Jumping back in with server-side improvements, and battle updates to come

So a lot got in the way -- the whole pandemic thing hasn't helped, and my young spawn also demands some time occasionally -- but I finally got back into working on this a bit, so I figured I'd resurrect this thread.

After the last update, I made a whole lot of progress on UI layer handling (including lots of effective focus shenanigans), and today I finished most of the important work involved in moving to a single thread per battle, which is a massive scalability improvement. Also just generally a lot easier to work with, so that's also something. It's also set up -- as I wanted but haven't really prioritized -- to enable any number of human players to control any number of characters in either party in a fight, so that's pretty sweet.

I'm to the point where it's time to get in-battle actions going. Starting with just basic attack and defense, this should lay the groundwork nicely for whatever spells/skills/whatever I'll hopefully get running down the road.

If job hunting and, you know, actually doing my current job don't get in the way, hopefully I'll have a bit of a visual aid this weekend or early next week. :)