Esoteric Update #263 - My Precious...

Ugh... I am so full of egg... sweet fucking Mithras on a chocolate pogo-bunny... hnnnngh...

Alright, let's see... This week, we're addressing some of the points from post #260. I also have some additional comments related to the document system.

So, let's go over the points from that previous post first.

• The location has been transformed into a graph representation with location attributes. This tells the game not only where things are relative to each other and how to move between them, but also to assign attributes and further data to the location, such as from where you can hear or see things.

This turned out to be a bit of a bigger problem than I had expected, but I likely have the solution now. The challenge here comes down to populating the locations with items. A process which ends up being very intricate because we have a lot of tiny decorative items which serve to add flavour to the area. The main problem is that assigning all these items manually isn't feasible. Especially as the game grows and the items diversify. So I had to design a "loot table" system, let's call it. A system that can automatically populate an area with items but also factors such things as manually adding essential items to specific places and recursively filling containers, basically. Anyway, while it might need some changes still, it likely works fine.

• She has began working on a door system, but before she could finish it got hung up on figuring out doors that require different ways of opening them from two sides. Imaging if a door is locked with a padlock, that padlock can only be accessed from one side. 

This, on the other hand, just ended up being an unfortunate mess, and I deleted the work I've done so far. The whole approach requires a re-evaluation. That's all I have to say for the moment. The system didn't play well with what we wanted to do with it, meaning that since we knew what we needed for future gameplay segments. If we went with this, we'd be faced with the unfortunate future of either having to redesign already planned adventures or the system anyway. And that sucks either way.

It's not the padlocks, by the way. It's more so about the interactions between many ways of closing a door, concepts like locking a door behind you, when and how you can lock a door, and those cases. It's possible we need to move away from treating doors as a special case of a container since they need to be able to do more than our containers.

• Finally, the handwriting system (v2, I think) has been completed, however only one of the several characters whose writing you will be reading over the course of the adventure has a defined writing style file.

So, a while back, we noted that the handwriting filters were not performant when running live in HTML, and as such, we're switching to a system of pre-rendering the handwriting into base64 encoded images. This absolutely is the way to go, but we've made some pretty important improvements to this.

In essence, we now have a tool that pre-renders specific defined templates that can be read by books (or whatever else needs it) to get the images. The tool handles things like detecting template changes, rendering, and saving the output images. We mentioned this in the last update but didn't really show how it was used.

So, have one of these burned books:

When this initially dropped, I noted that the system was performant when running in cache mode (which is how the game should be played). Since then, I have optimised how it works, and now it runs fine without caching being enabled. Also, the text rendering has a hook to directly interface with this system, meaning you have to just tell it what you want to render, and it will render it.

But wait, there's more!

I've also worked on the HTML renderer itself, and while it was a bit of a problem, I eventually managed to get the renderer to adjust the output image size to the render content.

This is something I'm very positive about overall.

Anyway, there's some other stuff I should mention regarding the documents. Apart from just the burns, I worked on improving the rendering of covers overall and on integrating new assets into the system. Jewels, improved control over corner braces, and new wrap-around borders ensued:

This was also a chance to sit down and fix some very, very long-term issues with the document assets and the document extension modules.

Oh, we also have some new mock flyers, but I don't think that's interesting enough to show off. I also modified how libraries work (as in code libraries extending the engine) so that now they have hooks for events (on game launch, on new game, on save, on load), which can be used to perform various manipulations on data held by the libraries, such as saving and recreating internal data states.

I know the update isn't particularly impressive, but I spent part of the last week resting and spending time with my family. I'm getting back to it. I am still very weak from the time I spent semi-hospitalised.