Java Lilith's Throne [v0.4.9.9] [Innoxia]

[HippoDog420]

Lol spends months slacking on progress, then talked about how she needs several weeks of break. 10/10

 

[alex2011]

So how are we supposed to make money in the game the right way? I mean I could save scum the Casino and get into fights and steal people's clothes and sell them but both really seem like exploits and not the intended money making way.

There's no real set intended way to make money, only a selection of options to do so with.

So, Inno has finally decided to take "a couple of weeks off" to rest and recover. Given the fact we usually get a release a month, that means we're looking at a month and half, at best, without new content. Two months, if you want to be more conservative. I can already imagine some people rolling their eyes at my post "Inno is not doing well, yet all you care about is more content, more releases!". Which I guess is kind of fair.

I wonder if this is beginning of the end for this game... at least she didn't just disappear without saying a word this time around. I'll give her that, at the very least. On the flip side, hey, a few Field-oriented morphs are in the game now. I could think of a few roleplay scenarios with a piggy-morph. If you want to be optimistic, maybe it's a sign that Inno actually intends to release the Fields sometime this year.

And this is content that is already multiple months late after the last time Inno said it was almost ready, as a lie, and almost three years total since it was initially supposed to be ready, in 2018, before the delays really started to set in against this very specific part of development.

I normally say that a dev should take all the time they need, but devs don't normally take this long to get this far. This is the absolute worst time to take a break and only serves to add more negativity to Inno's record, which is already abysmal.

The reason for Inno's break, as stated by Inno in the most recent post, is stress related. That stress likely comes from all the negativity. Inno would not be getting this negativity if they actually tried to act like they said they were going to, but Inno is making absolutely no effort to 'treat development like a full time job' let alone actually make real progress. In other words, all this stress is entirely their fault to begin with.

I would agree with your assessment, we aren't just looking at the beginning of the end for LT, we are looking at the developer forcing the game on life support when it is already dead.

My current implementation rolls on permission settings. Right now, every call to those methods hinges on two things: permission checks and location checks. By relocating those two checks into the permissions method and only looping through slaves who meet said permissions, it would drastically (and properly) reduce the number of slaves to only the number that have the potential to pass those checks. The only reason all of them can't be placed in permissions is some of those checks rely on time passed which is on a per-tile basis. It's not perfect, but it should cover every applicable slave without covering every slave.

You technically know how many encounters you need at a minimum because the map is static, but the problem lies in repeatable encounters and rare encounters (e.g. Enforcer encounters), and encounters that you can remove (e.g. alleyway attackers) which would be replaced with something else.

I don't really have the time to invest into solo reworking an entire game engine though. I've got a fulltime job as well lol

Hey, take your time and do what you can and want to get done. We'll be happy with whatever fixes you can come up with. Your life comes first and foremost, so if you need to stop, don't worry about it. It would be nice if you would let us kknow if and when that happens, though.

Please tell me Inno isn't actually still collecting money from patreon and subscribestar for this? She/he/whatever has promised 0.4.0 for like half a year, and has constantly cut down on promised content, while collecting thousands of dollars. It's kind of ridiculous, it's not quite as bad as what the New Life dev does, but still pretty shitty. I'm kinda pissed and i'm not even a subscriber of Inno, I feel bad for the people who actually pay for this.

Hasn't Inno been putting things off for like half a year, and there are still some simps supporting her/him/helicopter, it's pretty silly. I bet it'll come out by June at the earliest.

They are still collecting and I feel bad for the subscribers who don't know any better as well, not so much the ones who did it knowing what Inno is like.

I could definitely see June as the earliest, but now I'm going to say December...3034.

If this is true, I'm terrified of how it'll be going forward.

As am I, this game does not deserve this kind of mistreatment.

Man, where are the bookers who create bets? I am actually interested in doing a betting pool when/if 0.4.0 comes out.

Would not at all be one of the options?

Where do i find the rose for rose

Those are in rose bushes, which are in the parks, which are the tiles with the green icons outside the mansion.

 

[PussyPassAnon]

At this point, I think people are just here for the entertainment value in watching Inno fail.

I mean, that's funny and all. But... we're not getting a game, if this keeps up. Are we crabs in a bucket? Or, are we genuinely interested in seeing the game succeed?

 

[tehlemon]

At this point, I think people are just here for the entertainment value in watching Inno fail.

I mean, that's funny and all. But... we're not getting a game, if this keeps up. Are we crabs in a bucket? Or, are we genuinely interested in seeing the game succeed?

I mean, I'm definitely here for the entertainment of watching what happens. We're in a pandemic and I'm bored. Only so much Blaseball I can watch.

But I definitely wouldn't say I'm rooting for failure. I have low expectations, but I'd be ecstatic if Inno could exceed them.

But I still won't avoid laughing at how stupid this is just because it might be stressing Inno out. We're her potential customers. If my potential customers were laughing at my failure, I'd be pretty stressed out too. But I wouldn't be taking a month off.

Edit;
And you know what's funny about all this, we know Inno watches this thread. She turned off comments on her blog to stop potential customers seeing the delays being laughed at, but she couldn't resist watching what we're saying. So some might say that we're partially responsible for her being stressed. And sure, we are. But damn, I just checked how a few other sites that talk about the game are reacting, and we're wayyy nicer than any of them.

I wonder if she's watching those lol

 

[PussyPassAnon]

You make fair points. Innoxia did bring this on themselves. Won't hire help, but can't handle the job alone? Yeah, all people can really do is poke fun and criticize. It's just a really sad situation to watch unfold.

 

[throbzombie]

At this point, I think people are just here for the entertainment value in watching Inno fail.

I mean, that's funny and all. But... we're not getting a game, if this keeps up. Are we crabs in a bucket? Or, are we genuinely interested in seeing the game succeed?

I'm definitely a "crab". No one with an IQ above room temperature would actually believe in this trainwreck.

 

[Taak]

Meanwhile fields have been getting "worked on" since 2020

Dude, fields were "worked on" since 2019 if not earlier

 

[Sarkath]

The hardest part of my own project is creating the massive file parser needed to allow modded content of all types. The absolute last thing I would have thought to use is fucking JavaScript.

I started experimenting with something similar in .NET (though in fairness my experiment is more of an alternative to Twine/SugarCube than anything else) and just ended up rolling my own parser.

Inno kinda rolls their own parser, though that's more to handle the #IF/#ELSEIF/etc stuff.

You must be registered to see the links

.

I did consider using HTML/CSS for the main text output, just to make formatting super easy and modifiable with CSS. Just convert the presentable scene to HTML and toss it on screen, super easy. I'm going to bet that she thought the same and then just expanded from there.

I'm probably going to wind up taking that approach with my experiment as well, mostly due to the annoying lack of stable cross-platform .NET UI toolkits (being someone who primarily uses Linux/macOS and loves C#/.NET is rough at times, heh).

And yeah, LT essentially uses the JavaFX WebEngine for most of its display magic, and naturally that does involve a fair bit of frontend JavaScript to propagate JS events back to Java. The part that's really funny is that the conditionals handling is actually done using a separate JS interpreter! JavaFX uses JavaScriptCore, but LT's conditional parser uses Oracle's Nashorn JS engine.

And I'm not at all surprised she didn't implement any sanity checking into the system. A lot of this stuff seems to be her grabbing the simplest solution for the current problem and then running with it way further than she should. Adding sanity checking isn't simple.

There is some, but that mostly involves disabling the really spicy stuff. I haven't gone over it too thoroughly yet, but the main reason I couldn't easily write a random file into /var/tmp (or pretty much anywhere the user has access to in *nix, or somewhere on the same drive in Windows) is simply because the save game function (which is in one of the classes exposed to JS) is a static method, and there doesn't seem to be a way to access static methods with how the JS engine is configured.

If It Were Me™ and I had to implement it in this way, I would have created a barebones, purpose-built JavaScript API rather than directly exposing game classes. If this API were only intended for conditionals and checking game state (I'm not sure as of yet, to be honest), I would have ensured that it had access to exactly zero setters.

I'd ask you where in the project files all of this is, but I trashed my copy of the games source code a few days ago and I don't care enough to redownload it lol

Oh, don't worry. I'm not kind enough to keep that sort of information to myself. Here's a couple of noteworthy methods that show off some of this behavior:

You must be registered to see the links

- Initializes Nashorn, removes a few globals, and stuffs the global namespace full of hot, juicy class instances.

You must be registered to see the links

- Evaluates the expressions in #IF/#ELSEIF statements.

That's fucking precious considering that she's admitted that she's just plain goofing off at least once. Hey Inno, maybe instead of making it so that I have to put my .jar in a specific directory, you can make it so that I don't have to use an outdated version of JDK to build this?

It's pretty easy to do that. Here's a fork of 0.3.19 on my GitHub that targets JDK 11 (since it's the latest LTS and all) and successfully builds with JDK 15:

You must be registered to see the links

. As an added bonus, my fork also uses Maven's dependencies system to fetch JavaFX, so it should be easier to build as well.

As I mentioned in one of my previous ramblings, one of the issues with this is the deprecation (and, as of JDK 15, the removal) of the Nashorn JS engine. LT uses this heavily when parsing XML conditionals, to the tune of thousands of eval() calls during long loiter/sleep periods. Nashorn seems to handle this use case far better than GraalJS does, so the JDK 11+ fork runs significantly slower than the JDK 8 builds.

 

[throbzombie]

It's pretty easy to do that. Here's a fork of 0.3.19 on my GitHub that targets JDK 11 (since it's the latest LTS and all) and successfully builds with JDK 15:

You must be registered to see the links

. As an added bonus, my fork also uses Maven's dependencies system to fetch JavaFX, so it should be easier to build as well.

As I mentioned in one of my previous ramblings, one of the issues with this is the deprecation (and, as of JDK 15, the removal) of the Nashorn JS engine. LT uses this heavily when parsing XML conditionals, to the tune of thousands of eval() calls during long loiter/sleep periods. Nashorn seems to handle this use case far better than GraalJS does, so the JDK 11+ fork runs significantly slower than the JDK 8 builds.

Good looking out, man.

 

[jessiespill]

There's no real set intended way to make money, only a selection of options to do so with.


And this is content that is already multiple months late after the last time Inno said it was almost ready, as a lie, and almost three years total since it was initially supposed to be ready, in 2018, before the delays really started to set in against this very specific part of development.

I normally say that a dev should take all the time they need, but devs don't normally take this long to get this far. This is the absolute worst time to take a break and only serves to add more negativity to Inno's record, which is already abysmal.

The reason for Inno's break, as stated by Inno in the most recent post, is stress related. That stress likely comes from all the negativity. Inno would not be getting this negativity if they actually tried to act like they said they were going to, but Inno is making absolutely no effort to 'treat development like a full time job' let alone actually make real progress. In other words, all this stress is entirely their fault to begin with.

I would agree with your assessment, we aren't just looking at the beginning of the end for LT, we are looking at the developer forcing the game on life support when it is already dead.


Hey, take your time and do what you can and want to get done. We'll be happy with whatever fixes you can come up with. Your life comes first and foremost, so if you need to stop, don't worry about it. It would be nice if you would let us kknow if and when that happens, though.



They are still collecting and I feel bad for the subscribers who don't know any better as well, not so much the ones who did it knowing what Inno is like.

I could definitely see June as the earliest, but now I'm going to say December...3034.


As am I, this game does not deserve this kind of mistreatment.


Would not at all be one of the options?


Those are in rose bushes, which are in the parks, which are the tiles with the green icons outside the mansion.

Thank You

 

[Sarkath]

Good looking out, man.

No sweat! I'm looking into bringing performance back up to an acceptable level (probably by replacing the JS interpreter with something that's actually, y'know, sane). I'll update the thread if I come up with something.

Also, if you try building from that, let me know if you run into any issues. I've tested it on a couple of a systems (an Arch box with JDK 15 and a Mac with JDK 11 and 14) and it's worked fairly well, but I'm far from a Java/Maven expert.

 

[alex2011]

At this point, I think people are just here for the entertainment value in watching Inno fail.

I mean, that's funny and all. But... we're not getting a game, if this keeps up. Are we crabs in a bucket? Or, are we genuinely interested in seeing the game succeed?

I mean, I'm definitely here for the entertainment of watching what happens. We're in a pandemic and I'm bored. Only so much Blaseball I can watch.

But I definitely wouldn't say I'm rooting for failure. I have low expectations, but I'd be ecstatic if Inno could exceed them.

But I still won't avoid laughing at how stupid this is just because it might be stressing Inno out. We're her potential customers. If my potential customers were laughing at my failure, I'd be pretty stressed out too. But I wouldn't be taking a month off.

Edit;
And you know what's funny about all this, we know Inno watches this thread. She turned off comments on her blog to stop potential customers seeing the delays being laughed at, but she couldn't resist watching what we're saying. So some might say that we're partially responsible for her being stressed. And sure, we are. But damn, I just checked how a few other sites that talk about the game are reacting, and we're wayyy nicer than any of them.

I wonder if she's watching those lol

For me, still the latter. I couldn't care less about whether Inno succeeds as long as the game does, even if that means in someone else's hands.

I also agree on what Tehlemon said, if Inno does defy all logical conclusions in this situation, I will be ecstatic, and I am definitely not rooting for failure. I just don't care if Inno, and I mean specifically Inno, does. I or another person will just pick it up in the wake of said failure.

As for what you said in your edit, tehlemon, we wouldn't be laughing if Inno was doing what they were supposed to from the beginning. We are laughing because Inno has turned this entire project into one big joke, so no, we are not to blame for Inno's stress at all. If Inno had been doing as they were supposed to, there would be no reason to laugh or get negative. With no reason to laugh or get negative, the laughing and negativity would not be stressing Inno because it wouldn't exist. Because it is a thing Inno isn't doing that we are laughing at and being negative about, it is Inno's fault they are stressed and ONLY Inno's.

Dude, fields were "worked on" since 2019 if not earlier

No, they were supposed to originally be out in 2018, but there were delays and lots of them until around August 2020, when Inno finally said in no uncertain terms that the release was almost ready. This got pushed into September because of some supposed technical issue and then radio silence until January and the situation we have now.

 

[tehlemon]

I started experimenting with something similar in .NET (though in fairness my experiment is more of an alternative to Twine/SugarCube than anything else) and just ended up rolling my own parser.

Inno kinda rolls their own parser, though that's more to handle the #IF/#ELSEIF/etc stuff.

You must be registered to see the links

.

Interesting. I'll dig through this more if I have time later. I'm curious to see how it all works.

I'm probably going to wind up taking that approach with my experiment as well, mostly due to the annoying lack of stable cross-platform .NET UI toolkits (being someone who primarily uses Linux/macOS and loves C#/.NET is rough at times, heh).

Ah shit, I didn't even think about mac/linux.

I've playing around with all this in C#/.net as well, just because it's what I use most (aside from powershell, but that doesn't count lol). Trying to keep it as simple as possible, since I'm way more interested in the "can I make this" and less the final product lol

Currently all of my prototypes are just using WPF. Quick, simple, used it a billion times for my personal tools and projects. But the last I checked, doesn't support either Linux or macOS. I know it usually works in wine, but still.

The more I think about plot, setting, world building, and so forth... I might have to take some of these decisions more seriously. I could just switch to using Unity. But that kind of ruins the fun of doing it all myself. We're talking about a text game within pretty minimal graphics, I could easily make it work in WPF in my sleep, but Unity would probably allow for a better product. There are advantages beyond just cross platform support for using something like Unity. A lot of the problems I'm trying to come up with my own solutions for would just be solved using their tools.

But where's the fun in that.

And yeah, LT essentially uses the JavaFX WebEngine for most of its display magic, and naturally that does involve a fair bit of frontend JavaScript to propagate JS events back to Java. The part that's really funny is that the conditionals handling is actually done using a separate JS interpreter! JavaFX uses JavaScriptCore, but LT's conditional parser uses Oracle's Nashorn JS engine.

Yeah, I saw that too. Not sure why she did it that way. I don't know Java well enough to know if there's a benefit to using one over the other beyond what you said, but using both seems odd.

As I mentioned in one of my previous ramblings, one of the issues with this is the deprecation (and, as of JDK 15, the removal) of the Nashorn JS engine. LT uses this heavily when parsing XML conditionals, to the tune of thousands of eval() calls during long loiter/sleep periods. Nashorn seems to handle this use case far better than GraalJS does, so the JDK 11+ fork runs significantly slower than the JDK 8 builds.

That right there is why my last save would soft lock anytime you tried to advance time 12 hours. 4 hours was taking 30s.

One of the things I'm looking into for NPC scheduling is how much I can combine small updates into larger bulk updates. Most of the calculations and updates that are being done are *really* simple and should be quick, the issues is we're running a billion simple updates even when you really don't need to.

If anyone is making an RPG, don't build your NPC scheduling system like this. Look at how modern RPGs and games work. There are games that handle hundreds of active NPCs with way more intricate and complex behaviors and actions in real time. The game should absolutely *not* be this bad at NPC handling.

 

[Sarkath]

Currently all of my prototypes are just using WPF. Quick, simple, used it a billion times for my personal tools and projects. But the last I checked, doesn't support either Linux or macOS. I know it usually works in wine, but still.

Ah…yeah, WPF is Windows-only, sadly. Avalonia is probably the closest analogue, but I ended up ditching it because it doesn't support multiple text runs inside of TextBlock objects yet. Uno was kind of finicky in my experience, and I still have yet to look into Eto.Forms. As for MAUI, well…hopefully it'll be more desktop-focused than Xamarin.Forms, and at the rate things are going we might very well see Lilith's Throne 0.4.0 before they release the technical preview of it.

I think I have enough separation between the presentation layer and backend that I could easily switch away from HTML/CSS in the future when this stuff matures. The engine is using Markdown internally, so I could make it a console app if I really wanted and it would still be pretty legible.

There are advantages beyond just cross platform support for using something like Unity. A lot of the problems I'm trying to come up with my own solutions for would just be solved using their tools.

But where's the fun in that.

Hell yeah!

That was kinda my motivation, too. I started fiddling around with Twine/SugarCube recently to do some creative writing and got really frustrated by its "quirks" (and I didn't even attempt anything near the complexity of Tentacle Slave, Summoned By Accident, or Degrees of Lewdity!). What the hey, might as well try to write a proper parser and make my own interactive story system. Last time I attempted writing a parser was around 15 years ago and, honestly, it looked a lot like Inno's.

Yeah, I saw that too. Not sure why she did it that way. I don't know Java well enough to know if there's a benefit to using one over the other beyond what you said, but using both seems odd.

I'm guessing that the main motivation was to have full control over presentation. The default controls that JavaFX uses depend on the target platform. In the case of desktop applications it would end up using Swing, and it would end up making a porn game look awfully "enterprisey."

That right there is why my last save would soft lock anytime you tried to advance time 12 hours. 4 hours was taking 30s.

Anything that advances the day is especially bad. Like, 20000 evals on a fresh game levels of bad.

I didn't really notice this when the game engine was using Nashorn, but the second I switched it to GraalJS it just made the problem exponentially worse. Like, that 12 hour overnight sleep on a fresh save took something along the lines of 20-25 seconds on an i7-8700K.

One of the things I'm looking into for NPC scheduling is how much I can combine small updates into larger bulk updates. Most of the calculations and updates that are being done are *really* simple and should be quick, the issues is we're running a billion simple updates even when you really don't need to.

Surprisingly, the game does base its updates on delta times instead of fixed intervals:

You must be registered to see the links

. At its core it seems to sort of do the right thing as far as this goes. I'm not sure if that holds true as you drill down, but I think this part would be fairly easy to improve upon.

At this point I'd say the biggest issue is the over-reliance on JavaScript. Given that the flame graph indicates that evals consume 70% of all CPU time with much of the rest of that going to the JavaFX libraries, I'd wager (a very small amount, yes, but it still counts!) that the only reason the scheduler is even a factor is because it's the thing that triggers most of those rampant eval calls.

 

[RagnarBloodbane]

Lol 3.20, jesus, and now a break? Are you kidding me, those poor subscribers. And Inno also said that 0.4 won't even actually have that much field content, what the hell has he/she/Oni been doing? The Nyan quest thing seemed extremely pointless, and also took way longer than it should've, and the fields were what Inno was hyping everyone up for. If this was just a free project, or something that just had some donations here and there, this would be fine, but the fact that Inno is actually making several thousand a month (I think) is ridiculous. When your making that much money, your work and work ethic should be professional, but his isn't.

 

[RagnarBloodbane]

They should not be collecting patreon and subscribestar money for this kind of content, and i'm pretty sure that they are, correct me if I'm wrong.

 

[BryanDanielson]

Would not at all be one of the options?

Of course, that is where I am putting my money on.

 

[IvoryOwl]

They should not be collecting patreon and subscribestar money for this kind of content, and i'm pretty sure that they are, correct me if I'm wrong.

She does. Nearly 5.500$ are being funneled to this game ATM. It's depressing to see that the worse development gets, the more money she makes. That's one hell of a bad incentive.

What's even worse is that there's an easy way to circumvent most of the blame/guilt on this and still get the money, all you have to do is throw the ball to the opposite team. "I know my performance has been a disappointment lately so feel free to cancel your subscription until I have something ready." She has done something similar in the past.

Sex sells like hot cakes; it's one of the easiest markets to separate fools from their money. Meanwhile, this allows her to look "respectable and considerate" without having to lift a finger or improve things on her end. Why temporarily shut down donations when this is just so much smarter? "I told them to stop donating. If they don't do it then it's not my fault."

PS: I just checked her Sub. Star page and lo and behold!

Thank you all so much for your support, and I more than understand if you want to stop supporting this project at this stage.

 

[Dargondo]

So, I played this game pretty much all weekend and I have to say, for something that was originally posted FOUR YEARS AGO to have what seems like such little content and direction is a major disappointment, especially since it's just a text based game.

Like, I know full well how much work actually goes into a text based game since i've written content for multiple games at this point and have attempted to make my own before, and with that knowledge I have to say that with the severe lack of content here (as well as the amount of typos) over such a long period of time smells like a scam on the same levels as Breeding Season or any of Brozeks games.

Serious shame too since the amount I did play was enjoyable enough to check out the post again to learn more about the game, which I only do for games i've enjoyed.
If the other posts i've seen about the amount of money this game is pulling in are true though, then this game should have at least hit v2.0 at least two years ago.

I don't normally comment negatively on things people have made, but this is a very fishy situation at best.

 

[aspar4gus]

...does it make sense if i actually say i wish this game got "abandoned"? at least by its original creator.

Because from the pattern i saw in other text-based games, the ones who actually got finished or updated regularly is the ones who either is free (no monthly incentives from supporters) or abandoned and then got picked up by a (more competent) team of modders