Esoteric Update #313 - Assorted Technicals, Goo

Ok, time for an update~

Let's start with the important thing: the pricing list. I mentioned before turning the list (well, it's not really a list; it's a spreadsheet) over to another person for verification. I got it back now, with some minor corrections I agreed to and a small point of contention about how the pricing works with the fur items. Essentially, I intended to (unrealistically, I admit) make the type of fur an item is made of irrelevant to the price. Still, Bear says that if we want realism, this is a place where that matters. I'm unsure what to do with it now, as I have been working on other stuff. Regardless, if things don't go too badly at work this week, I should resolve this before the next update, however we decide to proceed.

I should note that I am closing my relationship with my workplace to retire. It's going fairly smoothly, but there is a lot to do, and the sooner I finish it, the sooner I leave. So, there might be points in the next few weeks when I am somewhat overwhelmed with work — just a heads up.

Now for other things!

Item descriptions pose a bit of a challenge to screen resolution. Even in the old game version, before we started playing with wrappers, some descriptions stretched the space available for them pretty hard. To help with this, I implemented the ability to view a tooltip's content as a modal. There's no need to do this most of the time, but I decided to make it a universal thing so it automatically works for all tooltips. There will be ones where it matters, though.

Bear has also asked me to help design and implement something into the engine that isn't related to this game but might be related to something else. I'll let him talk about it when he feels like it. Still, I will briefly discuss the feature: a simple stenography that embeds text into an image with a 1 byte per pixel density using an adapted method targetting the least significant bits. This allows the engine to produce pictures with embedded content that can be read elsewhere. A 200x200 stamp can hold almost 40KB of text data. The intended use is an interchange format that can be used through Discord and is humanly readable as an image.

Next up, I've finally taken the plunge into the slightly confusing realm of SVG filters in CSS. Because yeah, apparently, you can snag an SVG filter by ID using a CSS definition, and it works. I thought it might be some new way to get around the whole <foreignObject> issue, but as far as I can see, it can handle only 50% of what I need, and unfortunately, if it can't handle 100%, it doesn't fix the issue. I'm still glad to know about it, and I played around a little bit with it, making a little goo toy (it's on Discord if you want to snag it to see). It might be helpful at some later time; it just isn't right now. Well, no, actually I think this allows me to apply domain distortions to HTML, a most interesting proposition!

(Some colourful elements — with the white one following the mouse — smoothly merge, with some colour mixing.)

I've also had a whole adventure with something called Faker... or should I say Bogus at this point? Allow me to elaborate. I found a C# library for generating bulk random data called Bogus; some features caught my attention, like rules of name and address generation. Unfortunately, it did not expose the data like I wanted, but fortunately, it turned out to be a port of Faker, which is written in TypeScript and has all the data properly exposed for reading. Honestly, I'm still conflicted about what to do with it because there are still a few things about it that seem more of a problem than a benefit. I'll get back to it. For the moment, it's enough that I can read the data from it if I need it.

I've also done some minor coding and UI work, fixed a major bug stemming from WV2's quite honestly nonsensical design, and did some interesting design work. I'm already swinging the new item format to help automatically generate store item lists (this will further fix commerce issues from the original version). Finally, I'm redesigning the stipulation system to encompass a few additional aspects of the game so that it can become a more effective way of expressing when the player character can take some actions (i.e., "to open the door, you must have a free hand", this might not seem important, it is).

Next week should be mostly free so I'll try to finish up the pricing and begin assembling the new item definitions.