TaleSpire Dev Log 377

Heya folks.

Since we last spoke, I've carried on with my main two tasks, slab upload, and symbiotes.

Slab Upload

Slab upload is going well. It's always nice when something starts feeling like a feature and not a hack.

The progress isn't exciting to show, though. It's been things like:

- Side-load the slab data into the cache, so it doesn't have to be redownloaded
- Show an hourglass cursor when the slab tool is waiting on a slab to download
- Tuning camera behavior so that transitioning in and out of publish mode does what is expected.
- Get tabbing between fields working as expected
- Subtle visual changes to screenshot view to improve the experience
- Add loading graphics to the entries in the community-mod browser to show that thumbnails are downloading

And so on.

I've still got a list of tickets to get through to get a good first version, but there don't seem to be any show-stoppers.

The one (happy) distraction has been helping with the Symbiotes feature.

Symbiotes

> Context: Symbiotes is an upcoming feature allowing community-made mods to dock on the right side of the TaleSpire window.

Our first version of this feature supports Symbiotes powered by WebViews[0].

We are providing an API that allows communication with TaleSpire. The messages between TaleSpire and the Symbiote travel over a simple interconnect provided by the WebView.

The code on either side of such a bridge needs to match and, from my experience, are places where simple user errors result in extremely annoying bugs. To deal with that, I prefer to write the API specification as a simple document, which is then used to generate the plumbing code for either side.[1]

And so that's what I'm making. I have a JSON document specifying types, calls to TaleSpire, and the arguments and return types of those calls. I load that document, type-check it, and produce an intermediate tree of objects which describe the bridge.

Next, I'll write code to walk over that tree to spit out the JavaScript and C# boilerplate code required.

Some of you may be asking, "why aren't you using [nice serialization library] for this?". The answer is slightly dumb and slightly sensible, and it's "I can make this approach more quickly as I haven't used that library yet." I'm actually quite interested in
flatbuffers for symbiotes and server communication. But that said, I am very used to writing these kinds of generators. I know how to make something that solves our exact problem and do it in a short amount of time.

Given that we are trying to ship mods quickly and that this approach doesn't stop us from using a different serialization approach in the future, this is the way we are going for now.

Alright, enough rambling for today. Looking forward to sharing more with you soon.

Peace.

Disclaimer: This DevLog is from the perspective of one developer. It doesn't reflect everything going on with the team


[0] In the future, I want to explore supporting other languages/environments.
[1] This is exactly what we do with our server-side API. The API is represented as an erlang data structure, and from that, we generate C# and erlang plumbing code. It's been a huge boon.