naughtyroad

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Jan 8, 2019
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Could someone upload the file w06d07_s03.rpy? please!
I'm gonna take a stab in the dark here and guess you did not see this message in the OP?

1639185948880.png

Please let me know if that solves your issue so I don't have to drop everything and spend the rest of my evening testing to see if this is an actual problem that could affect others and roll out a hotfix, cheers! Note, you'll have to restart chapter 6, it's that bad.

Mumbles: this fucking piece of shit walkthrough mod is getting to be a real support nightmare.
 

CrazyRabbit

Engaged Member
Oct 30, 2019
2,207
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Just finished the chapter 6 and goddamn that was good.
Always a peak writing skill, that's a given ; the twist about Ethel being the one who died :)cry:), Denise's scenes and her fears (terrifying, those were !), and the final scene with Macy.... everything was perfect. Lacking bears but aside from that, a masterpiece once again.

I can't wait for next chapter and being reunited with the girls. A big thanks to naughtyroad
 

Portgas6620

Member
Feb 19, 2020
185
621
I'm gonna take a stab in the dark here and guess you did not see this message in the OP?

View attachment 1539285

Please let me know if that solves your issue so I don't have to drop everything and spend the rest of my evening testing to see if this is an actual problem that could affect others and roll out a hotfix, cheers! Note, you'll have to restart chapter 6, it's that bad.

Mumbles: this fucking piece of shit walkthrough mod is getting to be a real support nightmare.
I'm not using the mod in this version. The error continues if I used it in previous versions?
 

naughtyroad

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Jan 8, 2019
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I'm not using the mod in this version. The error continues if I used it in previous versions?
Your guess is as good as mine honestly.

What that piece of trash does is basically overwrite every line of code from chapter 4 and 5 with complete duplicates of their own, so they can put a color or a menu line. That's a few hundred source files? Some of which rolled back to versions 1.5 years old by now?

Writing some code right now to detect someone fucking that badly with my source files and exiting the game if they did, with a warning, because it's reflecting very poorly on my coding skills.

Please make sure to drop by the original mod maker and tell them how their quick-and-dirty churn-one-out, collect-some-coffees-and-run programming skills fucked up your game, it's important feedback to help them grow as content creators.

edit: Did I ever tell you guys how much I hate the walkthrough mod?
 

gmarvy

New Member
Jul 14, 2017
1
2
What a great chapter, thank you naughtyroad for sending us on the feels rollercoaster once again :)

Some thoughts: I felt the Macy lovemaking scene could have included some shots from the MC POV, especially a direct face-to-face moment (like previous Macy kissing scenes). There ended up being a bit of an emotional disconnect between me and the characters and lost a bit of the intimacy of the scene for me.
I was also eager to see how you would hide the MC's head in these complex scenes, an interesting technical challenge to be sure :)
 
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InvaderZim

Member
Jun 18, 2019
316
1,069
So is that a no?
There is a walkthrough, but as you can easily see if you glance at the first page, it thoroughly mess up the game and leave it unplayable. As also stated, on the first page as well, you do not need one. The dev does not want to screw you over, so you have to really be a dick to the people in the game, or flat out refuse to pursue interactions with them to miss out on stuff. There are no lockout paths you can accidentally drop into. The point the dev makes about no walkthrough is that you can impact your own personality to the dialogue, what you choose will be referenced in later interactions and so on.
 

goinghome1450

New Member
Aug 23, 2016
5
12
It's often a personality type thing, Naughty. For quite a proportion of people (there are only 16 Myers Briggs Types) every choice is a challenge - one of the choices is optimal and the others are not. And for some types that is an enjoyable challenge, while for others it makes them fearful that they may have chosen the sub-optimal option. It isn't just other games that have conditioned them to feel this way, but their cultural and social upbringing, environment, etc. Many people find choices stressful, and walkthroughs offer a simple reassurance, diminishing that stress (rational, justified or not) makes for a more relaxed, enjoyable experience.

Many of the choices can mean missing a joke, some can mean missing a scene, and in a few cases possibly an entire path, and there's not necessarily any way to know beforehand which of those types of choice has just been presented. You'd be amazed what anxiety that can cause in some people. And that's an actual percentage of people, not a fraction of 1%.

Now, that doesn't mean you have to have a walkthrough, or even colour-code your choices for severity or importance, or make any allowance at all. It's your project, and you get to choose who it appeals to, and who it will frustrate. I'm just pointing out it's a legitimate thing, and a real thing, and might be something to consider anew with an understanding of the perspective.

I agree that this update doesn't need a walkthrough (at least I hope I didn't miss anything). However, some people have a very limited amount of time they can spend playing these games and a walkthrough helpls them to know they aren't missing things. I don't have the time to do multiple playthroughs and it pisses me off when I learn that I missed whole story lines because I made a choice hours back in a game and know there is no way I'm ever going to have the time to go back and follow another path. I have zero anxiety about making choices. I just don't want to waste my time looking for the correct random choice combo that gets to certain scenes.

Thanks for the entertainment. And thanks to the people that compile the walkthroughs that help people like me optimize their time.
 

fried

Almost
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Nov 11, 2017
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I agree that this update doesn't need a walkthrough (at least I hope I didn't miss anything). However, some people have a very limited amount of time they can spend playing these games and a walkthrough helpls them to know they aren't missing things. I don't have the time to do multiple playthroughs and it pisses me off when I learn that I missed whole story lines because I made a choice hours back in a game and know there is no way I'm ever going to have the time to go back and follow another path. I have zero anxiety about making choices. I just don't want to waste my time looking for the correct random choice combo that gets to certain scenes.

Thanks for the entertainment. And thanks to the people that compile the walkthroughs that help people like me optimize their time.
This is a long installment - making choices that cut off the office-related hijinks, additional conversation or H-scenes with the wards, etc. because you are running low on time = will miss both meaningful content related to the story AND plenty of H-scenes of a very high quality.

The choices offered are mostly obvious and allow the player to decide if they want to take one tack with a character (i.e., non-destructive choices that don't fully impact the relationship, but maybe some additional content here or there) or whether they want to cut out deeper involvement with characters, altogether. But there are no "fatal" choices, per se: i.e., the game goes on, however limited your interest in one or more sets of characters might remain + you can't permanently piss off a character based on your choices.
 
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naughtyroad

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(...) And thanks to the people that compile the walkthroughs that help people like me optimize their time.
Yeah, thank the the modder that did a drop-and-run, because they implemented it using a method that is utterly unsustainable. The did this by duplicating just about every source file in the game in my code, thus ensuring that every installation on a higher version will undo all fixes and changes there and cause all sorts of unpredictable behavior. Any developer worth their salt knows this is a Problem, which means they didn't care, or they didn't understand what they were doing. Make sure to buy them a coffee, they made sure that link was clearly visible when the pooped that low effort monstrosity out.

Unmaintainable why? Well come the next update, they'd have to go over all that code they duplicated and merge the changes made in the update into their code. Or reapply their changes into a fresh copy of mine.
That's a goddamn job and a half I can tell you. There's about 400 source files for the "story", most of which range from a few hundred and several thousand lines long (especially in the later chapters), and have 1.500 menu's that need to be edited (that's the method they use). Even if you understand your tooling, that takes you exectly "let's put up the kettle, we'll be at this for a while" hours.

It's pretty clear why the first modder declined to continue the mod, and allowed the second modder to take over. It's also pretty clear that the second modder didn't even consider merging chapter 4 changes in, and by ignorance or laziness just hooked another boxcar to this three-part train wreck-in-waiting.

Even if I know I should just shrug and move on, it really hurts somewhere deep inside when you spend months upon months trying to make something that is a good as you can make it, and then see someone put out some low effort crap that still has everyone cheering for them. And then when it inevitably goes tits up by their ineptitude somewhere down the lilne, everyone turns to me and goes "yer shit's broken, fix this."

They're fucking with my baby, they're fucking up your saves and introduce errors and glitches that diminish your experience I spent so much time on, and they're sullying my name in the process.

But keep applauding these modders that can't be bothered to put in an effort to do it in a right and sustainable way as they churn these mods out and rake in the coffees.

download.gif

(just to clarify, I don't hate walkthrough mods in general, and I'm willing to turn over my own development documentation about choices in the game and what they do, if they can show that they can implement it in a maintainable way, for instance by plugging in to ren'py's translation functionality.
I've already passed it to the guy that did a brilliant effort on the pdf walkthrough last time and I'm sure he'll come through soon as he can).

(edit: goinghome1450 I know you meant to include the pdf mod makers as well, but this was too good a line not to latch on to to launch a rant. I hope you'll forgive me for some dramatics).
 
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dfccakelove

New Member
Dec 27, 2016
13
31
could have included some shots from the MC POV, especially a direct face-to-face moment
I didn't even think of it at the time and thoroughly enjoyed the scene anyway but I agree with this in part, it's not even a matter of feeling an emotional disconnect though, I just really enjoy the face-to-face moments and I think they could be a boon in these scenes.
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A bit of an semi-related side thing, all the lingering closeups in Solaris (2002) are incredibly lovely to me.
 

moose_puck

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Sep 6, 2021
740
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I know you meant to include the pdf mod makers as well, but this was too good a line not to latch on to to launch a rant. I hope you'll forgive me for some dramatics).

Naughty, I think a large part of the issue with people's reliance on walkthrough mods here is a result of how most devs using Ren'Py structure their scripts in a similar manner. I touched on this in my review here... how this game is not set up like a logic diagram of choices. Unfortunately, that is how so so many devs do things with Ren'Py. I think that is because, for the most part, these are all amateurs breaking into the VN world, and most of them are not professional or even experienced amateurs in doing any creative writing. So they make a story outline up, then build the scripts so that you have to follow certain choices. If you laid it out on paper, you'd have this logic diagram with AND, OR, NAND gates, etc... and only one path possible to reach the "main lewd scene" These devs will spend hundreds of manhours on their renders (rightfully so) but then knock off the code in like a week. It's one of the reasons I use cheats a lot or I unlock the console and play with code directly - because I want to be able to skim past this poor coding and just get the "story" Heck, these are supposed to be simple games and/or visual novels.... we're not trying to unlock the Da Vinci Code here!

So most of the users here have been conditioned to think there's only one correct choice to get to the "juicy bits" so to speak, lol.

You, on the other hand, are actually a damn good writer. And you seem to have a firm grip on programming as well. I even fell into the trap of thinking your story would be similar in construction and so I was making saves at almost every dialogue choice when I first played LoML back in Sept. But then I started experimenting by deliberately going back and trying both paths out and I noticed that what you do, in most cases, is give the MC multiple dialogue choices that change the next several lines of dialogue. But then, in most cases, you'll guide the story back to where it needs to go. Some of those choices will impact dialogue later down the road, but very few choices will lock you out of the main content. So your MC choices are not there to influence forks in the story... instead, they are there to make subtle dialogue changes, so as to ENHANCE the story for the player by giving them the feeling that they are an active participant in the conversation.

This blew me away when I realized what you were doing. Not only by how much better it made the story, but by how much effort must have went into this.

If I was ever going to write a walkthrough for this game, I think it would be less then a single page long. Just those few major forks in the game that relate to the side characters and whether you want to "play" with them. Everything else, i would just write "Do what you think is right... there are no wrong choices"

PS: I have a confession to make. I did a really stupid thing back in September when I was playing 0.6.1 - I got to, I think, it was the end of Chapter 4, then your "Light of My Life" end-of-chapter background came up. I'm a little quick on the CTRL button when I want to bypass some loading or transition screens, but I didn't realize that you had disabled the ability to skim past these end of chapter transitions. So... stupidly ... I thought I had reached the end of the current content. I missed out on the whole Chapter 5!! :eek: It wasn't until I played this version the other night that I had realized my mistake, lol. On the plus side... I had a huge amount of new content to enjoy!
 
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