I’ve spent two days to make this, but hopefully it’s worth it. Remember when I talked about making the compiler more robust and the engine more learnable? Take a look at the new errors:

As you can see, errors now are much more verbose. They have categories, and since there’s no space limit anymore they tell you a lot more detail on how it happened. This is already more advanced and useful than the previous version, and the display is nice.

A new thing however, that I added just now, is the ability to ask for a deeper explanation by clicking on the error itself. This adds the little blurb below that can be as verbose as it wants to that you can understand better why the errors happens, and how you can fix it.

This system is not just for compiler errors: it also handles compiler warnings, runtime errors, and the runtime logs. That also means all those can have more information given to them. One such information is the context, which you can see on the compiler error. This helps trace each of these back to the exact line it happened. This is definitely not something that will come up in a later update.

For the record, I have not written error codes for each error yet: there’s a lot and I got annoyed halfway through. Some are a bit context-specific and would require a bigger refactoring to work, and if I’m honest this has been already pretty long and I want to focus on other things. There are currently 38 error codes in the engine for compiler errors specifically, and I’ve written a message and explanation for each one, but there’s probably about as many of them to write on top of it. Now that the system is in place however it will be usable for new errors.

There’s a lot of work still to be done before a release. My tracker says 56 tasks before the first gate, which is not even the beta release. Not all of them are two days mind-numbing endeavors however. This biggest one still remaining is the attack system, including cancels and hitstun and the like. This is a core engine concept now so you have a lot of moving parts to design and handle, but bit by bit it’s going to be done.

There’s also all the surrounding parts I need to get back to: you might have noticed update videos have dried up, because they are pretty long to make even with the tools. Just communicating is taking quite a while, and even a casual update like this one takes 40 minutes to write, and another 20 to post. The forum is also still down, and I’m going to make the config a bit more robust because the website is hosing more and more features now. Anyway, that’s going to be it for today, see you next update!