Esoteric Update #262 - Negaseptendecimal In Hebrew

Hey, I'm back, at least for the most part. Standing up and keeping my body straight is still a bit of a challenge at times. I didn't expect this to kick my ass quite as hard as it did, but I guess we can call this a scale-tipping incident.

Anyway, I've been trying to get back into development, but before we get to that, there are a few more updates about that crypto module I've been working on. Or, given what I'm about to say... I've been working on with Bear.

So, Bear kindly graced us with a considerable extension to the module, implementing a full-featured set of transposition cyphers. This includes a few simple linear transpositions, such as reversing text (yeah, not quite a cypher that will rock your socks, but it stacks well with other methods to confuse the player), two versions of a skip cypher, an alternating text cypher and linear permutation cypher. More impressively, he also implemented a full suit of box-cypher-related methods, such as the classic Caesar box, the rail fence cypher, the columnar transposition cypher and the redefence cypher. But here's the fun part: these are all ways of writing text into a box, and he then combined them with a whole suite of ways to read text from a box, making it an entire modular process which can stack these cyphers up or complicate their usage. He even went for the Myszkowski cypher, which is a particular case of the columnar transposition cypher. Still, due to the implementation specifics, it cannot play well with any other methods.

I had to clean some stuff up and ensure the interfaces match up with our library interface, but that's done now, and the whole package has been added to the game.

I've also had an oddball idea myself, only semi-related to cryptography, concerning number systems, and I did a few implementations. All of the number systems I'll mention have customisable digits (i.e. what symbols you want to use for the values), and whenever possible, they also have a customisable radix. In total, I implemented Fibonacci encoding (a radix-2 system based on Fibonacci numbers), Zeckendorf notation (another radix-2 system based on Fibonacci numbers, but the encoding is a bit different), Bijective numbers (a radix 1+, yes this is a rare case of a number system accepting a radix of 1, system for writing positive integers without the use of the 0 symbol), Balanced numbers (a way of writing integers which uses odd radii and values digits with both positive and negative values, for example, balanced nonary uses digits from -4 to 4), Factoradic numbers (a way of writing positive integers using a system where digits change radix according to subsequent factorial numbers) and nega-base numbers (a way of writing integers which uses a negative base and a radix of 2+). Fun stuff! And there's lore attached to it, too, though I'm not going to be posting lore anymore; if you want to see what the lore is, you'll need to rummage around Discord. We've also joked about negaseptendecimal in Hebrew, but please, be not afraid.

As for work on the game itself, I will fully admit I've been struggling to get back to it. At times, it's just too exhausting to work on for too long, and I feel I'm making dumb errors and forgetting simple things.

Still, I am tackling the book generator and the writing system first. The subjects I managed to go over are interwoven. I guess I should first note that I finally got around to fixing some issues with the old book generator assets, but I've also been working on a few new elements. There are burned books now and a few new elements for embossing, with more new elements to come. The big thing, however, is a codification of image pre-rendering. And that I would like to talk about a bit more.

So, you may remember it was mentioned a while ago that our writing system is too complex to be performant while working live, so we've been thinking about solving the whole issue with image pre-rendering? I fleshed out a little system that handles this in a semi-automatic way. It allows for files with render definitions to be rendered down into base64 encoded images. It has benefits like automatically checking which files must be rendered again based on when a file was last edited. Overall, it's a pretty nice system, and it gave me a chance to use that nice loading bar I made a while ago, too. But you might ask, how exactly does that mix with the book assets? Well, we're pre-rendering the burns. This had the additional benefit of letting us probe if the system holds up to good performance. I will still likely change how it works exactly, but we packed up an almost 20MB bundle of pre-rendered assets and checked that the whole thing runs smoothly in live gameplay.

Sorry, there are no images today. I'm in a bit of a hurry to get some stuff done after my doctor's appointment.

I will be working on everything I've been up to before going down for the last three weeks. I'm sorry. I really didn't want it to happen like that, but it left me unable to function to an adequate level so that I could work on the game.