Hello everyone!
Two more fixes, both thanks to reports from Wonberger. They've pointed out several small things over the last few days that were easy for me to overlook after spending so much time staring at the same interfaces.
Thank you for taking the time to report them.
"of the of" in Item Names
Generated items could produce names like:
Vampiric Sylvan Parrying Dagger of the of Venom
or:
Glacial Eldritch Choker of Carnage of the of Precision
Obviously, something had gone slightly wrong with the English language.
The cause was straightforward once I found it. Item suffixes come in two forms — some are written as of Venom, while others are written as of the Giant. Each suffix already contains the wording it needs.
The item-name builder, however, was adding "of the" in front of every suffix regardless, resulting in the wonderfully grammatical of the of Venom.
Fixing that exposed a second, quieter version of the same problem.
When an item rolled two suffixes that both began with of the, the second suffix silently lost part of its wording:
of the Storm and of the Void
was becoming:
of the Storm and Void
Both problems are now fixed.
And you don't need to replace equipment that already has a broken name. Items you already own will be repaired automatically the next time you load, including items in:
your inventory
equipped gear
your vault
your mailbox
buyback
market listings
If you're wondering why I'm spending time chasing a stray preposition in a game with thousands of other things I could be working on:
Portalborn is a game made almost entirely of text.
There's very little else to look at. Bad grammar in an item name is basically the Portalborn equivalent of a texture failing to load.
Item Previews Disappearing in the Market and Shops
Hovering over an item in the Market Board or a shopkeeper's window would correctly display its stats — and then, seemingly at random, the preview would disappear on its own.
Sometimes it lasted a few seconds. Sometimes twenty. There didn't appear to be any pattern.
The cause turned out to be considerably more interesting than the symptom.
There's only one item-preview element in the game, shared between every interface that uses it.
Meanwhile, the inventory sidebar refreshes itself regularly as things change — health regeneration, buffs ticking down, timers updating, and other game state.
Every time that sidebar refreshed, it cleared the shared preview element.
So if you happened to be looking at an item in the Market Board at that moment, the inventory sidebar was unknowingly deleting the Market Board's tooltip.
The sidebar itself appeared perfectly fine because its item rows were immediately rebuilt underneath your cursor, causing the tooltip to appear again.
The Market Board and shop windows weren't being rebuilt, so their preview simply vanished.
The apparently random timing was the clue. If nothing happened that required the sidebar to refresh — for example, if you were at full health with no active buffs — the tooltip could happily remain there indefinitely.
That's now fixed.
Item previews will remain visible until you actually move your cursor away from the item.
Thank you all, as always.
And thank you again to Wonberger for taking the time to report these. Small inconsistencies like these can be surprisingly difficult for me to notice after I've spent hundreds of hours looking at the same parts of the game, and having someone point them out gives me a concrete place to start looking.