Ren'Py Brothel King [v0.3] [Goldo]

[Kite80]

Found it! Open options.rpy and go to line 286 to change the value, so that you don't need to do it every time you open the game ;-)

 

[OhWee]

Version 2 of my Gameplay and Interface mod is live:

You must be registered to see the links

You just need Brothel King 14.0, and the .7zip in the linked post. The 'official patch' from 10/15/2018 is already included, as well as an updated version of my interface mod.

Oh, and you'll still need to add girl packs of course!

There's a lot of gameplay tweaks. Among other changes, security is a bit more dynamic now, and slowly loses effectiveness as events and incidents occur in a given evening. There's a possibility of multiple events each evening, or maybe just a quiet start to the evening...

This MAY work with existing saves. No guarantees, but I've had good luck so far. If you have Version 1 of my Gameplay mod, it should work just fine with those.

It's not compatable with the experimental mod though. Someday maybe...

If you hit errors, kindly copy the error log and PM it to me here, or otherwise let me know.

Enjoy!
OhWee


Nap time...

 

[mailfatoto]

Version 2 of my Gameplay and Interface mod is live:

You must be registered to see the links

You just need Brothel King 14.0, and the .7zip in the linked post. The 'official patch' from 10/15/2018 is already included, as well as an updated version of my interface mod.

Oh, and girl packs of course!

There's a lot of gameplay tweaks. Among other changes, security is a bit more dynamic now, and slowly loses effectiveness as events and incidents occur in a given evening. There's a possibility of multiple events each evening, or maybe just a quiet start to the evening...

This MAY work with existing saves. No guarantees, but I've had good luck so far. If you have Version 1 of my Gameplay mod, it should work just fine with those.

It's not compatable with the experimental mod though. Someday maybe...

If you hit errors, kindly copy the error log and PM it to me here, or otherwise let me know.

Enjoy!
OhWee


Nap time...

I have tested this new mod with the existing Save.

All works but I have found an issue :

• the pictures liked to guard are missing on the forder "Furniture" in your delivery.

 

[Lolzoke]

So, here's a performance tip for BK. I posted it up in the Lemmasoft forums, and if people don't end up having issues, maybe Goldo can do this in the next release:

I remembered that Renpy has an image cache function. So I checked the options.rpy in BK, and noted the current setting:​

config.image_cache_size = 64​

​

Renpy guesses which images it thinks it'll need, using this number (along with a screen size factor, yeah I was scratching my head too) to determine how many images to cache.​

​

So I boosted it to 96, and yes, things got quite a bit snappier. I boosted it again to 128, and oh mama! Screens are loading very quickly now!​

​

The downside of this is that more images are directly stored in memory, so it'll increase the memory footprint. However, my Renpy game is still showing 774 MB in memory WITH the 128 setting (sometimes a bit more, but still less than 800mb), and it wasn't that much smaller with the 64 setting, so I don't think that'll be a big issue for most people.​

​

You can change this setting yourself, ingame, by typing this into the console while playing:​

​

Shift + o (i.e. type a capital O) to open the console.​

​

then type:​

config.image_cache_size = 128​

​

Then hit the esc key to exit console. ​

​

You can change it back if you have issues.​

The change won't 'stick' between game sessions, but if you like it, you can edit options.rpy (look around line 288, use an enhanced text editor like notepad2, but not wordpad, etc.).​

​

I'm not seeing a need to go above 128, as 128 seems to be getting the job done, hence anything higher may be overkill.​

​

I'll be making 128 the default setting in my Interface and Gameplay mods going forward (for now at least), unless people end up having issues, but I'd love to hear how this affects other people's games.​

BK being so slow in the late game is so frustrating, that I'm very excited if this will help. I will be checking out the updated mod when I get around to it.

Thanks for all your work

 

[OhWee]

I have tested this new mod with the existing Save.

All works but I have found an issue :

• the pictures liked to guard are missing on the forder "Furniture" in your delivery.

Yeah, I generally miss something. I changed a lot of stuff this time...

Pics are attached so that you don't have to reinstall (yeah the full mod 7zip is only 10 MB, but still...).

Just grab the items folder inside the attached items.7z into BK's /game folder (i.e. Brothel_King_14.0 > game, not the 'main' BK folder). It'll merge the three pics with the items folder.

Fixing my uploads for V2 now...

Thanks for the heads up!


Edit. I just noticed that on the 'load/save' screen, the 'old' OhWee Mod version numbers are showing. Yeah I forgot to update the version number.
This isn't worth uploading a new screens.rpy on it's own, as it doesn't affect anything. If, for example, you have the 'Builder' icon on the menu on the 'Brothel Home Screen' menu, then you KNOW you have the new version. Plus all of the other added stuff...

 

[Kite80]

I wanna add a note to the cache tip OhWee shared with us: it works with every renpy game, just open options.rpy and add that command line inside the python block (in other wors, find the line "init.python" and copy/paste under it what OhWee said).
Also don't hesitate to try greater values as long as they are powers of 2: 256, 512 and so on. Beware though: your pc ram has a limit, don't set a value greater than half of that!

 

[OhWee]

I wanna add a note to the cache tip OhWee shared with us: it works with every renpy game, just open options.rpy and add that command line inside the python block (in other wors, find the line "init.python" and copy/paste under it what OhWee said).
Also don't hesitate to try greater values as long as they are powers of 2: 256, 512 and so on. Beware though: your pc ram has a limit, don't set a value greater than half of that!

I have mine set at 156 currently. It hasn't crashed, but yeah I may try 256 next to see if there's a difference.

As I noted before, you can experiment before modding options.rpy.
Just open console (shift + o) and type:
config.image_cache_size = 128
then hit esc and see how it 'feels'.

For other games, you may need to enable console first. Unren.bat can help you with that...

And experiment with different numbers (64, 96, 128, 179, whatever). Just remember that the larger the number, the more Renpy will try to cache, which can have diminishing returns at some point.

Edit: You will need to 'do the rounds' once or twice to help Renpy decide which images to cache, so I recommend going to your 'most used' screens first and do what you usually do. In particular, you'll probably notice a significant speedup when harvesting resources after you've visited the associated sites once or twice.

 

[Lolzoke]

While I haven't had a chance to drop more than 5 min into it yet, running around the menus seems to be significantly faster with a very late game play with max girls. I'm very happy with this result and look forward to dropping some more time into it.

Also, is there a place to drop some girlpack requests?

 

[OhWee]

Just a quick note about my Gameplay mod V2.

I had been focusing most of my playtesting on balancing security for the late stages of the game, and didn't pay close enough attention to the early game.

So, short form, security wise, yeah District 1 is waaaay too easy.

Hence, there's a 'security update' coming, probably later today. I've tested the fix, but want to test just a bit more before I release the patch files.

The game will play just fine otherwise, but things will just be quieter security wise until I get the update out. This won't affect your saves in any way, so you should be able to pick up where you left off once the patch files are applied.

I've also fine tuned the early evening events so that it works more closely as to what I had in mind. If you didn't hire any goons, yeah the messages have been tweaked further to reflect that in the dialogue, in the upcoming patch.

Thanks for your patience!
OhWee

 

[Kite80]

Right, one more news about the cache size setting: I've tried to set it to 1024 (having 4 Gb ram on my pc), the results playing 2 games (Brothel King and Holiday Island) are amazing! With those settings the loading time for my games are more than halved, especially games like Holiday Island which load a lot of pics and some animations become so fluid that you neither see the tiniest lag. Brothel King city screen navigation is no more a pain now, a click and hop! I'm in the next district.
Try it and see ;-)

 

[Dizarus]

Anyone have an idea of what the trait "caster" does?
edit: seem like it lower energy consumption to about 1/4, wow cool! though it has no description...

 

[OhWee]

Right, one more news about the cache size setting: I've tried to set it to 1024 (having 4 Gb ram on my pc), the results playing 2 games (Brothel King and Holiday Island) are amazing! With those settings the loading time for my games are more than halved, especially games like Holiday Island which load a lot of pics and some animations become so fluid that you neither see the tiniest lag. Brothel King city screen navigation is no more a pain now, a click and hop! I'm in the next district.
Try it and see ;-)

I feel like I just shared some drugs or something - the first one's free...


Seriously, though, I'm curious as to how 1024 pans out for you (i.e. if any issues crop up at any point). Since the default is 64, yeah that's quite tht jump.

Also, if you don't mind sharing your system specs. I'm running an i7 quad core (8 threads) with dual graphics cards (SLI disabled 'cuz the Daz gurus told me to do that) and 64 GB of ram, although I have my Renpy games on the HDD, not an SSD (Renpy caches to the drive a lot, and hard drives are cheaper), so I consider my system as on the upper end of things.

 

[Kite80]

Caster wil get a description when the experimental patch will be the new official one, for now here's what it does: girl makes a magical shield which will protect her from the first attack she will suffer.

My pc specs, a poor machine, ut good companion of a lifetime

pentium dual core e4500 with 4 GB ram
single graphic card nvidia ge force GT 710 512 MB ram
HDD 148 GB - the real pain, need one with more storage capacity :-(

 

[OhWee]

@Kite80 ,

Well, if you are able to pull off a 1024 cache with those specs, yeah I think that most people should be fine using 1024. So apparently,you'd have to have a pretty old system with less that 4 gigs of ram, or a other programs running concurrently to soak up your ram, for that cache level to be an issue. Of course, the best thing is to post up ram usage numbers.

OK, I'm having a WTF moment...
Before, I posted that I was using around 700 MB of ram in BK (a bit less actually).

So, I just opened up my Gameplay V2 game, and blew through a night of interactions, and I was only seeing around 290 MB of ram being used, and now it's just spiked to 320 without me touching anything... then, after strolling around the city and visiting the slave market, shop, and girl screens, it drops to 305...

Now I want to know if these are 'typical numbers'. This can't be right, can it?

BTW, I'm seeing those numbers by using ctrl+alt+delete to pull up the task manager, then looking at the BK entry for the system usage stats.

Anyways, not sure how spiking the cache from 64 to 1024 would LOWER ram usage, but yeah whatever... what are you seeing @Kite80 ?

 

[OhWee]

I have some updated files for V2 of my gameplay mod, which I've attached to my post here:

It fine tunes the 'security vs threat' curve a bit. It is still easier, but I'm slowly ratcheting things up here and there to find a good balance without security going OTT. Feedback is appreciated (thanks @Lolzoke for the PMs!).

It also fixes a couple of other minor issue (quicksave slots now rotate through all 12 slots instead of just 10, as do Autosaves which are still mostly broken, even in 'Vanilla BK'), and I also did a very tiny change that relates to font calls (this should banish DejaVuSans entirely from character names).

 

[Dizarus]

Caster wil get a description when the experimental patch will be the new official one, for now here's what it does: girl makes a magical shield which will protect her from the first attack she will suffer.

It made me think it was energy related because this girl has 0 constitution, 50 energy and the only difference is that when she works it appears on the end day report that she lost 8 energy and i go to check and only 2 has been removed. So can make her work lots of days with barely any rest.

 

[OhWee]

It made me think it was energy related because this girl has 0 constitution, 50 energy and the only difference is that when she works it appears on the end day report that she lost 8 energy and i go to check and only 2 has been removed. So can make her work lots of days with barely any rest.

Question, is this girl half shifting - if are you using the experimental mod?

Or are you using my mod? If you are boosting upkeep, the girl earns bonus energy at the beginning of the night (if the girl isn't resting that night), but there wasn't an easy way for me to report that that I could think of at the time. So she indeed probably did burn 8 energy on job tasks, but her energy total was bumped first, if my mod is in play.

It's something I'll need to address in the future, plus I probably should look to see how Goldo has implemented half shift resting in the experimental mod, as he may have figured out a way to report it. Plus I'm trying to work within the 'Vanilla BK' framework, and Experimental has reworked the variables used to indicate resting, etc. a bit that breaks existing saves.

 

[Dizarus]

@OhWee No half shift, it is turn down to 0, because i don't see the point in them yet.

Edit: well not knowing what caster did lead me to assume wrong things, as this girl had just started i placed her with +5 upkeep, and with ohwee mod they get a rest bonus depending on it, so, as it was only getting a -8 EN on the job the high upkeep was recovering some, leading me to think it was something related to energy, still 1/4 was to OP.
Though i can point out that the girl is gaining energy because of the upkeep. Donno if intended, but with a good upkeep it makes sense i guess.

 

[Kite80]

Don't forget the furnitures which grant a minor loss of energy for girls... btw I'm thinking about the kind of cache used by BK, my suspect is tht it's gained by using not the ram, but the hdd space, like the paging file of windows. So, if BK has more hdd space for loading pics and screens, it needs less ram, by consequence everything goes faster. Just a suspect for now, don't have any clue to confirm it.

 

[Dizarus]

@Kite80 been lurking in the early game mostly, actually lost the late game save i had because i am dumb *coff*. haven't had the chance to get to the furniture stuff yet.