Refactoring for Fun and Profit

In my last update I mentioned that I was doing some UI refactoring, changing the way some menus were handled inside of Lab Rats 2. Pulling on that thread lead me to make a bunch of very useful internal changes that have taken up the last couple of days.

My work has all been focused around the concept of an "Action" inside of the LR2 code. An Action has two key pieces: A requirement, and the action to take. You would have run into an action before when you talked to your head researcher about improving your R&D or when you set your research goal in your lab. Previously, Actions also had some piecemeal extra logic to determine how an Action button would show up when it's requirement was failed. The main piece of this logic was second "disabled_show" function which, when True, would show a "disabled_slug" under the button title if the button was disabled. The slug was just a string set when the Action was defined and would be something like "Requires: $50". For most Actions this was fine, but some actions could fail in multiple ways and it always required writing a second nearly identical function to determine when the disabled slug should be shown.

All of that logic has been pulled out and replaced. The requirement function for an Action now returns three possible states. A "False" means the action is disabled and shouldn't be shown at all. This is used for actions that haven't been unlocked or that have been replaced with others in a story arc. A "True" means the button is enabled and can be pressed. In between are Strings (ie. words or sentences) that are returned. If a String is returned that is the check that the Action failed and that should be added to the button. Most of the work actions, for example, now tell you "Too late to start working" it is night time. This is one of many recent changes that helps guide the player and explain to them how the game is played.

While I've been doing all this coding I've also had a bunch of new clothing items being rendered to keep my PC busy. I thought the repertoire of underwear was underwhelming, so there are now four new panty types and two new bras. The last couple hours of rendering are finishing up right now so I'll be posting some previews of them tomorrow or the day after. Now that this refactoring detour is finished I can go back to implementing some new Love based events which sparked this whole thing to begin with.