May 27, 2026
ArtTrials in Tainted Space
21 Comments

Ginny art provided by the fabulous Adjatha!

It’s been a hot little minute, and let me start of by saying clearly that Azra’s quest isn’t quite ready yet – but it is baking to a nice golden brown in the code furnace at this very minute. I’d estimate it’s about half-cooked, depending on how long the finishing glaze takes.

In plainer terms, a few roadblocks have slowed me down. The most recent example? There’s an optional battle at the expedition’s midpoint with a trio of cockvines that seemed conceptually simple to implement – until I actually started trying to wire it up. They weren’t set up to properly handle multi-target battles at all, let alone having multiple cockvines on the field, each with their own progressive grappling actions going on, each dumping huge spammy attacks that were often three paragraphs long. Before I did anything else, I had to go through and convert all the:

"You dodge a tentacle." 
to 
"${StringUtil.capitalize(target.getCombatName(), false)} dodge
${target.isPlayer() || target.isPlural ? '':'s'} a tentacle."

Then the hidden grapple stage statuses needed reworked to directly tie back to their points of origin and their target selection reworked to stay locked onto partially grappled targets. As I was working through it, I made numerous tweaks to reveal more of the hidden status effects to the player and improve the combat flow of the encounter. In short: cockvines had basically every part of their fight reworked to run cleaner, more logically, and format better over two days. And then I wrote shorter versions of their attack texts to keep a fight with that many bodies in it legible.

I lost another two days of potential coding to having my house’s air-conditioner replaced – the unit is in the closet just outside my office, so I wasn’t really able to smut around at my smut-minting station as I normally would. Instead I wound catching a hit of inspiration and blocked out about three pages of outline for a possible fourth Azra expedition set on the twilight cyberpunk world of Dhaal from my laptop. I can’t promise that it will come with any direct rapidity, but it’s a big leap forward from being so idea-blocked that Skom had to come in to design and write the quest (as he did for Myrellion’s expedition). I can say that I’m really happy with what I have planned for it already, as heist missions are always a treat in any game!

There was also a little side adventure into improving our blackjack user experience with Jacques00’s help (he did all the real work!), but I’ll let the improved experience speak for itself. For now I’m gunning to have Azra quest drop in the coming week.

0.9.159 Changelog:

  • Known Bug: The player character portrait doesn’t seem to be updating correctly in all cases, Jacques00 is aware. I’ll hotfix when I have a solution handy.
  • [Backer Exclusive] New Dhaal Encounter: Ginny, the short, stacked XO! She’s more common in the southern Stacks, but she’ll pop up in the Gyre at times as well. Written by Magenta Needle, she was implemented by Leek with a small touch-up pass to some of her combat effects by Fenoxo.
    • New Bust: Ginny, by Adjatha.
  • [Backer Exclusive] Grimald Dates! Roughly seventy pages of new content for spending time with Grimald in all sorts of ways~ Written by Magenta Needle and coded by Leek.
  • [Now Public] Catching Rummi
  • Player Bust Updates: It should now have a variety of non-human head shapes added as well as support for some non-human body types. Ear types to come in the future!
  • Reworked Blackjack Interface – give it a try! It should feel a lot more like a “real” blackjack game now. (Relentless demands by Fenoxo, actual code & work by Jacques00.)
  • Reworked Cockvine battle – now features proper improved combat flow, improved status effect visibility and information, reactive anti-drone attack (and support for new “drone” types in said attack), and less random new line returns adding spaces where none were needed. (Fenoxo)
  • Fixed Azra’s axe-kick not displaying damage dealt. (Fenoxo)
  • Fixed a Shock Hopper attack potentially affected by the same bug as Azra above. (Jacques00)
  • Removed outdated and broken ‘classMST’ parser and replaced it with a new clMulti parser. (Example: [char.clMulti smuggler mercenary engineer kineticist|I’m a smuggler|I’m a mercenary|I’m a tech specialist|I’m a kineticist|I’m none of the above]) (Jacques00)
  • Assorted Frosty consistency fixes. (Jacques00)
  • Fixes some issues with browser-based translation & the react framework. (Jacques00)
  • Hardlight suits and power armor are no longer prevented from use by the “Priapism” effect. (Jacques00)
  • The number of force darts is now properly displayed. (Jacques00)
  • Amber encounters now pause navigation to prevent missing her while walking quickly. (Jacques00)
  • Fixes for VR versions of the E.G.G. quest encounters. (Jacques00)
  • Fixes for the Siren’s Bounty face transformation effect. (Jacques00)
  • Tail transformation effects have been unified with a shiftTail() utility function, and used through most TF items. (Jacques00)
  • Minor pregnancy and typos fixes. (Jacques00)
  • Many small user interface improvements. (Jacques00)