Esoteric Update #291 - All Keys To All Doors

Well, it's time for an update, though I find myself in a bit of an awkward position, with a bunch of things started and half-finished. But I'll try to review what I'm working on.

Firstly, progress happened with the key generation. Right now, I'm still missing some writing for some specific variants, but it's already quite a lot.

Something I've not wanted to mention before is that this was done with someone's help. Over the last few weeks, I spent a lot of time talking about modular writing with them, and now it's starting to bear some fruit. There's also something I'm interested in trying but have no clear idea as to how I want to do it: handwritten text generation for fobs containing those paper slips. The idea here is that perhaps we'd like to link the handwriting style seen on the fobs to the handwriting styles of characters who wrote on the slips. It's a bit of a silly idea, but then it's not out of the scope of things we've done before, isn't it?

Anyway, the second thing we've worked on are the old NPC conversations. I've mentioned encoding new entries recently, and I also have a hundred additional conversations ready for editing, but we've also been looking into the generation process itself. I got some help with extending the dictionaries used by the system, and we're working on some more commentary/narration to interject into the texts. This is one more task that was done with some help. Now, if you've never seen this before, it looks like this:

This is the same exchange generated in different ways. We see randomised characters participating in the conversation, including randomised appearances and idiolects. However, the narration is still limited to introductions and situations where a character's tone changes. That is part of what we want to change. The second part is that I have some additional work to do on the idiolects (b.t.w. these are the same filters the PC uses).

I've also encountered a rather persistently annoying formatting bug here; I only managed to fix it today in the early morning hours. It was a typo, of course (you may insert pained programmer noises here, if you wish).

It wasn't the only problem I've fixed, as I've also noticed a minor issue with how the radar chart was drawn, a formatting issue once more. So, I fixed that, and I've been looking into making a few more chart drawing functions so that we can put some charts in books. I've set this idea aside for the moment, as the other two topics above interested me much more.