Esoteric Update #292 - Keys And Snakes And Charts, Oh My

This is a bit of a late update, I know, but I struggled with a migraine for most of yesterday, and when it went away, I found myself digging in some writing for the game that just wasn't working or coming together up until it did.

So anyway, update time, and I broadly have three things to discuss.

Firstly, there were issues with the key texts; when I put everything together, the texts for the keys just didn't come together to produce descriptions that read well. I eventually ended up spending a significant amount of time re-writing them and managed to finally get them into a workable state. It's not perfect, but I think it's acceptable.

This closes another part of the test adventure construction; the next thing that's up is the room descriptions. Basically, the ambient narration that tells you what you see as you move through the map. I've wrestled with this before, but I think I now have the right approach to make it work well. We'll see how it goes. Maybe I'll prove myself wrong.

Secondly, we wrote a library extension for the engine that allows you to code in Python... not exactly the kind of language I enjoy using, but the idea didn't come from me. Bear wrote most of it, and I just helped polish it up and solve a rather interesting programming issue. Anyway, regardless of my own interest in using it, this is supposed to be an open engine; it seems that Bear had reasons to write the library, and I'm not going to get in the way of what people want to do. Additionally, seeing some of his solutions to interoperability, I think I can use this code to improve the engine in other spots.

This library is built on IronPython 2.7.12 and supports loading in modules, running arbitrary code and passing variables and values in and out of Python in several different ways. It's a rather complete package, but I would like to build in some system for automatically storing and retrieving data in a save file, much like what the JavaScript library does. So we'll poke at it sometime in the future; it should be possible to implement this using some good old pickle. But anyway, if you want to use some list comprehension or get confused about the type of a given variable, that's now possible!

Finally, I did something I was ruminating about doing for a while now, maybe due to stuffing my nose into Excel to verify some models I've been working on for the game (yeah, I have absolutely not talked about this, and I don't know when I will, I'm still not happy with it nor sure if it's even going in the right direction as far as the idea goes).

Right, getting off track here... charts! We have charts! After the radar chart and the candlestick chart approximation, both of which are used in the game right now (and after I made the radar chart much more customisable, so it can be used outside its original purpose), I bring you... line charts, bar charts, bubble charts and scatter charts... all as a single bit of code. That means it can be used to generate mixed charts. Here, have some examples:

Originally, I mostly just wanted to do line and scatter charts for the sake of... well, two things. On the one hand, I wanted to be able to put some charts into documents you find in-game. Some specific lore books call for this, having data that would be much more digestible if it were represented graphically. On the other hand, I also want to be able to visualise data within the game, both for debugging and for the player's information. And for the most part, this is pretty successful at offering tools for just that. The one thing I might want to revisit here are pie charts. But I won't immediately get to that; I'll let this rest for a bit and work on other things. Also, I will just say this: we take a lot for granted with the ability of some software to draw charts, but there are many weird things here that are just... difficult. Especially if you want to automate them.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure how much I'll be able to do over the next week, as I'll be out of town for much of it. Leaving today after work...