Portal 2 and Refactoring (alpha 4)

I planned to write a post earlier this week. Then Portal 2 happened and I was forced to play through that once or twice. It's incredibly good and you should definitely go play it now.

In other news, a small (but not insignificant update). I've been doing some refactoring. For the non-technical reader: that means I rewrote parts of the code so it works exactly as before, just better. This also meant that I could clean up some convoluted problems with rewards, which work now much nicer than before. There are two major changes:

Rewards
Rewards for stats are very much streamlined now. The following example is now valid (though a bit silly).

<stat exp="50" level="10" repeat="Inefficient" tag="Charming" untag="Ugly">Personality</stat>
Essentially, I've merged and nodes, and removed the unintuitive requirements for them to have only a subset of all options available at a time. I still would not recommend to mix @level and @exp, because that will reward experience twice (and possibly influence each other), and of course, you can only have a single @tag and a single @untag node per stat. That's just how XML works for attributes.


Challenges
I found "Primary" and "Secondary" to be really imprecise and unclear, not to mention rigid and difficult to use correctly. So I threw that out, and instead give you very simple mathematical tools. We now have the option to average values, or to add or subtract some, or parts of them. Example:

<avg>Reflexes</avg>
<avg>Lucidity</avg>
<sub mul="0.2">Trauma<sub>
<add>Muscles</add>

This will take the average of both Reflexes and Lucidity, then subtract 20% of the Trauma value, and add the Muscle value in full. The total is then tested against. Powerful, but very simple. Most actions will probably just use a single node, and be done with it.

I've also added a few more actions to the demo, showing off on how to do shopping. If you read through the XML to see how it is done and come to the conclusion that this takes a lot of effort to do, then you are correct. Inventory management is also not really something that I think RPGs should obsess over so much. The process of buying an item should be more interesting than the item itself. There is also slightly more content at The Coffee Shop. But as said before: I'm not so much a writer as a software engineer.