Esoteric Update #246 - A Lot, In A Way

Alright, update time. And it's a Sunday update. Honestly, I will likely stick to this until I stop needing to have long Monday hospital sessions; it just works better this way.

So, no lore this time; I'm too tired for that, and I still have more to do today. And I also have quite a few things to talk about...

So, let's start with a few things. Firstly, we are working on content. It isn't easy to talk about content without spoiling what it's about, so we don't talk about it. We're dipping our fingers in a few pies, but it's leading to some good results that we're happy with. Secondly, last week, I had some... let's say, issues, and I tried to work through those issues regardless of wanting to rest. Let's just say that much of what I did early last week didn't work out. I don't want to discuss it; I want to move on. Thirdly, there were bug fixes, most of them have a lot to do with pretty complicated issues, like memory leaks; once more, I don't really want to dwell on that; it's not interesting.

Now, let's review some of the more "fun" stuff.

One thing that worked out well is the new "crafting" interface. Well, it's not a crafting interface; it's more a system for using groups of items together to produce effects. The simple example shown in the image below uses it to glue together two parts of a broken key, but even then, you get complications, like the system being aware of the bottle of glue being multi-use. Interestingly, this whole system is managed by grammatical production rules. So, it is very consistent with the rest of the game. The introduction of this system directly addresses concerns we had regarding complex item use while also condensing all the use cases to the same interface. Overall, it was a big win.

Next is a small thing, and I won't even present an image for this. You get a keyring to store your keys so they don't rattle around in your bag. It works very similarly to the wallet, letting you place some items into it. We'll see about taking this further, but no promises and no solid plans for the moment.

We've also done some work on the documents. On one side, it's about introducing new document archetypes (some of which you can see below). But on the other side, it's also finding ourselves needing to adjust the format itself. Long ago, I made the foolish decision of deciding that pages in a document will never need more than ten parameters each. This turned out to be a mistake, as we just recently... ran out of parameter space. It turned out that we'd need at least thirteen parameters to fully implement all the new features we wanted for these new documents. So, as I said, I changed the document format from a simple array of data to a queryable dictionary (like what most of our later systems use). I still need to reformat a few documents, but I at least have most of the heavy lifting done. Anyway, have a look at some of our new templates:

I still also need to documentize the picture frames and integrate everything with the point of interest system.

Anyway, moving on to some more technical details, I also made a JS library. What does it do? If you attach it to the engine, it gives you a persistent JS execution environment where you can freely call code. It's pretty fully featured, and I might want to go into more details about it some other time, but I'll spare you for now. It uses the Chakra JScript engine b.t.w., so it's functionally consistent with the rest of JS execution in the engine (i.e. when you execute JS in the display).

As a bonus, we've also gotten some AI image synthesis going on, producing some pretty good results. For the moment, we have it rolling consistently on an old computer, so it doesn't run THAT fast, and we're still forced to curate the vast majority of its output as unfit for purpose buuuuut... have some samples below.

We've also experimented with ChatGPT 4.0 to generate literary noise, but its output still falls far below our expectations.

Anyway, I guess there's a question to be asked if I feel I've rested at all? The answer is definitely no. I've had several pretty distressing and unpleasant hospital visits over the last few weeks, and I've just not been sleeping well. But I'll try to keep to the weekly schedule for the nearest while.