Esoteric Update #280 - The Case Of The Phantom Money

It's the middle of the night, but I can't sleep, so let's get this update done. As I've mentioned on Discord, I was at the doctor's yesterday for an emergency; hence, the update is a day late.

Overall, I'd say that the last week went really well despite my health issues. It's just that I didn't get to work on what I wanted because I ended up running into a technological debt wall, and I needed to break that down to continue working on the adventure implementation. So, let's break this update up into two parts. First, we'll see what got done and then talk about this debt issue, where it came from, and what got done with it.

Of course, there was a little bit of writing. It's nothing major, but it's a few thousand words of progress. Secondly, I did some bug fixing here and there (in particular, the Glimpse mechanic ended up having some situations where it left a file around that should have been deleted. I'm looking at the Glimpse mechanic to remove that file in general, but any issues it has now would translate to the new version, just in a different form. Some other bugs were also fixed, but I want to bring this one to your attention since it will be relevant again later. I did some extensions to the formal grammar language we use, which are quickly shown below. These are operations we used to previously boilerplate using API tokens but it's no longer needed.

I also did some good work on the adventure itself. It's now moved to its own "location" and uses a new way of setting up data, utilising the loading screen. There's a graph of the location now, which includes movement, sight, and sound propagation. This is a slight departure from the original version of the graph, as it conceptualises moving from point to point using distance now, not time. And, of course, it has additional data to help with senses. Some interesting implications are bundled up here, and I might take some time to discuss it. There is still a lot to be done; I'm heading towards implementing movement and visual perception for the PC (which also includes fog of war, something I'm ashamed to say I didn't think about before but absolutely matters for these systems). Unfortunately, I had to take care of the tech debt first, so I had to put this down for the moment.

Now, what about this tech debt? Well, to make some of the features the adventure demands possible, I had to work with some of the older code in the game and a lot of that code was written to just "work for the moment", in particular, because a lot of it was written at the point where I was very pressured to start putting out content, even though the game's mechanics weren't ready for it. Yeah, go figure how that turned out. I'm not going to list everything, but here are some things that I feel are notable:

• You cannot open multiple instances of the game (this could lead to crashes);
• The game correctly recognises that you might not have your laptop/phone in your inventory if you try to shortcut into those views;
• The game correctly calculates the amount of money in your inventory, in particular when you might not have your debit card or wallet with you;

I've also shifted the whole code to use TextReader/TextWriter instead of StreamReader/StreamWriter because, as it turns out, that makes some things impossible — in particular, writing the game's whole memory into the game's memory. This is necessary to eliminate the file associated with Glimpse, which would result in a much more stable version of the whole mechanic.