Esoteric Update #261 - Provisional Update (But There's A Lot Here)

Unfortunately, this is Bear here again. Eso is still not feeling well. Between the food poisoning and her other health issues, she has spent much of the last two weeks too exhausted (due to dehydration, discomfort and pain) to do what she refers to as "serious work". That's not to say she hasn't been working on anything, however, as she decided to keep herself busy with clearing some backlog ideas and expansions to existing features. And I'd like to properly give credit to what she has been up to, as it is rather extensive and interesting work.

This will be a long post.

Let's start with the changes to the cypher mechanic Eso has implemented. The systems now allow for keyphrase entry as a part of encryption. The most interesting thing about the implementation, however, is that it is lax towards the entry. If you can give at least a mostly correct key, your character can adjust for any errors and decode the text even when there are issues with how the text is given. The changes to this mechanic now also allow for additional tools to be used during decoding (perhaps a cypher might need a ruler for you to measure something, or maybe it's an invisible ink cypher that needs a UV lamp).

Due to criticism of the cypher mechanic that Eso has taken to heart, possibly a bit too much, she has also dedicated time towards implementing a while cryptography module. This module provides a toolset we can use when designing puzzles and problems in the game that use real-world cryptography that is simple enough to be performed by a human, which can also include the player. This whole module is interesting due to how it mixes both historical encryption methods, but also some approaches that have a more occult and esoteric origin. I'd like to quickly describe the scope of this module to you.

1) The module contains a selection of classic substitution cyphers, including the very classic Caesar cypher, but also a set of traditional methods of Khaballistic origin that could be reasonably adapted for the Latin alphabet. These are the Atbash, Albam, Avgad and Achbi methods. While they are very much insecure cyphers by any measure (particularly the latter four, as they do not even have keys), they are quite adequate for puzzle design.

2) There are also a number of cyphers based on the tabula recta, including the simplest one of them, the Trithemius cypher. However, the more advanced Vigenère, Beaufort and Beaufort variant cyphers are provided, all of which also allow for Autokey functionality (a feature of some cyphers where the coded text is used as part of the key).

3) In a similar vein to the tabula recta, there's a whole set of cyphers based on Polybius Squares and Tap Codes. These two approaches are compatible and can use the same transformations. Speaking of which, in addition to a number of generic ones, the extension supports the Bifid cypher, the shifted Bifid cypher and the Playfair cypher. There are also tools for building your own transformations, tools for building Polybius Squares and Tap Codes based on a keyphrase and the ability to do partial operations for these cyphers (transform text to text, or text to number sequence, or number sequence to text... and if you ever really need it, also number sequence to number sequence).

4) And not on the more esoteric side of things, the module supports Gematria or Kabbalistic Numerology. It's a fully fleshed-out toolset that mostly focuses on traditional Hebrew Numerological practices translated into the Latin alphabet but also contains some historically accurate Latin/English variants. It contains a whole suite of options for processing words into Numerological values in accordance to many different methods, some of which can even be combined together. Similarly to the Polybius options above, partial steps are available for improved API access to the process.

5) Eso has also made an attempt to adapt Temurah for Latin, but unfortunately, she has deemed the results inadequate. It seems the English language is too unbalanced and non-phonetical for it to work. Regardless, at the moment at the very least, she has not removed the functionality.

Eso has mentioned wanting to finish working on this module for the moment, but she might return to it at some future point to implement more of the traditional transpositional cyphers.

Now, moving on to the game's image module, there are a few things here that have changed as well. The point of the image module as a whole is to provide image manipulation tools that can be used during development while also allowing the game to execute these same image operations on the fly. This way, the results match, and dynamic content can be inserted in places that rely on the image module. Eso wants to report two main avenues of improvement to the module.

1) The first one is support for blend modes. Blend modes take two images and output a composite image according to some formula. In this implementation, it's possible to choose which channels are affected, use a large variety of pre-defined blend modes, and even use a simple algebra to define your own.

2) The second is support for convolution filters. The engine had some pre-defined convolution filters before, like for example, some of the blur filters were defined based on convolutions. But now, the implementation is extended to allow for arbitrary filters, allowing for such functionality as sharpening or edge detection.

There have been some other changes to the image tools as well, the other important update being a change to how filters interact when wrap is disabled. The new policy is to extend the image, which gives better results compared to the old approach. Additionally, Eso wrote a helper function to help with text rendering. As mentioned in a previous update, very complex text rendering cannot be reliably done with live HTML. As such, the helper function will now wrap it up in an image, which is stored in the document in a base 64 encoding. This functionality has also been experimentally used to generate typewriter text (please note that in this text, each of the letters is to some degree unique, this is not possible to recreate using fonts, or at the very least not easily).

In a similar vein, Eso experimented with using the new image tools to achieve an ink imperfection effect.

In both cases, you can see the stack of operations needed to achieve the effect in the code above the rendered image.

Eso has also worked on books. Random books specifically. She has encoded all 187 titles currently available for random books. This refers to the SVG encoding as it requires manually setting the "tspan" elements to properly render the titles. She has also noted that she is not happy with some of the generation results and seeks to address this soon. Random books will be split into different styles, where each style will have a more carefully curated range of possible elements used to construct the look.

This is an example of one of those books that don't look particularly good.

Next, we have the scripts. Unicode is a fascinating beast, but in practice, sometimes it just doesn't work that well. Here, we have some scripts that, either in their entirety or at least to some significant enough extent, where it's viable to use. Here are some of the scripts that may find use in the game.

Here are the scripts.

Most of them, apart from heavily connected scripts, also fully support our handwriting systems, and those that don't at least do support the writing implements.

I've spoken to Eso about how she feels and if she's recovering, and at the moment it seems that she's still in a very rough shape. The issue of not being able to get out of bed, or even when she gets out of bed, being too weak to hold an upright position came up. It's a bit unclear how things will shape up for the nearest future. Tomorrow (which is the 18th), she has another doctor visit.

Personally, as a third party to this update. I think this is a hugely impressive achievement, especially as a set of updates written in this kind of state. It's true that some of the implementations are quite rote, but it's also about how some things are brought together to be more than the sum of their parts.