Ren'Py Abandoned Lab Rats 2 [v0.51.1] [Vren]

[Daxter250]

It's become fashionable in this thread to shit on Vren's attempts to make the game more fulfilling through a little added complexity for those who actually play the game instead of dumbing it down for the idiots who are just going to console their way to riches and faps anyway, but I've played with duties a little and they look like they're going to be good for increasing productivity, relieving maluses, and if he doesn't fix one exploit I think I discovered, creating mixed department employees lol. The game is easier since the contract patch by far. I haven't found an impossible contract in weeks, and I'm swimming in cash through legit play, allowing me more time to work on corrupting everyone

dont give me this bullocks. the game is not more complex with these updates, it's just more annoying to play now. wanna get new serums? well fuck you, you need weird points that you can only get via sexual intercourse. and you need to have TONS of it, so prepare for having a fucking monotonous gameplay for the next 10 hours until you get some serums that are interesting to play around with. but guess what, you can't experience with serums either, cause that also costs a lot of fucking points, so instead of playing around with different mixtures, you gotta grind your shit to get recipes that are of outmost importance to you and save the rest of your points for research. at the end you need every lil shit point for getting new recipes after all. some even cost over 3000, ffs.
vren accomplished it that intercourse in a game became a chore and a grind instead of a reward.

game itself is piss easy btw. this is in no way a management game. i have so much money, i could run that business for a 1000 years without making money and i wouldnt get broke. can't do shit with my money though, cause everything is paid with that new fucking point system!

and boy, without mods this game would break in half. so many broken shit, holy cow. so many errors. wanna have younger employees but smart? game breaks cause it was coded badly. employing a new girl? game can break. employing sis and mom? game can break or glitch out in hilarious ways like mom asdking you two employ her SECOND daughter.
trance state is at least okay'ish, but you gotta pay with those FUCKING POINTS again. more grind. im pimping girls now just for the points and not cause i wanna. i just press forward to get it over with, ffs. after doing it a fucking hundred times, you just danna wanna read the same crap they are saying over and over and over and over again. it's not fun, it's not sexy, it's piss boring. im glad that we have modders who repair vrens coding crap and actually add interesting bits and DEPTH to the game. or else the game ould simply be unplayable. fucking hell, even most rudimentory things like a useable gym to increase stamina is missing in vanilla. modders had to implement it. enslavment, hair cutter or changing thjat super stupid progression list in order to increase your stats. boy this is another chore. sell x amounts of meds in order to get +1 stat, flirt 20 times, fuck 9 different girls, generate 2000 research points... what time waster is this??? i basically just click for ten minutes straight by standing up, going to work and clicking "research2 for the whole day and then go back to sleep. rinse and repeat til i've done the task. another chore and time waster. absolutely uninspired task. once you are don with all your stats you can't do dogshit with the stat points you gain afterwards. you can however buy more useless statpoints by buying it with... can you guess? eh? ... those stupid points from earlier! hooray!

just so we are clear. i dont play with cheats here either.

edit: after reading Ambir 's post i agree that i was a bit too harsh on vren here. i apologize. take my ranting as a frustrated outcall for seeing a good foundation of a game that gets held back by the things i mentioned before.

 

[Naturalrice]

The update is clearly moving in the right direction. With the introduction of duties, Vren has introduced new thematic approaches in how the business upgrades, and distributing those upgrades in flavorful ways.

You clearly know how to play the game. Spend the money on getting new hires to do research instead of doing it yourself. If you're lacking clarity, trigger sex. It isn't hard. It's a porn game, and the porn has to be delivered. If you're so sick of watching the same scene, just do something else. Why even bother spend clarity on stats when the objectives are so easy to clear anyways. Why are you even rushing down the research tree, when you said yourself that your swimming in cash? Hire more people?

The game is a buggy mess, and most of the mechanics needed to make the game fluid isn't implemented yet, but it's clearly not unplayable and the framework is playable. most of the objectives can just be smashed through with skips/spending a day, unless you're actually sitting there reading through the text for the 200th time, it doesn't take that long to max stats with just objectives.
This update is a step in the right direction, and finally an update that makes me interested to see what mechanics Vren has planned.

Considering 90% of the games on this site is literally a click-fest VN with the same recycled plot/models, I don't even understand what you're comparing to. I do find it funny that you like the gym of all things that extends the bland sex scene longer for no reason, so that's something I guess. Seeing as the only reason you even need energy is in the early game to spam out conversation options.

 

[rorasaurus]

Daxter250

If you've got such a problem with the clarity points why dont you just cheat for them? or you know... maybe play another game?

 

[Daxter250]

Daxter250

If you've got such a problem with the clarity points why dont you just cheat for them? or you know... maybe play another game?

im waiting for our great modders instead. cause that game doesnt have just one problem (those charity points), it has dozens.

 

[Diconica]

It is after all python, i think it is doable.

I agree that the game has changed very much and that the code has not been restructured as you want it to be to build on it. We have seens duplicate code, code that works against other code, code that works around other code and so on. But this is not a problem of python or renpy it is a problem of modularity in code and cleaning the code if you change something.
I have seens strange things programmed in python that were really experiences where i would say, why?
I have seen python who had inbeded pearl scripts or other scripts in other languages. But over the last years nearly everyone changed it to python only or python based.
To stop this advertising of python lets come back to the game.

I' am not a betatester, but for me the changes sound like a nightmare to implement. In my opinion to implement this, without running in problems with code that works around or stand in opposition to other code a great amount of files must have been changed. If he had done this correctly it should have removed some of the older problems.
So i see two possible outcomes.
1) Everything works fine and he has cleaned his code and i will be deeply impressed after what he has done the last times.
2) Great parts are not working as intended and we see more code that is conflicting and questionable.

I will wait for now with judgement and hope for Option 1.

I was more looking at the performance of Renpy.
Renpy is built on pygame which is built using SDL2 however it nerfs the fuck out of SDL2 and what it does use it uses fairly poorly.
I built base copy of my C++ game engine to see how bad it was. in C++ with SDL2 I get 40,000 objects moving at 60fps.
Using python and pygame it is reduced to 1000 on the same system. Using python and SDL2 without pygame it s 3500 at 60fps.
Pypy unfortunately is not 3.10 compliant yet. So using it isn't a good choice either without rewriting a lot of code. While it is several times faster than cpython it isn't near C or C++. Why that is is an entire different discussion.

Then looking through Renpy's code there are a lot of things in it that also aren't exactly efficient.

Then you have the code written for the game stacked on top of that inefficient mess. Which is a mess in its own.
But lets pretend for a second Vrens code was written as good as it could be. You would still have a limited number of character and stuff that could be done and tracked because of the update system would eventually come to a crawl it would take a lot more time to load a page.

You have all the character schedules to update.
Effects on all the serums to track and keep track of.
Production
Sales
Events
Then updating any characters that have gone through a change or are affected by a serum or the player is interacting with.

Just that alone is going to run you into a limit.

But lets look at what else is poorly done. The way images are displayed. SDL2 has texture system which is much faster than simply using surface. Textures in SDL2 are hardware based buffered objects. Using SDL2 by itself would make it easier to display images. That said using python with opengl they good display the characters themselves it would make moding anding outfits and so on a million times easier give the render quality currently in use Opengl would be an improvement even with medium detail models.

Then you have stuff like displaying text. There are several ways to do it. You could use texture system to do it which uses the freetype library and create the textures as you need it. That's slow as hell. You could do the same thing directly with freetype again slow. You could pre-generate the textures store them and render the fonts as you need it. You could create an opengl context overlay it on top of the SDL2 window and render shaders and stuff through it. Again wastes performance.
Or you could create a glyph and font library system that can use the SDL2 texture system and render the font insanely fast.
I can go into details how that works but its for another discussion on a different forum.

 

[Diconica]

im waiting for our great modders instead. cause that game doesnt have just one problem (those charity points), it has dozens.

That's not going to happen. Take me for example. I mod the game because I simply choose to improve some stuff so I can play it.
Before I spend the time to rewrite his entire game and fix it I would release my own game. Why the fuck would I spend that much effort to change someone else's game for free when I can actually make money with the same amount of code.

If you have that much of a hard-on for not liking the shit suggest you learn to code and release your own mod.

 

[Daxter250]

That's not going to happen. Take me for example. I mod the game because I simply choose to improve some stuff so I can play it.
Before I spend the time to rewrite his entire game and fix it I would release my own game. Why the fuck would I spend that much effort to change someone else's game for free when I can actually make money with the same amount of code.

If you have that much of a hard-on for not liking the shit suggest you learn to code and release your own mod.

it is going to happen. but it will take some time. tristim already said that he and his team is working on it.

if mods ever throw their towel and dont mod this game anymore, the game is dead for me and i will just move on. end of story.

 

[sneezy_of_tie]

I was more looking at the performance of Renpy.
Renpy is built on pygame which is built using SDL2 however it nerfs the fuck out of SDL2 and what it does use it uses fairly poorly.
I built base copy of my C++ game engine to see how bad it was. in C++ with SDL2 I get 40,000 objects moving at 60fps.
Using python and pygame it is reduced to 1000 on the same system. Using python and SDL2 without pygame it s 3500 at 60fps.

Python is interpreted while C(++) is compile time just that already explains quite a bit of the speed difference. Then C is about the fastest human readable coding language (and C++ only about 10% slower). And when using C(++) the coder is expected to be responsible, where Python will either straight up not allow some of the 'dangerous' actions you can perform in C(++) or put a series of checks and balances on those that can in some cases result in code that is slower by a magnitude.

That said a a performance differential of a factor 40 is excessive.

 

[Diconica]

Python is interpreted while C(++) is compile time just that already explains quite a bit of the speed difference. Then C is about the fastest human readable coding language (and C++ only about 10% slower). And when using C(++) the coder is expected to be responsible, where Python will either straight up not allow some of the 'dangerous' actions you can perform in C(++) or put a series of checks and balances on those that can in some cases result in code that is slower by a magnitude.

That said a a performance differential of a factor 40 is excessive.

While python vs C/C++ makes up a factor of 10 when it comes to this.
There are two additional factors here. Pygame is less than a third the speed of just using SDL2 via pySDL2.
Then on top of that Renpy as I said has its own script added on top of Renpy, it font system and more also are limiting factors.

I already know I can get 3.5 times the performance using my own engine. with cpython and pysdl2. If Pypy was at version 3.10 that would get me to 10 times the peformance maybe 12 times. In truth pypy could be written better to get a lot closer to C/C++ performance. Other languages that have mode to compiled more can do it so there isn't much reason they can't.

There is very little if any difference in C and C++ compilation these days. 99% of the time the issue is with who is coding it.

 

[Diconica]

it is going to happen. but it will take some time. tristim already said that he and his team is working on it.

if mods ever throw their towel and dont mod this game anymore, the game is dead for me and i will just move on. end of story.

Well see.
They chose to reduce mod releases to every 2 months. Here is one of the reasons stated. https://f95zone.to/threads/lab-rats-2-mods.32881/post-7106124
They could have used that time instead to write a new base code system and get rid of stuff like you don't like.
Or they could have used it to tear out stuff like you are talking about. However, they didn't choose to do it.
As he pointed out it takes them time to merge the mod back into the base game each time.

It doesn't take me anyways near the amount of time it takes them to bring my mod to the new version.
While my mod is smaller that is less of a factor in this.
The biggest factor is how we approach the base code.
They created a bug fix / patch and then a mod that works on top of that.
Frankly, if I wanted to do what they are doing. I would scrap Vren's base code entirely then just use my own.
Right now they are each month they have to effectively reinvent the wheel just to keep dealing with his code.
If they made their own base code they could just use it. Then whatever types of changes he made they could implement it or not in their own code base in a proper manor.
That would be a lot less work than what they are currently are doing and they could use that extra time to make mod content instead of trying to re-implement their mod each month with Vren's crap code.

The thing is if they are going to go through all that trouble the only thing they need to call it their own game would be images after that point.

 

[Daxter250]

Well see.
They chose to reduce mod releases to every 2 months. Here is one of the reasons stated. https://f95zone.to/threads/lab-rats-2-mods.32881/post-7106124
They could have used that time instead to write a new base code system and get rid of stuff like you don't like.
Or they could have used it to tear out stuff like you are talking about. However, they didn't choose to do it.
As he pointed out it takes them time to merge the mod back into the base game each time.

It doesn't take me anyways near the amount of time it takes them to bring my mod to the new version.
While my mod is smaller that is less of a factor in this.
The biggest factor is how we approach the base code.
They created a bug fix / patch and then a mod that works on top of that.
Frankly, if I wanted to do what they are doing. I would scrap Vren's base code entirely then just use my own.
Right now they are each month they have to effectively reinvent the wheel just to keep dealing with his code.
If they made their own base code they could just use it. Then whatever types of changes he made they could implement it or not in their own code base in a proper manor.
That would be a lot less work than what they are currently are doing and they could use that extra time to make mod content instead of trying to re-implement their mod each month with Vren's crap code.

The thing is if they are going to go through all that trouble the only thing they need to call it their own game would be images after that point.

i actually don't know why you are bring in your bug fix into the talk. but i guess good for you that it doesnt take you long? i'm still talking about mods... like, actual mods, not patches. feel free to help modders out so they can get things done faster if it doesnt take you any time at all to bugfix. that being said, if you totally revamp the code you are not making a mod anymore as its not based on the vanilla foundation, you are creating a new game at that point. i read that they deliberately dont want to do that to not get in any conflict with vren. personally i would also just screw it and just do it on your own at this point, but its their decision and i respect that.

 

[Draculesti]

99% of the time the issue is with who is coding it.

This we can both totally agree on.

For enterprise enviroments that i have seen it have been a while that i have seen C+ oder C++ scripts. If it is really simple it may be a shell script. All other things evolve around python and ansible. But i can accept that i have a narrow view because my main part is automation, and maybe i'am in the wrong here.

edit: I also agree with you that a fresh start with everything that fits what you like to have in the game should be easier than changing everything every update because vren keeps adding and changing key mechanics.

 

[ruyin]

How to make mother quite her job and join MC`s HR ?

Anyone? I am eager to learn this as well.

 

[dalzomo]

Anyone? I am eager to learn this as well.

Disclaimer: I am playing the 50.0 beta, but Vren didn't say anything about changing this 'quest' so it should be the same in 49.2

First you need to have like over 20something Love to even have the conversation, which leads to three options:
-"You hate working there!" Requires: Hates working, Hates HR work (achievable through trances if this is your choice)
-"I'll take care of us." Requires: Make her your girlfriend (requires over 60 Love and its own quest, which I'm not going to cover here because that's not the question)
-"You can work for me." Requires: Free employee slot
-plus "Nevermind."

The most straightforward way to hire her for your own HR is to have a free employee slot so I went ahead and got one and advanced to three more options:
-"I want you by my side." Requires: Make her your girlfriend
-"We'll see each other so much more often." Requires: 50 Love
-"I'll pay you more than they do." Which was available to me. If it's unavailable to you, the requirement should show up
-plus "Nevermind."

I chose "pay more" and that led to a few lines where MC promised double what she's making now, and she accepted and you're prompted to hire and assign her to a department. I chose HR and in my game she began with a daily pay of $67 and work experience level 3 (new mechanic) which means she can take on 3 duties. I gave her the Obedience and Sluttiness raising ones (in addition to her normal work duty in HR), where for each of the duties each turn it picks an employee with lower score than Jennifer and raises them by one, but she had a handful of other duties available. They were: Mandatory Breaks (raises her happiness by 1/turn), Extra Paperwork (does all her own paperwork so she won't lower business efficiency each turn), Social Media Advertising (produces Marketing production for social accounts you know of. Unavailable in vanilla for Jennifer until Vren adds them for family, which he will do through advancing Lily's Insta storyline, eventually...), Extra Workload (+25% work results, but -2 Happiness/turn), and another policy like the two I picked except for Love instead of Obedience or Sluttiness

 

[Diconica]

This we can both totally agree on.

For enterprise enviroments that i have seen it have been a while that i have seen C+ oder C++ scripts. If it is really simple it may be a shell script. All other things evolve around python and ansible. But i can accept that i have a narrow view because my main part is automation, and maybe i'am in the wrong here.

edit: I also agree with you that a fresh start with everything that fits what you like to have in the game should be easier than changing everything every update because vren keeps adding and changing key mechanics.

When you say automation you mean like industrial such as PLCs or general software.

I wouldn't say you are wrong so much as that's probably what you seen where you worked. For me it has depended on the company or agency I worked for and what they were doing.

 

[gomesa]

how do i put them in trance fast ?

 

[Daxter250]

how do i put them in trance fast ?

have high suggestability and make em cum countless times. best combo imo is high fuck+foreplay skills and then you pound em and switch to fingering until you can pound em again. since you have 200 stamina compared to maybe 140 stamina with drugs you will come even in stamina when you are done with her.

having an orgams trigger also helps as it triggers trance mode with high suggedtability, but for that you need her in trance and pay a lot of those points for that to get access to that trigger. once you have it you can use it on a daily basis.

highest trance i got was very deep trance. i think it cant go higher.

 

[Inkheepurr]

So... the guide pdf is apparently inaccesable.

 

[Diconica]

So... the guide pdf is apparently inaccesable.

They are having server issues currently. A certificate on the server has expired. Once it is dealt with it should be available.

 

[lewd_gamer_31415]

have high suggestability and make em cum countless times. best combo imo is high fuck+foreplay skills and then you pound em and switch to fingering until you can pound em again. since you have 200 stamina compared to maybe 140 stamina with drugs you will come even in stamina when you are done with her.

having an orgams trigger also helps as it triggers trance mode with high suggedtability, but for that you need her in trance and pay a lot of those points for that to get access to that trigger. once you have it you can use it on a daily basis.

highest trance i got was very deep trance. i think it cant go higher.

Each orgasm checks against suggestibility + 1 for each previous orgasm. So if you have a 20 suggestibility drug and they have climaxed 5 times, it checks against 25%. So while possible without suggestibility drugs, it is more difficult.

So you really want to maximize suggestibility drugs and then maximize orgasm count. The former is easy: research higher level suggestibility, improve your serum level quests, which will then give you "Mind Control" trait later which is 75 suggestibility.

To maximize orgasms, you want:

• -20 max arousal trait
• +20 energy trait
• Avoid -20 energy/+sluttiness
• +Foreplay skill on her (either by serum or natural/trance-induced)
• +Oral skill for you if you don't have the traits above
• +Vaginal skill for you if you do

If you have the traits in a drug, you can give it to her twice by command. That would put her at 60 arousal to orgasm and 140ish energy. And with enough foreplay, she can get you aroused again in one turn. (You are considered "erect" at 10 arousal.)

So early game, when I don't have access to all the traits: "Cunnilingus" until you have about equal energy, then "Against the Wall" until out of energy. Last I checked, it has the best ratio of MC energy to partner arousal.
Late game with those traits in serums and applied twice, she's going to go insane quickly. Because the "Bored with this" penalty kicks in when her arousal > required sluttiness for a task, and her max arousal before orgasm is so low, you won't hit the penalties for much past foreplay. And you will quickly get her to the point of a climax every action.
So I usually go with "Anal Doggy" or "Against the Wall" or "Piledriver" depending on what sluttiness level you want to get her to.

And yes, "Very Deep Trance" is the highest level (25% cost reduction). Would not mind a mod for 12%/6%/3%/etc.

I prefer to play without using suggestibility drugs except where explicitly required (such as the Trigger Word Orgasms requiring 50 or whatever), so achieving multiple orgasms in a "session" is the way I get someone into a trance.