Esoteric Update #248 - The Writings Of The Mad

Alright, back to the usual then.

So I think I should somewhat explain myself about the last few weeks. I've been worried about how much I can say about this without it crossing that "too much information" boundary. But let's say, to keep things simple but honest, that I was in a life-threatening situation due to complications related to my chronic medical issues. This resulted in multiple hospital visits, some heavy medication and me being just sedated, exhausted and useless. Are things ok now? I guess, as much as they can be. Am I feeling better? On some subjective scale, sure. Did I manage to get back to work? Yeah, I did.

So, now let's talk a bit about what the actual update for today is. For the last few weeks, I've already been hinting at having some kind of concept I want to discuss. In short, it's about the representation of rooms, or even segments of a room, in the architectural sense, using containers. What is a room, after all, if not a box with things on the inside, right? This kind of approach would help with the modularity of locations in the game, making it easier to construct detailed settings and also to make those settings dynamic. This is something we've had issues with all across the game so far, making it an issue that had to be addressed if we could even hope to make this work the way we wanted it to work.

This was also not exactly easy to get off the ground, though now, with some pretty decent base for it, things should start rolling much smoother. There were some severe problems that got in the way, and I put a lot of effort into solving all but one of those problems, but even for that final issue, I have a solution, I just didn't manage to implement it yet. These were issues such as distinguishability of furniture in the scene, sorting furnishings, referring to furniture contents or even deeper (you know, box in a box in a box in a box) for interactions with NPCs and abilities the player character possesses (psychometry, for example), parts of furniture referencing the whole, etc.

I'd like to finish this by next week and start showing off how a scene might look when it's built using these features.

(Here, we can see a painting; despite just being an ordinary painting (b.t.w. paintings are now documents too, and so are frames), the game can present the player with information about its position in the scene.)

There are also some other things I managed to get done, some of them concerning document generation with a new and improved clay tablet, as well as some deep dives into how certain non-Latin scripts can be incorporated into the game and then also handwriting, which is its own can of worms.

(A clay tablet covered in some cuneiform writing.)

(Here are some scripts we've cleared as working; the Arabic is fascinating in how it attaches letters together without any input.)

(Here is some generated (gibberish) text using the character set.)

We've also made some serious progress with assets, and also... there's something relating to a library I still have to get back to. So that's maybe for next week, I'm not sure. I'll be trying to find more time to work on things this week while also further recovering from... well, "the incident".