Esoteric Update #269 - Almost Let Out The Magic Smoke

Sorry for the late update; I had some health issues on Sunday and Monday that had to be urgently addressed.

Anyway, there's another problem, though I did manage to get around it. During the last update, I mentioned that my PC was not okay, but I thought I could continue working on the game using it. It turned out I was wrong. Since Monday, I have not had access to my main dev station and had to change course somewhat. The issue is fixed now.

Anyway, I decided to focus on writing due to a lack of access to my tools. I managed to pump out around 10k words, mostly game-usable text and a third related to the design document. We now have a functional skeleton (mechanical) for dealing with ghosts, set very firmly in the lore.

I also tackled some technical issues, but not to the extent I planned, assuming access to all my tools. Firstly, I managed to improve the output and efficiency of the graph solver massively. This was done by observing the process in motion, fine-tuning the parameters, and implementing some different approaches to processing the notes. A version of this animated graph solver can be downloaded from our Discord if anyone would like to see what it does. The version I have is still more advanced and well-tuned. I've also managed to test it (successfully) with bigger graphs, up to 128 nodes, which is a lot more than 32, especially since the cost to calculate the solution grows faster than linearly.

It's not perfect, but it doesn't have to be.

Now, the second thing has been bothering me for a while and has to do with document rendering. Observe:

I amplified the shadowing for this bit of paper so it's visible - there are striations in the height map that emerge as a result of scaling the height map. These are only visible under zoom, but I didn't like the idea that they are at all visible under any circumstances, so I experimented with some alterations to the rendering to get rid of them. Unfortunately, this is an expected behaviour of height maps. Normal maps behave much better but I don't exactly have access to those. Here's how it looks after corrections:

They are still slightly visible, but much less than before. Under normal conditions (without this kind of ridiculous amplification), you can no longer see them at all.

Anyway, since I have access to my computer again, I can get back to the adventure now.