Esoteric Update #315 - Character Templates And Assorted Regular Expressions

This last week proved to be unexpectedly hectic and stressful between some government-related business and finishing my job departure. So, I did the best I could and focused on some programming tasks I had lined up and writing.

The descriptions here will be pretty curt because, you know... it's technical details?

Firstly, the game now has a character templating system that can read a whole character from a template file and resolve it along the way. That's useful for many things, especially since we're working on better integrating randomly generated characters with the game's many systems.

Secondly, I made some general touch-ups to how the engine handles variables, simplified some things, mostly, but also added variable deference when the engine is asked for a variable from a named scope but explicitly no scope name is provided. I know this might sound strange, but it has been boilerplated into many systems before, and now it'll just work on its own.

Thirdly, as some people reading this might know, regular expressions (a.k.a. RegEx) have many dialects. Because of the engine's technical construction, we had access to the JS and C# versions of RegEx, which are... not compatible. Anyway, a bunch of things happened, and now we just use C#'s version for everything. I also have some pre-baked regular expressions important to various things in the character creator.

And yeah, I wrote a fair bit. It's not something I talk about often, but the negative reaction to my writing has, at one point, got me to stop writing. Not because I didn't want to, but because I couldn't write anything I wouldn't instantly hate. I'm trying to work through that, and it seems to bear some fruit now.

I know it's a short update, but I am exhausted from the weather again and I don't think the details matter that much this time.