Posted January 30, 2023 by EsoDev
Alright, time for an update here again~
No lore, no article and no tutorials today, I'm just running late here, and I have no intention of postponing this update to tomorrow so I can edit and format one of those. However, I have some ready to go, so... I'll try to make it a double or triple feature next week.
Ok, so what happened this week? I finally managed to wrangle a working system out of Ink that has parity with most of the features of our current regular interface. While it's rough at some places to accommodate for this, the experience of working with it isn't that bad... except for having to work in Ink, and I have to say, the whole experience was somewhat frustrating.
I hoped to have this ready about a week ago, but here's the issue. Ink has three components you need to work with: the IDE, the compiler and the runtime. Over the last three weeks, I have thoroughly experienced many different and "interesting" ways for each component to crash or not work correctly.
Additionally, I've been somewhat ambitious with the feature parity itself as I wanted it to, at the very least, be able to handle the following features (in ascending order of difficulty):
And yeah, it worked. This is what a responder looks like in Inky:
And this is the effect it produces in-engine:
There's a bit more, but it's pretty technical. I changed some of the code for my engine to ensure parity between how different selectors work. I have also provided a new special tag element for the all and allrev selectors, denoted as ...else. This particular tag allows me to work with some edge cases that were a bit difficult before, but let's be honest, you have no idea what I'm talking about, nor are you very interested.
The point is I spent a lot of time getting this Ink thing to work, and the fault wasn't on my side (because I was sick) but just on the side of Ink's tools being problematic. But it's done now, and it's fit for purpose, so I can give it a spin and make some events and interactions.