Mod Lessons in Love Progress and Guide Mod [v0.45.0] [cckerberos]

[cckerberos]

Do you not write the update until public release, or do you just wait until public release to release your update? It'd be cool if you could work it out with Selebus to have the updated version of the mod somewhere that only subscribers can access, like subscriber specific Discord channels or his Subscribestar/Patreon. Definitely understand if that isn't possible.

The updates to the mod are mostly auto-generated at this point, so they're usually ready within ten minutes of the subscriber updates being released.

I would love to arrange something like that with Sel, but I don't think he'd be interested.

 

[RedSh]

I appreciate the invaluable assistance with the game. It's long enough that any sort of grinding is completely pointless.

It mostly worked, just went off the rails a couple of times (hints followed some of Ami's long-finished quests for some reason rather than the main line quests that it was supposed to be tracking) but save/exit Renpy/reload got things back on track.

I did miss Ayane's What_a_Wonderful_World scene (aka ayanelust15). Both Ayane and Kirin need a lust of 15, but the hint just keyed on Ayane's score. Loading the save, Ayane's Progress screen has What_a_Wonderful_World with a "Requirements met." note, except in the save Kirin is currently at 11 lust, so the full requirements are *not* met.


My primary suggestion would be on the Progress screens, put a max currently required value beside the current values for characters' love and lust scores. Towards the end of the game, the hint screen would often show just one line "Event <blah> Wait until <day>" which would be multiple days away. This obviously happens when further character events are gated by that main event and only after the main event passed would the character events then show up.

Now that's all well and good, but it would leave me in the situation where e.g. Chika would have an event after the main event needing a love of e.g. 50, but only be at e.g. 46 so I'd need to raise Chika's love by four to get the event. However, the Hint screen would only tell me that *after* the main event cleared, when I could have used the time between the current day and the main event to raise Chika's score.

Now, if Chika's last event needed a score of 55 and I'm at 46, but Touka's last event needs 10 and I'm at 12, it would be helpful to know that I should sink my spare time into Chika rather than Touka.

So, on the Progress screen you've got Name/Affection/Lust/Events columns like: Chika - 46 - 21 - 20/24.

I'd suggest that having: Chika - 46/55 - 21/20 - 20/24 would tell players that they don't any more lust, but could stand to raise Chika's affection to see those last few scenes.

As it stands, I ended up opening up Wiki to find the final events for each character and see the max required love and lust scores, so I could focus on meeting those scores when there was nothing better to do, and so I wasn't wasting time after main events before more character scenes would pop up.

Overall cheers, though -- wouldn't have wanted to play the game without it.

 

[cckerberos]

I appreciate the invaluable assistance with the game. It's long enough that any sort of grinding is completely pointless.

It mostly worked, just went off the rails a couple of times (hints followed some of Ami's long-finished quests for some reason rather than the main line quests that it was supposed to be tracking) but save/exit Renpy/reload got things back on track.

I did miss Ayane's What_a_Wonderful_World scene (aka ayanelust15). Both Ayane and Kirin need a lust of 15, but the hint just keyed on Ayane's score. Loading the save, Ayane's Progress screen has What_a_Wonderful_World with a "Requirements met." note, except in the save Kirin is currently at 11 lust, so the full requirements are *not* met.


My primary suggestion would be on the Progress screens, put a max currently required value beside the current values for characters' love and lust scores. Towards the end of the game, the hint screen would often show just one line "Event <blah> Wait until <day>" which would be multiple days away. This obviously happens when further character events are gated by that main event and only after the main event passed would the character events then show up.

Now that's all well and good, but it would leave me in the situation where e.g. Chika would have an event after the main event needing a love of e.g. 50, but only be at e.g. 46 so I'd need to raise Chika's love by four to get the event. However, the Hint screen would only tell me that *after* the main event cleared, when I could have used the time between the current day and the main event to raise Chika's score.

Now, if Chika's last event needed a score of 55 and I'm at 46, but Touka's last event needs 10 and I'm at 12, it would be helpful to know that I should sink my spare time into Chika rather than Touka.

So, on the Progress screen you've got Name/Affection/Lust/Events columns like: Chika - 46 - 21 - 20/24.

I'd suggest that having: Chika - 46/55 - 21/20 - 20/24 would tell players that they don't any more lust, but could stand to raise Chika's affection to see those last few scenes.

As it stands, I ended up opening up Wiki to find the final events for each character and see the max required love and lust scores, so I could focus on meeting those scores when there was nothing better to do, and so I wasn't wasting time after main events before more character scenes would pop up.

Overall cheers, though -- wouldn't have wanted to play the game without it.

Thanks for what is definitely the most in-depth feedback I've ever gotten on the mod!

I've fixed the requirements for What a Wonderful World.

Regarding your idea, I'll add something like this to the next version:



This is a kind of quick and dirty implementation, and I can see two potential issues. First, it's dependent on the list of each girl's events to determine their order and, especially in Chapter 1, event order can be a little more fluid. Second, it only checks that girl's event requirements when figuring out the scores needed for her next event. But I don't think that either of these issues will have much practical impact.

I'll make it an option that players can turn on and off.

 

[RedSh]

Sweet, thanks.

Sounds like you're not just displaying the max checked value for each girl_love/lust variable but rather what the next quest needs. Either way, the value isn't terribly useful when the Hint list is full of quests as it is up until there's only a few updates' worth of content to cover, so I wouldn't worry about it in the early game. It's really only supplemental information when the Hint screen isn't displaying something more relevant.

Speaking of...

After playing more towards the end of current content, I remembered a note in your changelog about not overwhelming the player with too many hints. When there are many events available for many characters, strict pruning is certainly the way to go to avoid overload.

On the flip side, though, I've completed everything up to v21, leaving only a couple updates' worth of events to go, with only around 8 characters having updated content and the Hint screen shows only a single quest which will only trigger sometime in the future. In this instance, perhaps easing off the pruning would be beneficial.

I haven't looked at your code so I don't know what is and isn't possible, but I'm sort of imagining rather than implementing pruning criteria and just displaying whatever events make it through, instead build a list and display the top X events. Or run the events through pruning and if the result is only a couple of events, then disable some/all of the pruning?

My suggestion for adding maximums to the Progress screen was, after all, basically a kludge to work around the fact that the Hint screen isn't telling me soon enough that there's an upcoming Chika scene that I'm short affection for.

For something completely different, is there a built in delay (e.g. a 1-2 second fade in) before displaying the 'n' Hint screen or 'p' Progress screen? If so, it's really annoying and checking what to select next ends up taking a significant fraction of the user's time when you've got Auto-Skip to speed through generic scenes.

Also, I don't know if it's possible in Ren'py, but can hotkeys be context sensitive such that e.g. 'n' will take you to the Hint screen but on the Hint screen, pressing it again would just take you back the to game? That way, the hotkey essentially becomes a toggle. I currently use 'n' or 'p' then Esc, but that's less user friendly than just 'n' + 'n'.

Finally, whatever you're doing with Happy event hints isn't working very well, at least for ones with oddball triggers like 'select wait until the next day' from the weekend afternoon's call menu. Selecting that is the adventure game equivalent of just clicking everywhere on the screen to hopefully find a hotspot as there seems zero reason to select it when there's almost always someone to call to bump up their points. As such, I keep having to look up the triggers from the Wiki. For example, I think a hint for XIII should show up after The Place She Falls Asleep At Night is complete.

 

[cckerberos]

Sweet, thanks.

Sounds like you're not just displaying the max checked value for each girl_love/lust variable but rather what the next quest needs. Either way, the value isn't terribly useful when the Hint list is full of quests as it is up until there's only a few updates' worth of content to cover, so I wouldn't worry about it in the early game. It's really only supplemental information when the Hint screen isn't displaying something more relevant.

Speaking of...

After playing more towards the end of current content, I remembered a note in your changelog about not overwhelming the player with too many hints. When there are many events available for many characters, strict pruning is certainly the wait to go to avoid overload.

On the flip side, though, I've completed everything up to v21, leaving only a couple updates' worth of events to go, with only around 8 characters having updated content and the Hint screen shows only a single quest which will only trigger sometime in the future. In this instance, perhaps easing off the pruning would be beneficial.

I haven't looked at your code so I don't know what is and isn't possible, but I'm sort of imagining rather than implementing pruning criteria and just displaying whatever events make it through, instead build a list and display the top X events. Or run the events through pruning and if the result is only a couple of events, then disable some/all of the pruning?

My suggestion for adding maximums to the Progress screen was, after all, basically a kludge to work around the fact that the Hint screen isn't telling me soon enough that there's an upcoming Chika scene that I'm short affection for.

For something completely different, is there a built in delay (e.g. a 1-2 second fade in) before displaying the 'n' Hint screen or 'p' Progress screen? If so, it's really annoying and checking what to select next ends up taking a significant fraction of the user's time when you've got Auto-Skip to speed through generic scenes.

Also, I don't know if it's possible in Ren'py, but can hotkeys be context sensitive such that e.g. 'n' will take you to the Hint screen but on the Hint screen, pressing it again would just take you back the to game? That way, the hotkey essentially becomes a toggle. I currently use 'n' or 'p' then Esc, but that's less user friendly than just 'n' + 'n'.

Finally, whatever you're doing with Happy event hints isn't working very well, at least for ones with oddball triggers like 'select wait until the next day' from the weekend afternoon's call menu. Selecting that is the adventure game equivalent of just clicking everywhere on the screen to hopefully find a hotspot as there seems zero reason to select it when there's almost always someone to call to bump up their points. As such, I keep having to look up the triggers from the Wiki. For example, I think a hint for XIII should show up after The Place She Falls Asleep At Night is complete.

1. Yeah, the value displayed is whatever the next affection/lust check requires (whether its in the next event or a few down the line). That seemed more useful than displaying the highest required value in general, though there would be kind of niche cases where having the highest value would be better.

2. I can't think of a way to go about this off the top of my head that would be efficient to generate and not require substantial reworking of the mod. Pruning only prevents hints from showing up for events that the player can't see yet, so while turning off pruning wouldn't be difficult in of itself, making sure that the hints that the player could then see would actually be helpful would be.

3. There's no intentional delay. It's just Ren'py being inefficient. Whenever the Progress or Hint screens are opened, the mod generates hints for all unseen events in the current chapter (Ren'py actually makes it do this multiple times for some reason unknown to me). On my computer, that means a delay of about a second at the beginning of a chapter that gradually becomes smaller progressing through the chapter.

4. I'll look into this, but the mod's hotkeys are based on a kludgy workaround, so it's a bit of a miracle that they work at all, to be honest. It would be nice, though.

5. You're right that something was wrong with Good Boy (a "False" should have been "True"). Otherwise, I feel like the current setup for Happy Events is fine.

 

[cckerberos]

A couple of notes ahead of the release of the 0.23.0p1 version of the mod:

1. RedSh I've gotten the hotkeys to act as a toggle under certain circumstances. They only seem to work that way when moving directly to a screen from the game, though. To give an example of what I mean, pressing "n" on the game will take you to the hints screen and pressing it again will take you back to the game. But if you go to the progress screen and then to the hints screen, pressing "n" won't do anything.

2. This was discussed above, but it's something I've been looking at fixing for a while: Ren'py preloads screens in advance in an attempt to reduce lag. This means that the mod's event processing gets run multiple times whenever you try to open the progress or hints screen. This is really inefficient and can result in a lag of 1-2 seconds when opening those screens, especially when you're at the beginning of a chapter. I'll be implementing an imperfect solution to this in the next release that will noticeably reduce the load time for those screens. The reason I say it's imperfect is because it doesn't play nice with saves. It doesn't break them or anything, but a lot of the time the mod will show incorrect information after you load a save. The way to fix this is by either doing something to change the state of the game (trigger an event or increase a girl's love/lust) or clicking the new "Refresh" button on the progress screen. This isn't ideal, but I think the benefits are worth it. If you don't, you can go to the options screen and turn off "reduced event processing mode" to go back to the way things were (this is also useful for comparing screen load times with it on and off).



TLDR: Click the "Refresh" button in the lower right-hand corner if the mod seems wrong after you load a save.

 

[Eeagle]

I get this error each time i try to save the game(And i can`t save beacuse of that)Right after 2 Chapter Frst Christmas auto-event chain ends.

Spoiler: BBCode

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[cckerberos]

I get this error each time i try to save the game(And i can`t save beacuse of that)Right after 2 Chapter Frst Christmas auto-event chain ends.

Spoiler: BBCode

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Sorry about that. I've never encountered that error myself, but I've uploaded a new version of the mod that should fix this (if I'm correct in my guess about what's causing it).

 

[Eeagle]

Sorry about that. I've never encountered that error myself, but I've uploaded a new version of the mod that should fix this (if I'm correct in my guess about what's causing it).

That did it, thank you.And thank you VERY much for the mod, it saves A LOT of time!

 

[jam5]

I can't wait for this update's guide. Selebus is really putting my brain to work today

 

[Eeagle]

Stop looking for answers event is not showing in the hints, refreshing and Save\load doesnt help, but after that events are showing normally.

 

[cckerberos]

Stop looking for answers event is not showing in the hints, refreshing and Save\load doesnt help, but after that events are showing normally.

Do you have a save file you can post? The hint for the event appeared normally when I tried to reproduce the problem.

 

[JJATH]

Next update coming soon?

 

[Eeagle]

Do you have a save file you can post? The hint for the event appeared normally when I tried to reproduce the problem.

Sadly, no.

 

[cckerberos]

Next update coming soon?

Not until the public release.

 

[JJATH]

Not until the public release.

Ah. I thought it was out.

 

[Eeagle]

Sweet tooth event is not showing, same as before, reloading and refreshing doesnt work.
But i have a save this time.

 

[Eeagle]

Tell me when(Sara) Also not showing.

P.s This is my sexless playthrough, lust events are all missed, maybe its because of that?

 

[cckerberos]

P.s This is my sexless playthrough, lust events are all missed, maybe its because of that?

Yes, this was why. The mod thought those missed events were incomplete, when it should have realized they were complete (just failed).

Here's an updated file that should fix the issue for you (put it in the progress mod folder).

 

[Darthjake]

Just wanted to drop in, and re-affirm that you are doing the lord's work, keep up the good work!