Esoteric Update #311 - Pricing The Item List

Update time. And I do have a few things to say, as it was a pretty productive week. Just a shame I ended up being torn across several different topics.

So firstly, the item update. It's going fine. I'm in the annoying phase now, where I need to estimate prices (in pounds) for the various clothing items in the game. That's unfortunately several hundred items. It'll take me a day or two to get through it.

For the character creator update... I have made a few critical changes in the works, but I'll discuss them in more depth later. I've decided to go for a more integrated method of character building where things interact a bit across the different stages. Due to this, there will be more restrictions, but nothing major. Again, I'll explain later.

I've also been working on the UI, as some things emerged that required attention. Specifically, some interactions between different UI elements and between JS and CSS were not playing nicely. There were also some issues isolated to CSS that I had to fix. In the process, I've also gotten to know CSS Grid and found it very useful; it's essentially a table with more options while being less verbose.

While redoing the settings UI, I've been trying to address the tooltips, as we had cases where people told us that it's sometimes unclear what the options do. I've made an effort to clarify that.

(I think the UI also, in general, looks a lot better.)

Furthermore, I've been working on the efficiency of some operations, basically leveraging the browser's caching for a bunch of optimisations for asset retrieval and managed to not only sort out regular caching (for the edata schema) but I also introduced a new schema that results in generated images (from the draw API) being cached. This will make a difference for document draw time, especially for the more complicated ones and on repeated page visits.

And for a final point... I've encountered a rather peculiar case of deadlock earlier this week. After struggling with it, I've concluded that there is an irreconcilable conflict between my scripting language and WebView2... or rather, there was. I couldn't fix it, but I reconsidered a few things and concluded that I can change things so they still work. It's a loss of functionality, but I could at least mitigate it. (Well ok, I could fix it but it would require some pretty hefty thread based operations and restructuring my whole engine in a way I don't want to deal with right now - this is already a good deal of problems that are making me reconsider my choices, or at least feel bitter about them.)