GOAL SETTING!

I did it! \o/



It turns out it wasn't that bad to debug. The issue was twofold.

For one, the UI was being drawn with the depth test not disabled, but reset to the default OpenGL settings. By default, OpenGL only draws a pixel if the new depth value is less than the previous one. This means that if two things are drawn at exactly the same distance from the camera, the first one will be drawn but the second one won't since the new depth value is not less than the old value (it's equal).

Second, the UI was being drawn out-of-order. The engine is in Mercury, which uses linked lists. Usually, it's faster to build a list in the reverse order by prepending the start, and then reversing it at the end. The new UI code I wrote just uses a fixed list of elements to draw since it's not dynamic (always the same UI elements). But I copied the button element order from code which did prepend and then reverse, so they were in the wrong order.

So the text was drawn first, set the depth buffer value, and then when the button image was drawn it didn't overwrite the old pixels from drawing the text. The fix was to properly disable depth testing in the UI (as it should be, the UI should be drawn using the painter's algorithm, not depth buffer testing), and then to reverse the drawing order.

Wow, good work Atiya! <3

So for Tuesday through Wednesday, I'm going to write the first drafts of all the dating scripts for the game (In Debt to the Stomach)

Welp, this was harder than I thought!

I've got about half the dialog written. I'm making progress at least.