Progress Report (February)

Hey folks.

I feel utterly drained right now. February was a mentally taxing month for me. It all started with me trying to work out a “small fix” for the way the UI got instantiated, appeared, and then got destroyed, as well as affected the transparency of some of the UI elements. I had been working on that “small fix” for two whole weeks. After those weeks spent in vain, I decided to revisit the whole logic behind that class, and in just two/three-ish days I completely reworked the system to an adequately serviceable state. Needless to say, I regret having spent so much time on a supposed fix that wouldn’t even remedy the core problems of the whole thing.

So, after that, I had only about two weeks left until the end of the month. Working on the dialogue mode was pointless, because there was no guarantee I’d finish the entire system rework in that small amount of time, and I didn’t want to split the reworking process into multiple stages. Besides, I found a few areas that needed further polish, so I chose to focus on those instead.

Roughly what I did is as follows:

- Almost completely transferred the dialogue mode UI, except for stand-ins for the character sprites. I probably could spend some minimal time to add those as well, but when I was about to begin, I suddenly realized that I needed to fix the instantiation/destruction logic, and the rest is history. I never got back to the dialogue mode UI since then;

- Reworked the aforementioned logic. It was quite inflexible before, which is why I needed a fix in the first place (I was trying to find work-around ways to make the logic work the way I wanted, and failed at that). At least now it’s more developer-friendly, though most devs would probably argue that I don’t even need this system anyway. They would probably be right, but I’m going in that direction nevertheless;

- With the logic reworked, I could properly specify when the UI elements needed to become transparent or invisible altogether, based on the state of the panels/windows/game modes. To alleviate enforcing the changes, I decided to make all of those inherit from the same base class, which now sounds quite logical, but there was literally no need to have those UI elements be connected in any capacity before;

- Turned foraging and navigation windows into separate game modes. It just dawned on me that it would be frustrating for the player to look around the map, then accidentally switch to a different window and get forcibly returned to the player party as a consequence. Making the navigation window a game mode prevents that. Foraging window was simply too similar to navigation window in its design, so I decided to change its role, too;

- Reworked the logic for health/stamina fill bars. They should now work better in a wider variety of situations, most of which won’t even be accessible by normal means, like randomly adding/subtracting the value in extra quick succession. Which begs the question, why would I even need to spend precious time on that. I don’t have an answer. I just wanted to ensure that the bars worked better than they had;

- Fixed some issues with the music player, plus addressed the oversight of not making the buttons not interactable in case the current music track list had less than two tracks or was empty;

- It’s a given that I needed to introduce a way to switch between game modes via the staring tile and through action buttons that appear when any game mode is activated. The dialogue mode has only the half-imported UI, the exchange mode is simply a placeholder;

- Removed all OnPointerEnter and OnPointerExit calls. They keep failing me, which leads to bugs. I started tracking gameObjects under the pointer in Update, granted the position of the mouse changes or previously stored gameObjects become null. I know it’s not ideal, but the game is text-based, with only the UI rendering. I’m sure it shouldn’t be THAT bad for computations;

- Made a gazillion small changes to various parts of the code to ensure the above worked and didn’t break anything by accident;

- Oh, right. I added the change scale and position on hover effect to not just the default UI panels but also to windows and game modes. I did it, like, yesterday. It’s experimental. If it doesn’t look and play well, I’ll remove it. It’ll only take a couple of minutes to browse through prefabs and remove the script.

I WILL WORK ON THE DIALOGUE MODE IN MARCH I SWEAR, OKAY BYE.