Sqlalchemy

[jason-kane]

So.. I ripped all the manual SQL out and replaced it with a sqlalchemy ORM layer. It was messy and took a few days. There are probably a few new bugs.

Why bother? Let me step back a second and explain.

The UI to block whenever someone is talking
The UI should be usable while the log tail is active

I think it is import to be able to adjust voices while you play. Because its the way this stuff works, that means threads and/or multiple processes.

In my case the log tailing/talking is a second process. When you click attach it starts that second process, when you click detach it kill the process.

Not good enough. If it is chewing through logs and showing xp/min and fun stuff like that I don't want those to stop updating whenever it talks. So the actual talking part happens in a thread. That also means there has to be a way for the log reader to communicate with the talker. I'm using a queue for that. It's mostly a good approach; but the worst case is kind of ugg.

if there is a bunch of talking all at once (which happens in a few places in the game), it will dutifully recite each thing in the order in which it was received. That can take a long while and is annoying. I'll try and fix it at some point (non-trivial), but for most cases the current setup works nicely.

Sidekick is pretty cool and will be the direction of future development. It relegates voice_editor to a "voices" tab and adds a "character" tab intended to present live data. I'm fiddling with matplotlib and xp/inf graphs right now.

Other changes... I found out how to enable more TTS voices in windows 10. Notes in the README and a powershell script in the repo.

I added "Presets"; these make it easy to kick-start a more complicated voice for more constancy. There is a 'Zombie' preset for a creepy monster voice that works nicely for Vhz. I don't like having all the random npc citizens use the same voice, so I added 'Random Male' and 'Random Female' presets to make it easy to give them a little more variety.

I should add a robot preset for clockwork.. I'll do that now.