Game thing progress #2

Since the last post, some more of the story text got ported to a format that the game understands. The entire first day is now there, and, maybe, it will stay there as it is, unless i decide to change the beginning details again. This day includes a feature that I implemented a long time ago but didn't have any chance to use, which is showing answers to questions depending on some state. This state is actually determined from a lua script in the story file. Here's how one of them looks like:

return not TerminalModule.state_variables.narrator_house.hub.living_room

This "script" is put into the "condition" part of the reply and the reply is therefore only shown if, in this particular case, the living room has not been seen yet. I'm thinking about maybe simplifying hubs like these in some way, but I'm not sure about it yet.

Another thing that's been done is that for the "walking" part of the game, all the components for the entities and the assets to use are now written out in a TOML file (because that's a simple format and there's a native parser for lua), and are loaded from that file instead of being hard-coded. Here's how that file look like right now:

[assets.sprites]
computer_room = "resources/sprites/room/room.png"
button = "resources/sprites/room/button/button.png"
mainchar = "resources/sprites/mainchar/mainchar.png"

[assets.sounds]
footstep = "resources/sounds/footstep.ogg"

# Background

[entities.background.drawable_sprite]
sprite_asset = "computer_room"
z = 0

# Button

[entities.button.drawable_sprite]
sprite_asset = "button"
z = 1
position = [1020, 672]

[entities.button.animation]
sheet = "resources/sprites/room/button/"
playing = false
playable = false

[entities.button.button]
initial_state = "disabled"
state_map = { disabled = 1, enabled = 2 }
callback_name = "switch_to_terminal"

# Player

[entities.player.drawable_sprite]
sprite_asset = "mainchar"
z = 2
position = [420, 820]
origin = [44, 176]

[entities.player.animation]
sheet = "resources/sprites/mainchar/"

[entities.player.player_movement]
footstep_sound_asset = "footstep"

All of the assets are loaded and stored first, and then components reference them by name. At component creation time, references to assets are taken from the storage and put into the components. This allows them to never be GCd, which is a good thing since dependencies between values passed from C++ like textures are not tracked by the lua refcounter.

Another change worth noting is porting most of the code to moonscript, because it's quite a bit better as a language (except maybe the indentation syntax, the features are nice). That was a pain to set up, because i've always been linking lua statically to my executable, but lua modules expect that the dynamic symbols of the lua library can be looked up. Didn't know about that for a while, but when i figured that out, it was as easy as adding -Wl,--export-dynamic to the linker arguments to expose those statically linked library symbols to the modules. After that there was a bit of a fight with luarocks, that ended up in moving the modules from build.modules to build.install.lua, as it was trying to build .moon files as if they were C sources. For some reason, sources in install don't have that problem.

So, that's what I was up to in the last few days, I'm hoping to maybe continue rewriting things in moonscript and then work on the second room in the walking part of the game.

Thank you for reading my blog post :)