VN Ren'Py Eternum [v0.8.0] [Caribdis]

[fanc5544]

It's amazing,I can't imaging how hard work for this game producing!

 

[bolondro2]

Amazed. Keep the same humour that Only in alifetime and graphically you can see tht the developer had learned the ropes from start to end and from end to start, it´s as good (or better) that the last chapters of his former game.

And the amounth of content for a first release is HUGE.

 

[bacienvu88]

Officially they are AIs, but as we can see, there are a lot of secrets behind Eternum, so, we will see.

Clearly they must have brain-scanned Stabby Mike and used that as basis for the Praetorian AI:s. I mean who else is better at showing up precisely when and where is needed?

 

[bolondro2]

I won't do an incest patch myself.
Of course, if someone is interested, you can create one unofficially (like any other patch/mod) but it might require quite a few dialogue changes if you want it to make sense because I'm not creating the game with that in mind.
Cheers!

Roma locuta, causa finita

 

[buff]

As a software developer I can tell you that it is quite the opposite. The shorter the time between builds, the more time will generally be spent fixing bugs. Because a large part of fixing bugs is finding the bugs in the first place.
It is good practice to have regular working builds, but the reason for that is that it makes working in large teams easier.

You are not wrong that long release cycles can lead to problems. But the reason for that is its much harder to predict how long making large amounts of content will take, so chances are more devs that do this will predict too low dev times leading to missed deadlines. Long release cycles can also lead to feature creep, when the devs think they can achieve a lot more than they are capable of based on the long time until the next release is due.

You're correct on that first point *if* you assume all the QA burden is falling on the developer. But that's what high-tier patrons are for-- they provide the QA work, not the developer. He just takes care of the bug reports, which is far easier since the changes are fresher in mind and smaller. A lot of bugs (beyond trivial stuff like syntax errors or missing files) come from the way bits of code interact, and the affected interactions are proportional to the _square_ of the size of the change.

Agreed on the second, being bad at estimating has always been a problem in the world of software. However, it *is* something people get better at with experience. Given that the problem has been steadily getting worse, not better, as the devs acquire experience in games like Something Unlimited causes me to think it is not normally the more important factor.

 

[1tomadeira]

Eh, does anyone control the praetorians directly(like players I mean)? Aren't they all just AIs?

They are yes... or they should. But I think that way because she knew about the MC yet ignored both MC and Annie . I don't know, it felt weird, otherwise she would simply ignore the surroundings. But again, it's just my theory. Meanwhile Caridbis is in his dark castle with his evil laugh "muhuhahuahuaha" checking all our brain freezes trying to understand the actual story. It may even be simply nothing as well lel. But oh well, it's what I think.

his previous game Once in a lifetime had a really healthy update cycle and recently finished. very trustworthy dev imo

I subscribe this. Of course work ethic is great, but for me being comunicative and being humble is also a major factor to me. One of the devs I definitely recommend to support if you can.

Do you guys think the praetorians look the same in every server? I mean in the cyberpunk setting they fit in nicely, but they would stick out like a sore thumb in the fantasy setting where guns or futuristic armor aren't allowed for example. Since they are a security measure I guess they can be excused of that, as Idriel just showed one model in the Eternum introduction, but it would be cool if they changed appearance to suit the environment.

As long those asses remain, I'm on board.

 

[New Kid]

Officially they are AIs, but as we can see, there are a lot of secrets behind Eternum, so, we will see.

They are yes... or they should. But I think that way because she knew about the MC yet ignored both MC and Annie . I don't know, it felt weird, otherwise she would simply ignore the surroundings. But again, it's just my theory. Meanwhile Caridbis is in his dark castle with his evil laugh "muhuhahuahuaha" checking all our brain freezes trying to understand the actual story. It may even be simply nothing as well lel. But oh well, it's what I think.


As long those asses remain, I'm on board.

Ah I see, I thought that I had missed something in the story for a moment there. To me they seemed just pretty advanced AI like Idriel,

Spoiler

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But of course, the asses must remain, this has never been in dispute hahaha.

 

[runz]

more100x

 

[DrDerpington]

They are yes... or they should. But I think that way because she knew about the MC yet ignored both MC and Annie. I don't know, it felt weird, otherwise she would simply ignore the surroundings.

Did you never see how real police officers work? It doesnt even have to be real life police, even police from TV shows is enough.

When something interesting happens there are bound to be curious people around (and some TV reporters). It is pretty common. As long as curious people dont come too close and disturb investigation then police force simply ignores them.

Annie said it so herself. They did nothing wrong and they had no reason to be afraid of police force.

 

[Wesieboy56]

 

[Machete]

Did you never see how real police officers work? It doesnt even have to be real life police, even police from TV shows is enough.

When something interesting happens there are bound to be curious people around (and some TV reporters). It is pretty common. As long as curious people dont come too close and disturb investigation then police force simply ignores them.

Annie said it so herself. They did nothing wrong and they had no reason to be afraid of police force.

I think what the scene is supposed to mean is that the praetorians killed a Eternum user causing his death in the real world (or at last it's what the final scene of the chapter suggests), and no one was supposed to withness the fact and be able to link the praetorians' actions to the real person demise. That's why MC suddenly feels he needs to shut the girl before she can make a noise and reveal their presence. Otherwise they would have probably been in big trouble.

Now, if the praetorians are AIs i presume they should be aware of the wereabouts of the users in the server, while, if they are in fact human controlled, they more easely could be withnessed without knowing that.

Just a consideration.

 

[LeonJKennedy]

I think what the scene is supposed to mean is that the praetorians killed a Eternum user causing his death in the real world (or at last it's what the final scene of the chapter suggests), and no one was supposed to withness the fact and be able to link the praetorians' actions to the real person demise. That's why MC suddenly feels he needs to shut the girl before she can make a noise and reveal their presence. Otherwise they would have probably been in big trouble.

Now, if the praetorians are AIs i presume they should be aware of the wereabouts of the users in the server, while, if they are in fact human controlled, they more easely could be withnessed without knowing that.

Just a consideration.

But they learn about his death the day after?

 

[1tomadeira]

Did you never see how real police officers work? It doesnt even have to be real life police, even police from TV shows is enough.

When something interesting happens there are bound to be curious people around (and some TV reporters). It is pretty common. As long as curious people dont come too close and disturb investigation then police force simply ignores them.

Annie said it so herself. They did nothing wrong and they had no reason to be afraid of police force.

I never said that. But it's still an AI. And we all know what happened to the convicted dude.

Again, as I said I may be completly wrong, it may even be a completly normal thing as you said, but it was the feel it gave to me.

 

[RainGres]

Is the virtual plot going to be like HLW(Hardcore Leveling Warrior)? The whole virtual thing IMO feels very close to the lucid adventure, well all virtual world plot crisis usually have the same basic premise, so maybe it was just in my head.

 

[Machete]

But they learn about his death the day after?

Yes indeed. But they weren't supposed to see the praetorian execute they guy in the game. You know "a young healty guy dies in the game and more or less at the same time has a fatal stroke". In the real world you would say "Bummer. He was so young". In a narrative world you would say "This smells fishy, there is sure a conspiracy behind this, otherwise, clear coincidence".

 

[DrDerpington]

I think what the scene is supposed to mean is that the praetorians killed a Eternum user causing his death in the real world (or at last it's what the final scene of the chapter suggests), and no one was supposed to withness the fact and be able to link the praetorians' actions to the real person demise. That's why MC suddenly feels he needs to shut the girl before she can make a noise and reveal their presence. Otherwise they would have probably been in big trouble.

Now, if the praetorians are AIs i presume they should be aware of the wereabouts of the users in the server, while, if they are in fact human controlled, they more easely could be withnessed without knowing that.

That was a huge assumption on your part. We dont know at this point.

There are multiple possibilities.
1.) That guy could have a meltdown that he was banned. Even young people can have a heart attack.

2.) It is also possible he was killed by someone else. It is no secret that a lot of real life money is orbiting around Eternum. Him getting killed means his entire inventory is lost (confiscated). If the lost items were worth a huge amount of money, then somebody might have punished him for it.

Spoiler: money in online gaming

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3.) Lastly it is entirely possible that there is indeed some huge secret behind Eternum and somehow AI really killed somebody in real life.

 

[tntltct]

This may sound dumb, but this is exactly happened with me, my bf and my xgf many years ago. )

 

[Alandir]

You're correct on that first point *if* you assume all the QA burden is falling on the developer. But that's what high-tier patrons are for-- they provide the QA work, not the developer. He just takes care of the bug reports, which is far easier since the changes are fresher in mind and smaller. A lot of bugs (beyond trivial stuff like syntax errors or missing files) come from the way bits of code interact, and the affected interactions are proportional to the _square_ of the size of the change.

Agreed on the second, being bad at estimating has always been a problem in the world of software. However, it *is* something people get better at with experience. Given that the problem has been steadily getting worse, not better, as the devs acquire experience in games like Something Unlimited causes me to think it is not normally the more important factor.

How do you think QA works? And more specifically in what way do you think patrons provide good QA?
QA finds bugs, not the source of bugs. If its done by professionals they will write down a description of the bug, how to reproduce it and some screenshots or videos showing the bug.
The developer still needs to reproduce the bug in their local version of the game, find the source of the bug in the game's code, fix it and then test it again to make sure the bug is really gone. And even with professionals the "How to reproduce it" part of bug reports often doesn't happen. Do you really think some patrons that give the game a lot of money have the technical understanding and patience to meticulously find bugs, find how they are reproduced, produce evidence of it and then send it all clearly documented and understandable to the developer?

My company makes software for other professional companies and even when those companies have binding contracts that put the responsibility for testing on them, the bug reports that the employees of those professional companies produce are often just plain garbage. They barely document what the bug looks like, the screenshots often crop out important data and information and they almost NEVER bother to establish and document how to reproduce the bugs they find. This happens even with companies that we spend years working with and when we explicitly and repeatedly tell their employees how the bug reports should look and what they should contain.
And you think some random patreon supporter will write good enough bug reports that takes the problem of finding the bugs off the developer? Sorry if this sounds aggressive, but its a bit of a pet peeve thanks to my work.

You're correct that bugs often come from code interacting with each other in unforeseen ways, but that's the issue. A bug in one part of the game can have it's source in an entirelly different part of the actual code. With "finding the bugs" I didn't mean finding the actual problem that happens, but finding the real source of the problem in the games code.

I admit I haven't been following games like this for a long time. It is true that experience makes it easier to judge how long something will take, but only provided that they are doing things they have done before. A lot of these games are fairly repetetive in what kind of content they entail, so it's true that they should get better, but it would be a lot harder if they implement new mechanics or try new effects or renders or something like that.
And additional reason why stuff like that probably gets worse with time is that the game itself simply got larger. The more code there is, the harder it is to find the source of bugs. I am also not familiar with renpy as an engine, but I know that python itself as a language is very hands-of. It doesn't give programmers a lot of restraints on how to organize or structure their code. Which can be great if you have a lot of experience, but it can also be absolutly deadly if you are not. It is very easy to write shoddy, unorganized code. It is even easier to do that with a loose language like python. It is even easier to do that if you don't have any experience in how to structure a software project and it is supremely easier to do that if you have a tight, fast-approaching deadline that doesn't give you enough time to refactor your code. And stuff like that can easily get out of control. Oh it's not so bad if those few mechanics are programmed in an obscure, hard to read way. But then it's been a year, a couple of more convoluted code-bits have been added, you forgot all about those old code-bits and now you are left to find a bug in that weird jumble of text.

I don't mean to imply that all devs are innocent little angles that will do nothing bad, I just want to explain to you that coding a big project like a game, even if it is mechanically simple like a VN is very hard and there isn't a one size fits all approach to how to do the development well. Some developers work better if a short deadlines brings them to focuss, others work better if they have enough time to get the game to work exactly how they want it to work, while avoiding shoddy code that could lead to problems further down the line. So it can be very true that short release-cycles can be good for both a project, the patrons and the developer. But it isn't always true and it can cause a lot of harm and cause development to slow down significantly after a time, because short release cycles lead to shoddy code that now takes a long time to fix.

Sorry for the long post, the subject kind of ran away from me here.

 

[DrDerpington]

How do you think QA works? And more specifically in what way do you think patrons provide good QA?
QA finds bugs, not the source of bugs. If its done by professionals they will write down a description of the bug, how to reproduce it and some screenshots or videos showing the bug.
The developer still needs to reproduce the bug in their local version of the game, find the source of the bug in the game's code, fix it and then test it again to make sure the bug is really gone. And even with professionals the "How to reproduce it" part of bug reports often doesn't happen. Do you really think some patrons that give the game a lot of money have the technical understanding and patience to meticulously find bugs, find how they are reproduced, produce evidence of it and then send it all clearly documented and understandable to the developer?

My company makes software for other professional companies and even when those companies have binding contracts that put the responsibility for testing on them, the bug reports that the employees of those professional companies produce are often just plain garbage. They barely document what the bug looks like, the screenshots often crop out important data and information and they almost NEVER bother to establish and document how to reproduce the bugs they find. This happens even with companies that we spend years working with and when we explicitly and repeatedly tell their employees how the bug reports should look and what they should contain.
And you think some random patreon supporter will write good enough bug reports that takes the problem of finding the bugs off the developer? Sorry if this sounds aggressive, but its a bit of a pet peeve thanks to my work.

You're correct that bugs often come from code interacting with each other in unforeseen ways, but that's the issue. A bug in one part of the game can have it's source in an entirelly different part of the actual code. With "finding the bugs" I didn't mean finding the actual problem that happens, but finding the real source of the problem in the games code.

I admit I haven't been following games like this for a long time. It is true that experience makes it easier to judge how long something will take, but only provided that they are doing things they have done before. A lot of these games are fairly repetetive in what kind of content they entail, so it's true that they should get better, but it would be a lot harder if they implement new mechanics or try new effects or renders or something like that.
And additional reason why stuff like that probably gets worse with time is that the game itself simply got larger. The more code there is, the harder it is to find the source of bugs. I am also not familiar with renpy as an engine, but I know that python itself as a language is very hands-of. It doesn't give programmers a lot of restraints on how to organize or structure their code. Which can be great if you have a lot of experience, but it can also be absolutly deadly if you are not. It is very easy to write shoddy, unorganized code. It is even easier to do that with a loose language like python. It is even easier to do that if you don't have any experience in how to structure a software project and it is supremely easier to do that if you have a tight, fast-approaching deadline that doesn't give you enough time to refactor your code. And stuff like that can easily get out of control. Oh it's not so bad if those few mechanics are programmed in an obscure, hard to read way. But then it's been a year, a couple of more convoluted code-bits have been added, you forgot all about those old code-bits and now you are left to find a bug in that weird jumble of text.

I don't mean to imply that all devs are innocent little angles that will do nothing bad, I just want to explain to you that coding a big project like a game, even if it is mechanically simple like a VN is very hard and there isn't a one size fits all approach to how to do the development well. Some developers work better if a short deadlines brings them to focuss, others work better if they have enough time to get the game to work exactly how they want it to work, while avoiding shoddy code that could lead to problems further down the line. So it can be very true that short release-cycles can be good for both a project, the patrons and the developer. But it isn't always true and it can cause a lot of harm and cause development to slow down significantly after a time, because short release cycles lead to shoddy code that now takes a long time to fix.

Sorry for the long post, the subject kind of ran away from me here.

Spoiler: TL,DR

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You are partially right. On one hand finding and correcting bugs is not as easy as some people might believe. But on the other hand RenPy engine is one of the easiest development tools available.

 

[Alandir]

You are partially right. On one hand finding and correcting bugs is not as easy as some people might believe. But on the other hand RenPy engine is one of the easiest development tools available.

Lol, yeah sorry for the wall of text. I actually checked renpy out just now and sure, it is easy to start making a game with it. But that doesn't mean that it's easy to finish making a game with it. From what I have seen it is build to make very simple, short visual novel games. It actually encourages the developer to put all the code for the text and branching paths of the game in a single file. I haven't spent enough time with the thing to know whether there's a way around that, but needless to say that's a pretty damn bad way to structure a bigger game. Given how many hours the games here can take. With some of them having lots of branching paths and some having sandbox elements. It sounds like a nightmare having it all in just one huge file.