Okay, I thought about it a little more, and I don't need to delete the
lumps or show a pop-up warning

Very few games will have those lumps, and even fewer (if any) will have
made meaningful edits to them. I might have told somebody to go in there to
change a box style, or change translucency settings, but I don't know if
anybody ever actually did.

I'll just stop reading those lumps, and log a warning about it.

---
James

On Tue, Sep 9, 2025 at 5:21 PM James Paige <[email protected]>
wrote:

> So I want to make some changes to the slice collection that is used by the
> built-in item menu.
>
> I realize that this gets loaded from slicetree_1_0.reld inside the rpg
> file.
>
> So to make an engine-side change to it, I have to add a fixbit to delete
> that file, and regenerate it from the default
> sourceslices/default_item_screen.slice
>
> And that of course nukes any changes anybody might have made to it.
>
> I'm thinking having copies of those collections inside the RPG file was a
> terrible idea.
>
> It is very lucky that we hid them inside the "spam" menu, but I really
> have no idea who might have gone in there and tweaked those files for their
> own games.
>
> That means I CAN'T delete that file with a fixbit. The best I can do is
> pop up a warning if it exists, letting people know they will need to delete
> it to get new inventory features. (And I have to add a way to delete it,
> probably also in the "spam" menu)
>
> It was a mistake to put a copy of the slice collection in the rpg under
> any circumstance, and it is a mistake to allow end-users to edit it (Thank
> goodness I never got further on the plan to allow that)
>
> So where does that leave us?
>
> I still want to continue adding features to the built-in items screen.
> Some of them have to have hard-coded magic no matter how many slice
> features we add.
>
> So here is a rough plan of what I hope to do:
> * Disable creating slicetree_1_0.reld inside the rpg file
> * Add a safety backcompat warning when you open an RPG file where that
> lump exists. Add an option to delete it to allow those few games that might
> have customized it to delete it if they want to un-break new items menu
> features (I REALLY hope there aren't too many of these games)
> * I can then refactor sourceslices/default_item_screen.slice as needed
> without fear of further breakage beyond the above
>
> As for how to give game authors access to edit built-in slice collections
> without breaking future-compat of their games, I don't know how to move
> forward with that yet. Probably the best option is a split path:
> 1. Further built-in customization of specific things like number of
> inventory columns, or which box styles to use.
> 2. Continue adding features that will facilitate people scripting their
> own completely custom special screens not dependent on the slice
> collections of the built-in screens,
>
> Thoughts?
>
> tldr; reviewing the current built-in items menu code made me fear that I
> was going down a bad path, even worse than the flexmenu debacle.
>
>
>
>
>
_______________________________________________
Ohrrpgce mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.motherhamster.org/listinfo.cgi/ohrrpgce-motherhamster.org

Reply via email to