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I feel very happy because I woke up thinking that there's no way I'd be able to duplicate function names for extender functions in AGS without the compiler throwing a fit but it just works, not sure how I never knew this.

@ThreeOhFour yes! it's actually a happy accident that the compiler is capable of this. unintentional behaviour but we're all happy for it

@vga256 My heart is telling me this shouldn't work, but I kind of suspected it from the fact that I could call things like Character.Scaling AND Object.Scaling and the editor is okay with it. But wow, what a weird setup!

@ThreeOhFour yes!

it's a side-effect of having the engine written in C/C++.

C-likes treat functions with the same function name *but different parameters* as separate functions:

Say(this *Character)

is seen as a different function than

Say(this *Object)

because the parameter between the brackets is different.

you can take advantage of this for all kinds of things!

@vga256 I love this insight, thank you! And yes, combined with the strength of custom properties this is going to save me so, so much tedious work.

@ThreeOhFour it's awesome. having unlimited custom properties sure opens up a lot of possibilities for doing cool things at runtime

@vga256 I imagine your forays into more systemic design have had you exploring this area a great deal.

@ThreeOhFour 😅 it was so much fun begging pleading and screaming ags into a simulation machine

@vga256 I am definitely not planning anything so systemic or intricate. But I do have a number of simple systems, and I believe that rather than going "Oh no this only works on particular hotspots that the magic designer hinted at", I can make things always work by default and make a much less stubborn, linear, "I'm the puppet master, you're the puppet" kind of adventure.

@ThreeOhFour that's so great. assigning common properties to "kinds" of objects and people and places makes things so much more interesting

@vga256 My north star is *kind of* The Incredible Machine. If Kevin Ryan and Jeff Tunnell had built an RPG the fireball spell would definitely have worked on wooden doors & crates. The ball physics don't stop working in some cases because the designer decided that it's 'wrong' in this instance.

My Machine will just be way more Credible hahaha

@ThreeOhFour oooo that's tantalizing. that game is my touchstone for perfect UI design and goofy fun behaviour

@vga256 Yeah! And like, it might have opened up more interesting gameplay if the "turn this thing green" draft had worked on everything, right?

vga256

@ThreeOhFour i wish so much that those spells hadn't been hardcoded :\
i understand what they were going for, but i love ruining a game with bad behaviour

@vga256 For me I kind of think of it as like improv. Everybody knows the rule to improv is you don't go "no", you go "yes, and". So if you give me a shrink ray, I should be able to shrink, like, everything I can click on.

@ThreeOhFour that's a great way of thinking about it. also, the best way to not be an asshole irl!