Java Lilith's Throne [v0.4.10.7 Hotfix] [Innoxia]

[H3ntaiMaster69]

No, spreading it out means more areas have more content, so less walking between content in general.

Let's put this into perspective with a Pokemon example. Let's say you have to travel between Pallet Town and Viridian City like in gen 1 (Red/Blue/yellow versions within the Pokemon franchise). If you put all the battles inside Viridian or Pallet, you don't have any along the route in between, but if you put some of the battles currently in Pallet or Viridian onto the route in between, you now have battles available the entire time.

Now to put this into relation with Lilith's Throne, Pallet Town is the equivalent of Dominion because it is the starting town in both of those cases while Elis is the Viridian City of Lilith's Throne, the second town. The fields are the route in between the two towns.

All content is currently shoved into Pallet Town, or Dominion in LT terms, and none is on the route in between, the fields in LT terms. This means an empty walk between Pallet Town, Dominion in LT, and Viridian City, Elis in LT.

If we take some of that content out of Pallet Town, Dominion in LT, and put it on the route between, the fields in LT, we have content in all three areas and none of them are left empty, which is your concern.


That's where you're wrong, scenery in a text based game is the description in words. If only pictures counted, then no text based game has scenery, even the finished ones. The reason there is no textual scenery in the fields is because it is a blank canvas with no work done to it by the painter, or developer in this case, which is Inno.


As I said, I've only ever gotten it during an arcane storm. I typically fly or teleport, so I rarely get random encounters at all unless I do it intentionally.


Tell that to the cow morph who suddenly appeared out of nowhere, though that one wasn't random, it was scripted. It is possible that it was fixed by some of the under the hood stuff that the GitHub puts out on occasion, but seeing as my current source has not updated to beyond 3.13, I wouldn't be aware if it was.


Same


Nope, not at all at this time, but it might assuming this game ever gets an actual update.


Assuming Inno doesn't shoot down any attempt at core development that came from an outside source such as a modder.


I mean we've been waiting for over a year, so forever is not out of the realm of possibility.

"Assuming Inno doesn't shoot down any attempt at core development that came from an outside source such as a modder."
If she did that, it would piss off even the discord. It would legit be disastrous.

 

[alex2011]

"Assuming Inno doesn't shoot down any attempt at core development that came from an outside source such as a modder."
If she did that, it would piss off even the discord. It would legit be disastrous.

It wouldn't be the first time and it is bound to happen eventually given the Nyan rework as an example of what requested content quality is like.

 

[bobomb]

It wouldn't be the first time and it is bound to happen eventually given the Nyan rework as an example of what requested content quality is like.

I don't really think she can. Anybody who works on the core engine enough to advance the project is likely to fix the shit out of the code organization, bad coding, and bad development practices to the point that copyright law won't recognize it anymore. Just change the name to lilith's bone, and change the identifying terms enough and a modder should be in the clear. She tries to come hard at anyone they will point out that their game is as similar to hers as hers is to coc, and fenoxo will sue her into oblivion if she wins.

 

[alex2011]

I don't really think she can. Anybody who works on the core engine enough to advance the project is likely to fix the shit out of the code organization, bad coding, and bad development practices to the point that copyright law won't recognize it anymore. Just change the name to lilith's bone, and change the identifying terms enough and a modder should be in the clear. She tries to come hard at anyone they will point out that their game is as similar to hers as hers is to coc, and fenoxo will sue her into oblivion if she wins.

Anyone who has control over the GitHub as far as what pushes to it get accepted, which is Inno and only Inno in this case, can deny anything they wish. It would be a terrible idea, but Inno CAN do it.

The modders are only clear if they put out a separate version of the game themselves using a downloaded copy of the source, that's the only way Inno has no actual control over if something gets added.

 

[bobomb]

Anyone who has control over the GitHub as far as what pushes to it get accepted, which is Inno and only Inno in this case, can deny anything they wish. It would be a terrible idea, but Inno CAN do it.

The modders are only clear if they put out a separate version of the game themselves using a downloaded copy of the source, that's the only way Inno has no actual control over if something gets added.

That's what I was talking about.

 

[throbzombie]

Cities attract people from all over the place, though, so they're the perfect setting to have a lot of diverse content in a small area.

I disagree that cities are mostly nothing. Yeah, if you only ever travel between your home, your job, and the supermarket, you won't see much of what the city has to offer.

No matter how much interesting stuff is in a city, or how many different kinds of people live there, the overwhelming majority of a city's landscape will be residences and commercial areas, stuff that you wouldn't give a second glance., and any believable depiction of a city in media is going to reflect that. Dominion is especially boring because it's just contemporary London given a coat of steampunk/gaslight fantasy paint. Fashion, tech, culture, all of it is lifted straight from modern-day Britain, which makes sense given the lore, but there are more fantastical areas planned for the overworld, like a Mesoamerican-style city, and one that's underwater. I'd much rather be in those places than dreary streets of a modern-day metropolis.

But that doesn't mean it's not there. We explore a lot more in games than we do in real life, but for that exploration to be satisfying there have to be things to discover. The more you spread content out, the less interesting and satisfying you make that exploration.

That's why you don't spread it too thin. Besides, nothing says you have to explore the whole map. That's why it's called side content. I don't explore most of the map in games I play, but I like having the option to do so. Of course, with this game in particular, spreading out content may provide a much-needed boost to overall performance. Now, I'm not saying that staying in Dominion couldn't work, but when all these possibilities have been dangled in front of my face, suddenly I find myself wanting more than what we've got.

No, the reason there is no scenery is because this is a text-based game where the environment you find yourself in plays basically no role in anything.

That's like saying the environment in Lord of the Rings doesn't matter because it's a book.

 

[alex2011]

No matter how much interesting stuff is in a city, or how many different kinds of people live there, the overwhelming majority of a city's landscape will be residences and commercial areas, stuff that you wouldn't give a second glance. Dominion is especially boring because it's just contemporary London given a coat of steampunk/gaslight fantasy paint. Fashion, tech, culture, all of it is lifted straight from modern-day Britain, which makes sense given the lore, but there are more fantastical areas planned for the overworld, like a Mesoamerican-style city, and one that's underwater. I'd much rather be in those places than dreary streets of a modern-day metropolis.



That's why you don't spread it too thin. Besides, nothing says you have to explore the whole map. That's why it's called side content. I don't explore most of the map in games I play, but I like having the option to do so. Of course, with this game in particular, spreading out content may provide a much-needed boost to overall performance. Now, I'm not saying that staying in Dominion couldn't work, but when all these possibilities have been dangled in front of my face, suddenly I find myself wanting more than what we've got.



That's like saying the environment in Lord of the Rings doesn't matter because it's a book.

Exactly on all points, but to get into the dangled in front of us part, it is too late to think about containing the entire game to just Dominion. We have had the thought of 9 separate zones with their own settlements and content in the wild for far too long, ever since day one in fact.

The time to change to containing the game to only Dominion was in the first few releases or, better yet, in planning it. You can't just change the concept after multiple years and expect anyone but the most fanatically loyal players to accept it, which basically amounts to anyone who will accept anything given to them. Even the Discord isn't that fanatically loyal.

That could cause a whole bunch of issues from a mass uproar dwarfing the companion system commotion to a mass exodus that could rob the funding needed for this "full time job" to stay full time or even to the point where the project can no longer be sustained at all.

 

[SordidDreams]

No, spreading it out means more areas have more content, so less walking between content in general.

No, that's not what "spreading out" means.

If we take some of that content out of Pallet Town, Dominion in LT, and put it on the route between, the fields in LT, we have content in all three areas and none of them are left empty, which is your concern.

Yes, but then you have the same amount of content spread over a larger area, so you have to do more walking to get to it.
Or we delete the overworld map entirely, we put all content into Dominion, and then we have everything in one place and no tedious travel between distant locations at all. Sounds like a much better idea to me.

No matter how much interesting stuff is in a city, or how many different kinds of people live there, the overwhelming majority of a city's landscape will be residences and commercial areas, stuff that you wouldn't give a second glance., and any believable depiction of a city in media is going to reflect that.

Have you ever heard of Skyrim? The major metropolis in that game has like fifty people living in it, and I never heard anyone complain about it. It certainly didn't stop the game from being, y'know, decently successful. Point is, nobody cares about realism. Not in a fantasy game about vikings and dragons, and certainly not in a porn game filled to the brim with furries.

there are more fantastical areas planned for the overworld, like a Mesoamerican-style city, and one that's underwater. I'd much rather be in those places than dreary streets of a modern-day metropolis.

How do you reconcile your desire for suspension of disbelief with your desire to have a Mesoamerican-style city in the vicinity of London?

That's like saying the environment in Lord of the Rings doesn't matter because it's a book.

Only if you stop reading at "text-based game" and ignore the second half of the sentence. If you read the whole thing, no, it's not like that at all.

 

[H3ntaiMaster69]

I feel like most of this shitshow would be avoided if Inno would interact more with her community and being more transparent instead of shutting down comments on the blog, not saying anything besides an UWU kawaii emoji on the discord and sniping the people that criticise her.

 

[H3ntaiMaster69]

No, that's not what "spreading out" means.


Or we delete the overworld map entirely, we put all content into Dominion, and then we have everything in once place and no tedious travel between distant locations at all.


How do you reconcile your desire for suspension of disbelief with your desire to have a Mesoamerican-style city in the vicinity of London?


Only if you stop reading at "text-based game" and ignore the second half of the sentence. If you read the whole thing, no, it's not like that at all.

instead of an overworld map, why not just do a level select? dominion being the hub. It's way more realistic in terms of scope.

 

[H3ntaiMaster69]

Man, trying to talk about the overall developpment of the game, ways help and maybe fix the npc limit on the discord feels like smashing your head over and over on a wall.

 

[H3ntaiMaster69]

apparently the npc limit isn't an actual issue

 

[tehlemon]

Okay, I'm not going to reply directly to 90% of the stuff I missed and just say that I'm 100% calling bullshit on the performance claims we're getting from the discord users.

If I manually spawn in even a fraction of the NPCs that they're claiming the game's memory usage balloons out of control and the stats screen literally hard crashes. Each turn is taking 20-30 seconds. Trying to skip time cause the game to grey screen. And this is on a significantly more powerful computer than any of the people supposedly testing.

And just to be clear, I'm spawning in fully realized NPCs. No trickery of bullshit where the NPC isn't actually being kept track of but is somehow visually on the tile or any buggy bullshit like that. You can abolutely *not* get 1600 NPCs on the map at once, that screen shot is 100% nonsense. That stat isn't tracking NPCs that are currently in the world or in the save file, it includes all the child NPCs you've despawned.

I tested the save file on both the java and exe version of the latest releases. And I absolutely don't give a shit what versions from 6 months ago can do, because that's not the ones being updated any longer.

They can claim it's a bug and not an engine limitation, and sure, fair enough. Either way it needs to be fixed.

And this is all world NPCs. Lord fucking help you if you start adding in slave NPCs. The game gets unplayable fast enough that if you have a populated house you're better off avoiding spawning NPC when possible. And lord help you if you over populate the house, because slaves are far worse for the game than stationary NPCs that don't have actions that need to be tracked. The logging alone for the hourly actions, room tracking, relationship tracking, and other bullshit bloats the hell out the game's memory usage and save file in a hurry.

And holy fuck, you don't want to see this save file I tested this nonsense with. After only a few days of game time it's like 500mb. My save file is now 70% of the game directory's usage.

 

[throbzombie]

Have you ever heard of Skyrim? The major metropolis in that game has like fifty people living in it, and I never heard anyone complain about it. It certainly didn't stop the game from being, y'know, decently successful. Point is, nobody cares about realism. Not in a fantasy game about vikings and dragons, and certainly not in a porn game filled to the brim with furries.

Yeah, Skyrim is exactly what I had in mind when I made that post. The cities in Skyrim, if you can call them that, are tiny, and populated only by a handful of people. "Wasted space" is absolutely essential to making the environment feel real. I'm not going on a spergy rant about muh casuals nor the many, many other problem I have with that particular game on here, but I will say that popularity does not equal quality.

How do you reconcile your desire for suspension of disbelief with your desire to have a Mesoamerican-style city in the vicinity of London?

Realism and believability are two different things. I couldn't enjoy most works of fiction if they weren't. Also, it somewhat depends on how seriously the work takes itself.

Only if you stop reading at "text-based game" and ignore the second half of the sentence. If you read the whole thing, no, it's not like that at all.

No, it still makes perfect sense. The environment, as part of the setting, helps give that all-important context to the narrative, defining the boundaries in which all actions and events take place and shaping the characters who reside therein. The kind of person you'd come across in a city, any city, is different from who you'd expect to find in a jungle, for example, and what opportunities you have in either place will likewise be different.

I'd like to close by saying that LT being a porn game doesn't excuse it for criticism. It's trying to be a narrative-driven RPG as well as a porn game, so it deserves to be judged to the same standard as anything else. If it didn't have pretensions of being anything other than porn, I wouldn't bother picking on it like I do, and I don't think anyone else would.

 

[H3ntaiMaster69]

Okay, I'm not going to reply directly to 90% of the stuff I missed and just say that I'm 100% calling bullshit on the performance claims we're getting from the discord users.

If I manually spawn in even a fraction of the NPCs that they're claiming the game's memory usage balloons out of control and the stats screen literally hard crashes. Each turn is taking 20-30 seconds. Trying to skip time cause the game to grey screen. And this is on a significantly more powerful computer than any of the people supposedly testing.

And just to be clear, I'm spawning in fully realized NPCs. No trickery of bullshit where the NPC isn't actually being kept track of but is somehow visually on the tile or any buggy bullshit like that. You can abolutely *not* get 1600 NPCs on the map at once, that screen shot is 100% nonsense. That stat isn't tracking NPCs that are currently in the world or in the save file, it includes all the child NPCs you've despawned.

I tested the save file on both the java and exe version of the latest releases. And I absolutely don't give a shit what versions from 6 months ago can do, because that's not the ones being updated any longer.

They can claim it's a bug and not an engine limitation, and sure, fair enough. Either way it needs to be fixed.

And this is all world NPCs. Lord fucking help you if you start adding in slave NPCs. The game gets unplayable fast enough that if you have a populated house you're better off avoiding spawning NPC when possible. And lord help you if you over populate the house, because slaves are far worse for the game than stationary NPCs that don't have actions that need to be tracked. The logging alone for the hourly actions, room tracking, relationship tracking, and other bullshit bloats the hell out the game's memory usage and save file in a hurry.

And holy fuck, you don't want to see this save file I tested this nonsense with. After only a few days of game time it's like 500mb. My save file is now 70% of the game directory's usage.

Comments like this is WHY the comment section on the blog shouldn't be disabled, how the fuck are you gonna know they're lying if you're just a normal guy on the discord. It's litteraly an echo chamber filling more and more with yes men.

 

[SordidDreams]

instead of an overworld map, why not just do a level select? dominion being the hub. It's way more realistic in terms of scope.

I agree, I also made a suggestion along those lines:

You could easily expand the game with new zones without having an overworld map at all. You come to one of the exits out of Dominion, the game gives you a list of known locations you can go. You click your destination, you get a screen saying something along the lines of "after several days of travel, you arrive at your destination", and boom, you're there. Two clicks instead of several hundred. You could have random encounters built into that, and even exploration. A simple menu option along the lines of "explore the vicinity of <choose a known location from a list>" would do just fine for that, and if you find something interesting, it gets added to your list of known locations. I see no reason to have a map at all, all it'll do is just waste a load of your time by making you visit every tile to make sure you haven't missed anything.

Though I don't see that as necessary just yet, IMO there's still plenty of empty space within the current city map for many more interesting NPCs, quests, and locations.

 

[bobomb]

I reported Slaanesh Champion. Once. Some mod is sittin on you bro. I believe my exact words when I reported you was "I don't know if you guys care about this kind of behavior but if you do here it is". I ain't no pussy. I own my shit.

 

[SordidDreams]

"Wasted space" is absolutely essential to making the environment feel real.

In a game with graphics, yes. In a text game, hell no.

Realism and believability are two different things. I couldn't enjoy most works of fiction if they weren't.

You sure seem to draw the line in a weird place, though. Personally, my suspension of disbelief was irrevocably shattered when the game explained to me during the tutorial that clothes magically adjust size to fit the wearer. I'm sure that was done to enhance believability, to account for the gameplay mechanic of looting and wearing clothes from enemies of a different size than the player character, but for me it did the exact opposite. Wherever you draw the line between realism and believability, it seems to me LT is unconcerned with either.

The kind of person you'd come across in a city, any city, is different from who you'd expect to find in a jungle, for example, and what opportunities you have in both places will likewise be different.

If you can have a cave network under the city filled with glowing mushrooms and slime people, I see no reason why you couldn't have a similarly secluded area filled with jungle and populated by a primitive tribe or something. Like maybe an abandoned and overgrown botanical garden somewhere on the outskirts of the city or something. I'd certainly find that a lot more believable than having real jungle and a real Mesoamerican city fifty miles from London.

That is, of course, assuming that you even want to have a jungle area in the game. Which frankly I'm not really sure I do. I'd rather have one environment well fleshed out and filled with rich content than several sparse environments. Isn't that kinda the gist of the criticisms constantly raining on Inno's head, that doing one thing well is better than doing many things poorly?

 

[H3ntaiMaster69]

(Aight, last time that i rant about the discord.)
This right there, is a major problem. You can technically criticize the game, but you gotta accept that you're gonna get ganked by multiple people. It's a really, dare i say, toxic environment and either silences anyone that has problems with the game or drives them away.

 

[alex2011]

No, that's not what "spreading out" means.


Yes, but then you have the same amount of content spread over a larger area, so you have to do more walking to get to it.
Or we delete the overworld map entirely, we put all content into Dominion, and then we have everything in one place and no tedious travel between distant locations at all. Sounds like a much better idea to me.


Have you ever heard of Skyrim? The major metropolis in that game has like fifty people living in it, and I never heard anyone complain about it. It certainly didn't stop the game from being, y'know, decently successful. Point is, nobody cares about realism. Not in a fantasy game about vikings and dragons, and certainly not in a porn game filled to the brim with furries.


How do you reconcile your desire for suspension of disbelief with your desire to have a Mesoamerican-style city in the vicinity of London?


Only if you stop reading at "text-based game" and ignore the second half of the sentence. If you read the whole thing, no, it's not like that at all.

Yes, that is exactly what spreading it out means. The ONLY way any area becomes empty is to either have all content remved completely or for it to not have content in the first place. Example, the fields are currently empty.

Having the same amount of content spread out over a larger area means there is now content in areas that were empty before content was spread out AND it means there is no overcrowding of content in one area like there is right now in Dominion.

Deleting the overworld has not been an option for several years now, Inno waited far too long to do that. At latest, it should have been done in the first five releases of the game, not several years later. We've had this 9 area overworld dangled in front of us since day one and it is too late not to make the overall world that way.

Putting everything into Dominion is already a problem, there's too much there already, so that is not an option.

If you don't like 'tedious travel,' then the open world concept is simply not for you and you might want to find a different game because this game follows the open world concept. Skyrim, which you mention in your next reply, also follows this concept and there is A LOT of walking in it. There is A LOT more than just one city in Skyrim, it is an entire country sized area.

I feel like most of this shitshow would be avoided if Inno would interact more with her community and being more transparent instead of shutting down comments on the blog, not saying anything besides an UWU kawaii emoji on the discord and sniping the people that criticise her.

It would not, the shitshow is not because of a lack of interaction, but because of Inno's development practices. More interaction is actually a bad idea, what Inno needs to do is cut down on Discord time and add the new free time to development or to learning things in Java necessary for coding something in the game. This was stated multiple times on the blog and several times here as well.

instead of an overworld map, why not just do a level select? dominion being the hub. It's way more realistic in terms of scope.

Make them separately controlled areas that load independently, meaning NPCs would only count per level, that actually would be a pretty good solution to every issue revolving around the expansion of the game. Forget two birds, that's massacring the entire flock in one stone.

The problem there is separate areas like that can be more tedious and difficult from a technical development perspective, meaning Inno might not be skilled enough to handle it. Inno is already in over their head with this game as a whole, making it more complicated is the last thing they should consider.

Man, trying to talk about the overall developpment of the game, ways help and maybe fix the npc limit on the discord feels like smashing your head over and over on a wall.

I know how you feel on that just by lurking silently.

Comments like this is WHY the comment section on the blog shouldn't be disabled, how the fuck are you gonna know they're lying if you're just a normal guy on the discord. It's litteraly an echo chamber filling more and more with yes men.

People on the blog DID say things like this, that was one of the biggest actual complaints with the side content being crammed in is that it is quickly shrinking the number of random encounters a player can spawn before these symptoms appear.

I reported Slaanesh Champion. Once. Some mod is sittin on you bro. I believe my exact words when I reported you was "I don't know if you guys care about this kind of behavior but if you do here it is". I ain't no pussy. I own my shit.

As they should, Slaneesh is the one time I have seen so far where mod action is justified. He was going way too far with his comments.

In a game with graphics, yes. In a text game, hell no.


You sure seem to draw the line in a weird place, though. Personally, my suspension of disbelief was irrevocably shattered when the game explained to me during the tutorial that clothes magically adjust size to fit the wearer. I'm sure that was done to enhance believability, to account for the gameplay mechanic of looting and wearing clothes from enemies of a different size than the player character, but for me it did the exact opposite. Wherever you draw the line between realism and believability, it seems to me LT is unconcerned with either.


If you can have a cave network under the city filled with glowing mushrooms and slime people, I see no reason why you couldn't have a similarly secluded area filled with jungle and populated by a primitive tribe or something. Like maybe an abandoned and overgrown botanical garden somewhere on the outskirts of the city or something. I'd certainly find that a lot more believable than having real jungle and a real Mesoamerican city fifty miles from London.

In an open world game where 9 other areas are supposed to have content plus any settlements within like Elis, hell yes. Dominion isn't the only place in the game, there's an entire world planned.