Esoteric Update #273 - Seeded Randomness and Audio

Ok, so this week's update? Well, first, before we get into anything else, I would like to say that I am indeed on my break. That means I can more or less dedicate my time to the game (and my health).

Now for the update: I want to say that I've primarily been working on writing, data encoding, design, etc. But I have stumbled into a few other things along the way.

I've further improved the exception reporting to catch even more errors and do so as hopefully easily as possible. However, I've used the #if Debug preprocessor directive extensively, so this more comprehensive error checking does not make it into the end-user release. It's just a bit too heavy for that. I've fixed some bugs relating to specific API tokens and cleaned up some code here and there. It's not the central focus and nothing interesting, so I won't get too deep into these.

I have worked on audio support. The engine has always implemented some audio functionality, but initially, I gave up working on it as the chances for us to have a custom soundtrack fell through. At the time, it wasn't working correctly and would throw exceptions if an audio track was deallocated, but I brushed up the code a while ago without talking about it much. This week, I added some API tokens to round up the functionality. I might look into some audio support eventually, maybe using free resources or trying to find someone to work on it again, but I don't know. Finding help for the game is akin to pulling teeth.

Finally, I did something I had meant to try for a while now: seeded random generation. I implemented seeded randomness a while ago but never used it. For a test, we whipped up a list of everyday items and made a shopping list generator (shopping lists work great as noise-type items). The list is defined by a number of parameters (a seed number and some restrictions on the returned items), and every time the list is generated, it returns the same items. The parameters are, of course, much smaller than the data needed to define the list. As long as the generation process is either stateless or fully encapsulates the state, the approach works, and I intend to use it later for more complex things.

There's not much to show since it's nothing that interesting. Some examples are on my Discord, including a list of the shopping items. Work will just continue for the following week. I should be able to do more now that I have extra free time. Hopefully, things will work out well.