So, KUVA. My sideproject of a sideproject. Or something like that.
So, this is a bit of project. Never done anything like this. What I am trying to do here is to simulate a person, or a personality. There's no dialogue, basically I use a REPL and "why" which then tells me what it feels and why. Basically it's a "person" shaped thing that I can interact with limited activities, and it changes mood, and responds to things. Reponses to which change the "person".
It's very extensive with a lot of experimentation, and being confused. Had to read about Psi Theory, OCC Appraisal, ALMA Mood model, and what else crazy bullshit that psychologists come up with, in addition to programmers and philosophers. It's a never-ending rabbit-hole that I have no idea how to escape.
Anyway, right now I have three prototypes, none are anywhere near done. They all share rough idea of there being different layers that change in different speds. Fast emotions leak into slower moods, which then even slower beliefs and so forth.
Currently I tried three ways to approach this same architecture, more or less:
I did everything by hand, special rule after special rule. It worked, but goddamn that's a lot of code with no universal function to be seen. First proto, off to the trash.
Basically everything is data now, instead of code, and it all comes down to the "what will this bring me?" question as the central tenent of the personality construct.
Concerns. The same as second, but now the central tenent is what it cares about rather than what it gets out of things.
Not sure if I'll consider this third version the final version... but it is the furthest along, if that's worth anything.
I still would need to tackle the idea how to communicate with this "person"... in a game. It'd make for an interesting dating simulator, since there's no way I can script anything at all for this. They are who they are. Which is somewhat randomly generated per playthrough.
We'll see how this idea progresses. Even if I get this working and I crack the dynamic dialogue system as well... then we'd still be at most 1/3rd way through. It would still need actual game around it. Le sigh.
So, this website is getting a new look. Right now this post is not going to be published... at least not right away. I'm also going to return the ability (to me) to publish straight to Bluesky as well. Also, yes, there was again another riot of heatmap stuff... I'll come back to that and explain it later. It's way too late in the evening to get into that right now.
So, finally the storm of Basecamp has abated. Most of the design work is done... for now? Maybe? I'll start working on some Rust code now. We'll see how it goes, and if Basecamp will be hit again a lot. Should be a lot more sane number of changes rather what the last few weeks were like. So much churn. Well... back to work.
Okay, the [Location] system as I call it in my head is now simplified. I killed bunch of dead code. How it works now is how it should have done from the start... but for historical reasons (too complicated to explain here) I had much more convoluted way of displaying a location. What this means is that when you go into a Room, that is a capital letter "Room". When you click on, let's say the shower, and you see a dialogue panel style view of the shower -- that is a "Location".
Now, technically speaking, there is almost no difference between a normal dialogue panel during story beats, and the view of the Location. Before, those two were completely separate and different things, although using same graphics. Architecturally, this makes making Rooms and adding Locations much easier as I don't have to juggle basically pointless differentiation between a dialogue panel and a location panel. Now I just create a dialogue panel, add interactive areas as needed, and tell Room that this spot opens this Location -- and it's done.
So, this is kind of homepage related? I have a new server (with no domain pointed at it) and I moved this "blog" there. I'll be moving the other stuff here eventually, but for now it's only this lone static HTML file here.
Finally. This is working again. Well, technically, it is working better than ever before. For the technically minded: There's now a very ... uh, "XGH" style approach to making a TUI application that I use via SSH to write and do everything. So, yeah. Trust me, this is better than the old way, or the first way.