Hello!

Yadda yadda, we’re a week later and here’s a new devlog. You know the drill by now. This one may be a bit shorter than expected, because frankly, it was either this or fifteen pages of code, and we’re out of codeine in here.

The innumerable depths

Mod development unfortunately necessitates one eventually leave the ivory towers of imagination and whimsy, move towards the mudswamp of implementation, light up taper candles, and pray to any and all divinities for what they planned to actually work. 

All our preparatory endeavors for the Vertical Slice are therefore extremely important, as they form the basis of everything we have to build. My interviewee and I tried to make this devlog understandable, so you don’t have to be a radiocomputer wizard to understand this.

Interview with a Wizard

This week, our honored speaker is Dima, The Implementer, on various subjects relating to the technical aspects of our project.

Q : What is Tabula Rasa, and how would you explain it to a five-year old?

A : Tabula Rasa disables base Disco Elysium content, which is pretty much everything except the environment. Even if these objects are loaded, they’re not active in the engine. They’re not rendered and their scripts don’t run. 

Tabula Rasa turns Disco Elysium into a walking simulator, a blank slate ready for new content 🙂

I want to say, for the record, that the systems that I mention in this interview are built on top of a whole bunch of other code that makes this all possible.

All the workers are probably out for nachos…

Q : What is the Overlay System?

A : The Overlay System formalizes how we add content to the game. We achieve this by telling the system that this custom content (Unity Prefab) has to be loaded when a base game area (Unity Scene) gets loaded. It also ensures that extra content is unloaded correctly when changing scenes.

The two systems also work together: Tabula Rasa asks the Overlay System if something is custom content, and if it is, it doesn’t disable it. All in all, these are two pretty simple systems that give developers the ability to more easily shape the game into something new. As an example, we used them to change the main menu!

Title screen, still a work in progress. You’ve seen this image every time you opened the website.

Reader’s Questions

As you know, any and all questions go to [email protected]. The fact we’ve not received any means either:

1.) all of you are grievously incurious, 
2.) you are completely baffled by the archeotech of e-mails, and/or 
3.) I am such a good writer that I pre-emptively answer any questions you might possibly ask. 

Go me! Or maybe you’re just shy?

To give you time to forget about us (and thus be pleasantly surprised each time we post), we’re moving to a fortnightly schedule. 

It’s not you, it’s us. We just need some space, you know? A little time apart (mostly because we don’t want to reveal too much too early).

See you all in two weeks for a tour of the never-before-seen interior of the Allez Vous-en Shack.

Flip the table,

Skullhead McShay
Professional Goobster, Amateur Serious Person™