Esoteric Update #275 - Fuzzy Logic Too Chunky, Like A Cat

I'm sorry for the late update. Yesterday, I ended up having a bit of an unpleasant episode, and I chose to refrain from making an update due to some concerns about what I might write and how I might phrase it.

I ended up doing some manic programming instead because I figured that the WebBrowser component we use for display has to allow for custom protocol extensions, and this was true to some extent, but unfortunately, it wasn't what I was looking for. Anyway, I spent some hours bashing my head against Microsoft's documentation, Stack Overflow, and Chat-GPT, spinning my wheels in place. At this point, I'm afraid that I not only did not manage to do what I set out to, but it might not be possible.

So anyway, update time, right?

Last week, I said I needed a bit of a break from writing because I was feeling burnout set in. So for the first two days that's what I did. I think I can split this into a few separate tasks, so let's go over them in a not necessarily chronological order.

The engine features a number of loop shorthands, and most require an iterator variable to be declared somewhere beforehand. I've changed this so that the loop can now create and destroy an iterator if the auto keyword is used. It's nothing big but a nice QoL improvement for me as the primary person coding.

I've also decided to split Eliza off as a separate library instead of functioning as a direct extension of the game state. This definitely makes more sense, and it lets me ensure save/load persistence for the currently loaded instance of Eliza. In the process, I reviewed all the libraries and ensured none of them threw any superficial errors when handling events.

Finally, for this part of the update, I was also sketching up a possible API extension for fuzzy logic (a.k.a. continual value logic) handling, but I got cold feet about it. The issue isn't coding for fuzzy logic; it's not that complicated. Really, I wouldn't even write it myself when there are perfectly good open licence libraries to handle it. The issue lies with the breadth of the topic, the number of different nuances, variants and options that crop up everywhere and that I just couldn't figure out a concise API representation for it. I'm not sure if I will get back to this some other time or not; at the very least for the moment I'm putting it aside.

After finishing the above, I sat down and started writing more. The writing was still going into environmental detail, but it's coming along nicely. The texts are currently divided into eight different "sets", and seven of those sets are finished, while the 8th is about 90% done. I just don't want to finish the remaining 10% now, which is fine; I don't need it immediately. Next week, I'll be finishing some systems I started working on in the past, probably starting with finishing up the system that places items in containers. I'll also need to do some tagged item lists to test it properly.

Anyway, while filling out those item sets, I also handled some medicine-related texts, which led me to ask about potential mechanics people would like to see regarding such items. We do have some ideas regarding this already planned out (for a long time, actually), but I wanted to see if there will be any ideas we've not thought of. And there was one idea from a person helping on the game (Bear, you might remember him from some posts here, I guess) regarding a difficulty mode of sorts, where the character you play as suffers from a chronic medical condition that has to be medicated periodically or cause narrative and systemic problems for you. It is an idea, but regardless of how that goes, I won't be the person implementing it.

Right, that would be all for today; I'm going to return to slowly cooking in the sweltering, moist heat drowning this area of the world right now.