Unrolling the stack
Added 2021-04-19 01:32:31 +0000 UTCJust letting you know I've spent a lot of time recently on improving the devtools to add the ability to modify the main game. This includes moving/editing/removing/adding to the main world.
In the screenshot above I've made a mod that changes Slurt's greeting from "Oh hello! Want a job?" to "Oh hello, you git! Want a job?"
Modified assets will show in blue. I'm not fully done with it yet, so don't use the mod tools on the dev branch for anything you intend to keep. But it would be helpful if some of you would go on there and try them out.
Technical info below:
When I created this game I made most of the content by hand by manually creating the library. If I wanted to create a player I'd do something like:
{name:"Player", species:"cat", assets:[{name:"speedo", slot:"lowerBody"}, {name:"gold", amount:3}]...}
As you can see, this created nested objects automatically. However, this also makes it overly complex to modify. Once the game started growing, I exported the game and turned it into a "root mod" that's loaded before any other mods. Once I added the new modtools, the database would instead store lists of each asset type with an ID tied to it:
players: [{name:"Player", species:"cat", assets:["speedo001", "3gold"]}...]
assets: [{label:"speedo001", name:"speedo", slot:"lowerBody"}, {label:"3gold",name:"gold", amount:3}]
So when the player is loaded, assets are fetched by label from the library.
The problem is that much of the old nesting still lives in the root mod, so I need to unroll these into the asset database. And that's a ton of nesting that needs to be worked out.
That's what I'll be working on this week. Join the discord if you wanna chat while I work!
