I took a short break from my Stats change to implement something simple as a brain break today.

You can now delete your character from the Gui. The icon is too big, and there’s no warning yet (of course, it’s planned, the assets are already there). It will delete your character and all automatic backup copies too. So please be careful.

Friday and today I spent most of the day conceptualizing and designing a major change to how Stats and StatusEffects are handled, to make them simplier, data-driven, and lua-capable. I sent it to the other coders for review before I start replacing our current system.

I’ve been kind of out of the loop with most of what’s happening with the rest of the team as a result. Reading through the commit logs, it looks like kyren was doing some cleanup and optimization around how entity lookup queries are handled. Likely as a short brain break because it looks like she’s still tackling TileRendering. It looks like Armagon is adding a bunch of interesting microdungeons for Apex inhabited worlds. And it looks like community member Kawa’s patch to make human hair accessories match undy color was accepted and pushed by Metadept (Thanks Kawa!) And a few other things.

Per some suggestions from our Starbound Modding channel. I’ve been exploring options to make how we do JSON merging better. And I would like comments from current modders on this.

As you’re no doubt aware, currently, the system in place has a big limitation, in that it doesn’t have the ability to address any point conceptually below a list. This has been discussed a bunch, and one interesting result of that discussion has been a JSON patching RFC being brought to my attention. I’ve spoken with the modding channel on freenode and they were more or less welcoming of this change, even though it would invalidate all files which use “__merge”.

I really don’t want two different JSON patching systems running at the same time for reasons of complexity and weirdness. So I’d like to take a vote. If you are currently a modder, and you’re currently using our __merge system, would you rather have __merge eliminated and use the new system, or would you rather I go back to the drawing board and figure out a way to fix the __merge system, which may or may not actually be possible?