Progress Report 11/10/2023 (Patreon)

Hello again, everyone! Here's what I got done this week:

• Made the individual/heterochromia colors separate from the base colors again (undid a lot of progress from last week)
• Fixed an issue in which the checkbox colors wouldn't save/load if they weren't currently visible
• Fixed an issue in which the ears would revert back to the default skin color on load
• Updated the "Ear Color" and "Lip color" UI so that the scrolling stays in place when their visibilities are toggled on and off
• Updated the save system; if an item is removed from a category, your custom colors are preserved and the sprite reverts to default

Yep! That's right! It's... definitely progress! And it's, uh... going!

Okay, trust me, I know how boring these last couple of progress reports have been. @_@  It's a necessary evil, though -- one I have to tackle sooner or later. And I happen to be the type who likes to eat my veggies before the main course. Not that there's anything wrong with veggies, but-... ah, never mind.

On to the details!

So first thing's first: I undid a lot of the progress that I made last week regarding making the individual colors match the base colors when clicking the individual nail or heterochromia checkboxes. I got it working about 70%, and that 70% showed me that implementation would be somewhat confusing from the player's perspective. To someone who doesn't understand what's going on under the hood, it would have looked like the individual colors were changing almost at random, and therefore seem unintended. So, I decided to scrap the idea and embrace the old system.

In other words, the individual colors and the base colors are once again entirely separate from each other, neither influencing the other. Ah, that was so much easier to explain than that monstrosity I was trying to build!

Next up, still looking at those pesky individual/base colors, I noticed that they weren't saving/loading properly if they weren't visible. So, if you had a bunch of heterochromia colors set, but then saved the outfit with non-heterochromia eyes, those heterochromia colors would be lost. With the next update, that won't be an issue anymore! However, I am still trying to work out this same issue with secondary colors; if you save your outfit with a sprite that doesn't have a secondary color, any custom secondary color you have for that category will reset to default. Still working that one out...

Let's see... I fixed the ear color problem... fixed a minor issue with the Ear Color and Lip Color UI pushing the scroll bar...

Ah! This is a big one! Sorta!

In the event that I remove an item from a category (say I move the "Shocked" eyes from the "Eyes" category to the "Extras" category) and then update the game with that change, the version that you guys currently have would crash and your outfit save likely unsalvageable if you had that specific item included on your current outfit.

Fortunately, I've updated the save system so that this crash doesn't happen! If your outfit includes an item that has since been moved/removed, it will now return to the default sprite in that item's category while preserving the colors that you had on it.

I don't anticipate that I'll be doing much moving around with the sprites, but it's nice to have this so that I don't need to be afraid to make changes if I need to. ^_^

I am still working on making this work with the "Extras" category. It works a bit differently than the rest of the categories, so it requires a different kind of finagling.

So, I've got exactly eight tasks left to do on this maintenance! There are a couple of big ones left as mentioned above, but the rest are relatively small. Hopefully no more issues pop up as I fix them. Fingers crossed!

Anyhoo, I'm going cross-eyed from staring at this code for so long, so I'm gonna go focus my eyes on a Taco Bell meal for a while. And then I'll eat the Taco Bell meal. And then I'll be sad because I don't have a Taco Bell meal to look at anymore. I'll see you guys again next week!