Still here, still hacking away at this vision/clothing issue^[1][2][3][4]. I hope this isn’t getting tedious. If it is, hang in there! There’s some light up ahead.

Over the last couple weeks a few interesting things have happened to Imaginary. For one, a number of the fixes that Glyph and I made along the way have actually made their way into master now. Most significantly (I think) the documentation I started and Glyph and I worked to finish is there now. Seven other fixes landed too, though. This is the most activity Imaginary has seen in a handful of years now. Crufty, dead code has been deleted. Several interfaces has been improved. Useful functionality has been factored out so it can actually be re-used. Good stuff. ashfall gets the credit for doing the legwork of splitting out these good pieces from the larger branch where most work has been going on.

Something else came about last week which is worthy of note: the code in that branch now passes the full test suite. That is pretty big news. I think maybe it means we actually figured out how to fix the bug (I’m totally hedging here; Imaginary’s test suite is pretty good). This came about after a relatively big change and a relatively little change.

The bigger change was an expansion of the interface for exits. “Wait,”, you’re surely going to exclaim, “exits?” Recall that the general idea for the fix to the way clothing is rendered was to preserve information about the path from the observer to the clothing and then use that path information to inform the renderer. As you might guess, this involved some code changes to the renderer. In the process of doing this, we disturbed the way the renderer shows you exits from a place. The previous implementation was rather hacky and just included some extra code to find exits. It did so without properly traversing the simulation graph and so potentially produced incorrect results. In the new renderer, exit information comes along with all of its related path information - automatically, even! - in the same collection of paths-to-ideas that represents everything else you might be able to see.

This generalization resulted in a bit more information being rendered than we really wanted. Containers (boxes, chairs, rooms, submarines, etc) almost all have implicit “in” and “out” exits (okay exit might not be the best name for how you go in to something; it’s just a name, okay?) and it’s usually not very interesting to include this information along with other more interesting exits. Anyway, that’s a decision we’d made previously in the renderer and we wanted to preserve it. So the exit interface got expanded to include a method which can be used to determine whether it makes sense to present that particular exit when rendering something near that exit. This removed a bunch of extra, not-very-interesting “into” and “out of” exits from the text which is generated to describe most things you might encounter in an Imaginary simulation.

The smaller change was a fix for a bug in how actions resolve targets. One of the fixes we needed to make to the garment system was to make it possible for the person wearing some clothing to always be able to refer to it. This was originally possible by virtue of the duplicate links to all clothing that I discussed in the first post I wrote about this bug. Once we got rid of those duplicate links, referring to clothing you were wearing became impossible if you couldn’t see the clothing. At some level this makes sense, but even if you can’t see your socks at the moment you still know they’re there and you can manipulate them in various ways (pull them up, for example). The long term fix for this will most likely be to add an “awareness” component (to be specified) to action target resolution (the system that turns the “my socks” string into an Idea instance representing your socks). The short term fix was just to just add an observer argument to an existing method, isOpaque and hack the garment system to make clothing not opaque to the person wearing it. This lets you see all your own layers but still prevents other people from seeing anything but your top layer. It has problems - for example, if you look in a mirror, you’ll see your socks, even if they’re covered by your shoes and your pants - but it’ll do for now (because we don’t have mirrors yet, ha ha).

And that fix we actually made a few weeks ago. What we did last week was remember to update the code that calls isOpaque to actually pass the correct observer object.

So, pending some refactoring, some documentation, probably some new automated tests, clothing and vision are now playing nicely together - in a way with fewer net hacks than we had before. Woot.

After working on that stuff with Glyph I also tried to get the documentation that has been merged into master actually published somewhere so it can be read. Unfortunately this proved to be something of a challenge. After fighting with distutils for a couple hours I still couldn’t get readthedocs.org to build Imaginary’s Sphinx-based documentation and had to give up (for my sanity as much as for anything). There is a solution in sight but it involves the long hard road of actually bringing both the packaging state of Imaginary and (here’s the real bummer) all of Imaginary’s dependencies up to contemporary standards. After cooling off for a couple days I did take the first steps towards this, doing some work on Nevow (yes, that’s a github link). There’s more work to do on that front but perhaps mostly just getting a new release out. So, watch this space (but please don’t hold your breath).