a pretty thorough look at random NPC conversations, as it turned out there were several corrupted files there (plus one very, very rare mechanic that ended up being broken). I've also been taking the game away from using file names containing unnecessary periods, making random parts of the file name look like extensions. This doesn't matter, but since someone asked what the extension even meant, and it's... not an extension, I might as well correct it. Finally, I've added some code to the GB system that allows for setting markers in the callstack and subsequently manipulating them. For the moment, it's removing functors from the callstack until hitting a specified tag.

As usual, there were other things, and I won't lie. My health got in the way of getting more done, particularly because extensive bloodwork is extensive.