QoL for Earth (Patreon)

Ack, what a week! October was supposed to be New Content Full Speed Ahead month, complete with amazing progress on a bunch of brand new stuff, but a massive wrench got thrown into the works in the form of me having to take care of family with covid, making everything just just... Not Good xD

I'm good, but all the other things to take care of around here mean I've barely had any time to even sit in front of my computer, much less actually get serious work done, so unfortunately this week was almost a total bust :/

(It's also the reason I had to skip streaming last week, and likely again this week.)

We'll have to see how long this period lasts...

For Earth!

In the few hours available this week I did however manage to at least crank out one new feature. Since I was just about to add a new cave map, I finally moved the "impossible to visually differentiate cave walls from cave earth in ASCII mode" issue to the very front of the todo list, determined to finally find a solution. I've looked into it multiple times before, and tested several approaches, but none of the options were really promising, so it seemed like a real solution would require even more extreme measures...

(I moved it to the top because the very next thing I was about to work on is adding a new cave map, and it really felt like the right time to resolve that longstanding issue!)

Certainly we want to get rid of the fact that it's often optimal/desirable to quickly hit F2 while in ASCII mode to switch over to tiles and confirm whether or not certain cells are actually earth or wall...

Color differences can't really serve their normal purpose in this regard due to the desired darker scheme of cave walls--there's simply not enough color space to make them readily distinguishable without ruining the style. Among my considerations I also thought about simply having only earth in caves, rather than separate wall cells, but decided against that for other design reasons...

So the extreme measure I came up with to test was to give earth its own background color, albeit a dark one.

This required a fair bit of prototyping prior to implementation.

For one it has the potential to be a pretty big aesthetic change. While you generally won't see earth when just exploring the world normally, since it's pretty much all concealed behind walls, as we all know blowing stuff up and/or digging new passages is a common Cogmind pastime :)

Then on the architecture side it would need to be compatible with a lot of other interface and data systems, and after confirming it would theoretically work I had to update a bunch of things to support it--a decade of assuming all cells have the same solid black background will do that to ya xD

And now it's done! I think it's turned out okay so far (not sure if I missed anything that still needs to be addressed, but a general survey examined and addressed most issues). So let's see this nice QoL feature in action...

The main use case that led to it all, ASCII in caves:

Having a "background" color in a terminal sense is clearly going to be much more impactful for ASCII, which includes a lot of black compared to tiles, but even the latter benefits somewhat as well. See here some caves in tiles mode, where even behind walls it's easier to spot areas with more wall (denoting a potentially useful dig target) instead of earth:

In terms of aesthetic changes, this also impacts both terrain intel as well as previously seen earth cells, both of which you can see in this Materials screenshot:

Here's a more involved composite example showing various intel and destruction in a Factory map, exposing more earth:

Another side effect of this change is that you'll also much more easily notice some cave areas featuring earth out in the open, which wasn't so easy to see before. I imagine many players probably haven't even realized it, but some "spottier" cave areas were supposed to represent partial cave-ins, or previous cave-ins that had since been cleared out with some earth remaining (sometimes with heavily damaged broken bots nearby).

So there you have it, a seemingly little new tweak with not-so-little aesthetic and QoL implications before moving on to more meat! Mmm, meat...