Looks like I need to make one thing VERY clear:
Breaking the savegame compatibility in Ren'Py for big updates in a complex non-linear game is NOT A CHOICE. It is practically impossible to maintain.
- go ahead and decompile V9 scripts and compare them with V0.10.X, you will see that trying to load an old savegame is like trying to load a Witcher 3 savegame in Minecraft, the internals changed fundamentally!
- go ahead and ask professional developer teams from bigger projects. They will give you the same answer.
But Devon! Why does game XY have compatible savegames then?
That's because these games are far less complex and linear. As long as the game progresses linear, no matter how many paths it has, it's very easy to keep savegames compatible. A lot of people have this 'in-the-box'-thinking, they just expect content in chapters or romance routes. Most visual novels are like that, Holiday Islands is not. The open world and quest-system allows non-linear progression and it creates data-structures which are much harder to maintain/update. On top of that and contrary to the wrong assumption that I've read here, the game is still in early development. Things change internally to organize the game better. That is necessary and actually helps to speed up development due to having better scripts and a more effective workflow.
Btw the UI changes are a step towards a potential Android version. That's not playable yet. Menus are broken. The focus stays on PC/Linux/Mac.
Yes, Summertime Saga is another non-linear (and very good) visual novel. They have a team with excellent coders and they do it the same way. Hmm ... I wonder why.
(<- sarcasm) I have provided many options for a quick restart and play-through. Combined with RenPy's skip feature you can rush through the entire game in minutes.
I know some people just want to give feedback and please keep doing that, but in this case there is nothing I can do.
What pisses me off, are the people that accuse me of being lazy, down-rate the game or act entitled while lecturing me about how I could do things better, clearly knowing nothing about development. Sorry, not sorry! YOU ARE RUDE, UNFAIR AND WRONG! This is exactly why I have the reminder on the Patreon page. You guys are the reason why less dedicated developers give up! Things change during development. You cannot change car tires while it's moving. What I did with V0.10.x was not that, I changed the entire car engine.
If anyone is being lazy, it's the developers following the standard blueprint for a cash-cow Ren'Py visual novels:
Steal 3D assets, throw them in the 3D software, ignore all the clipping, no customization, bad light, render at low 720p resolution and low sample-rates to pump out as much content in the shortest possible time, release it in chapters/episodes because it's easy and fast to develop, instantly throw countless grainy sex-scenes at the player face without character backgrounds and story. After a shorty popularity burst the game just dies. There is no reason to play a game like that, you could just look at porn or rule34 animations. Good linear VNs are rare and the more popular ones tend to have ... how do it put this ... "controversial" content, things you would not be able to publish on Patreon these days.
Filling an open world with content takes MUCH longer and requires more complex logic, but it pays off on the long run. I think we can all agree on the fact that seeing these sex-scenes is something rewarding. I believe the player should 'work' for that reward, make the right decisions, learn what a character loves and hates, their backgrounds. There is way to much instant gratification in modern games. That's a problem. Why? Because fulfilling a desire without a delay makes a game boring, there is no goal anymore. There must always be a carrot on a stick to chase.
@swed57
Yep, you found a bug causes by a typo. It tries to call the function
choices instead of the correct name
choice. It's pops up when you try to speak to some characters while being tired (0 energy). The main-character is suppose to say something random about being tired and then block the dialog. For now it's safe to 2x click ignore, the game will continue and nothing will break.
There is nothing blocked or protected. It's just complicated due to the quest-system. Progress-data can be deeply nested inside a quest-object. Progress and/or available choices rely on many different things:
- Does the player have a quest or is it still hidden? / Was the player introduced to this character ('unhidden' Sympathy quest)?
- Was a quest-goal (part of a quest) or entire quest completed?
- Is a quest-goal hidden?
- How many 'things' did the player collect/do? (Sympathy-, Spider-, Baywatch-quests)
- Does the player have item X (inventory)?
- What time is it?
- Does the player have enough sympathy? (when you see a sympathy-check notification)
- Was variable y set? (that's mostly what other chapter based games use)
- Is the main character tired?
- more ...
@khaledd
This looks like a permission issue. Try:
- moving the game out of the Users-directory, avoid folder names with spaces, something like "C:\games\HolidayIslands-0101-pc\"
- run the game with administrator permissions
- wipe the savegame data (or move it temporary to check whether it fixes the issue)
The exception is in RenPy's scripts, not my scripts. When RenPy writes a savegame it tries two locations. In your case both options seem to be unavailable:
- <wherever you copied the game>\HolidayIslands-0101-pc\saves
- %appdata%\RenPy\HolidayIslands
If there is a folder %appdata%\RenPy\HolidayIslands-Episode1-1510310011 on the system, it's from version before 0.10.x and this can be deleted (unless you want to play old versions).
Can confirm this. My bad. Type exactly this console command (Shift+O) to fix that:
pamela.is_model("True")
It should show u'True' in the console after typing this.