I for one think Inno was telling the truth. (*Audience gasps!*) Many of us know the code in LT is basically an Elder God in the form of spaghetti. Said code is not shrinking or getting any easier to manager. When she said she had to ditch it because it was becoming too much of a hassle to maintain, I believe her. I am not happy with the decision but I understand. Though it does raise the question on what might get axed in the future, should another similar situation arise.
I do believe that she was having some sort of issues with the feature. What I believe to be the lie was that this was one of the main issues causing slow down and axing it would speed up development. If that was true, we wouldnt be having this conversation right now. Hell, this entire thread and the blog wouldnt look like this if that was the case. The companion feature is one of the few features where instead of kicking the can down the road like she usually does, she threw the baby out with the bath water and replaced the baby with a raggedy ass doll and other "promises". Like with what Sarkath mentioned, she could have just scaled back this feature a bit and not have the NPC chime in on every single scene there is. But instead of any kind of solution, she just dropped it then did her usual song and jig. Now the game lost something good and in its place its getting a vegan substitute that leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Yuck.
So that was confirmed being dumped in the future? Damn. Well, at least that didn't make it off the ground yet, so no real loss beyond potential (although that's not that much better). It bothers me that things are getting dropped especially when I also hear that we keep getting more and more sub-species and clothes added still.
At the attempt to shift my own gears here and move away from pessimism, has Inno hinted at anything planned near future that folks are actually excited about?
So that was confirmed being dumped in the future? Damn. Well, at least that didn't make it off the ground yet, so no real loss beyond potential (although that's not that much better). It bothers me that things are getting dropped especially when I also hear that we keep getting more and more sub-species and clothes added still.
At the attempt to shift my own gears here and move away from pessimism, has Inno hinted at anything planned near future that folks are actually excited about?
'No end in sight': Same goes for the constant stream of anger, hate and repetition of the same arguments over and over.
For several pages now it has been nothing but repeating each others sentences - just with minor changes in wording. Maybe its time to also create an end to that and get back to some more substantial topics around the game.
You're blaming the symptom for the existence of the disease.
If you read what the complaints actually target, you'd understand why they exist. The blanket buzzword of "hate" and "anger" is relatively contained to a small few people, yet you're broadening it out to everyone not outright praising the Dev.
Granted, I understand your side as well. This cycle has been repeating for a while, but shouldn't we address the actual problem instead of white-knighting for its cause?
On top of that, opinions you personally don't like don't automatically make them "off-topic." Most of these comments aren't personally aimed at Innoxia; it's criticism of their development path and ethics. If you don't like seeing that, maybe join us in encouraging Innoxia to improve and be more transparent? If any other developer behaved this way, you would see the same criticisms and they would absolutely justified. From these criticisms come actual progress, in that people are hearing the complaints and taking solutions into their own hands (Sarkath, for example). There's been great benefit to all this criticism; you discouraging it would justify this Dev's behavior and thus the cycle would continue as new people will find this game, see the same problems, and voice the same criticisms.
So that was confirmed being dumped in the future? Damn. Well, at least that didn't make it off the ground yet, so no real loss beyond potential (although that's not that much better). It bothers me that things are getting dropped especially when I also hear that we keep getting more and more sub-species and clothes added still.
At the attempt to shift my own gears here and move away from pessimism, has Inno hinted at anything planned near future that folks are actually excited about?
But on a serious note, what IS suppose to coming is fields which actually adds content outside the city and moves the story forward.... except thats been the "next thing" for a year now...
Yeah, but the main problem is that the way they were implemented increases the complexity of character interactions exponentially. It's not really due to any coding issues, but rather due to the innate complexity of the game world and mechanics, and all of that time and effort would be going to content that the majority of players are unlikely to see.
For example, the interaction between Brax and Sean in Slaver Alley has dialogue for Brax, Bree (femme Brax), and Brandi (subby, bimbo Brax), with lines for Brax with a covered mouth, as well as Brax-specific pregnancy reactions. This is on top of the various reactions to the player character, which all have their own unique dialogue, and the more you build out the world the worse it gets. Even AAA RPG like Mass Effect, with massive teams and EA-sized budgets, aren't that bold when it comes to character interactions.
That said, I think removing the feature altogether is a bit much. I think a more balanced approach would have been to allow for companions but largely leave them out of the NPC dialogue altogether. It would make things a bit less "personal" but it would remove a great deal of complexity while still letting the player wander around with someone that has a bit of personality.
Hey hey, mod idea! Maybe make it so that as the player move around they occasionally make comments about the area that you're in. For example, walking by the Enforcer HQ with Brax might give a certain reaction depending on his affection with you. If he hates you, is disobedient, and is still dommy, he'll make his bitterness well-known. If he likes you, he might remark that, slave or not, getting to adventure with you is better than the daily grind ever was. It would make it feel like you were building a relationship with the NPC rather than them simply being a set of stats on a computer screen, yet it wouldn't be nearly as bonkers as trying to create complex NPC<->NPC relationships.
This is where I'll give the CoC2 team credit. They're making it work through a really simple answer: Their companions have simple "I'm going to fuck off and be somewhere else, have fun" lines.
No need to go crazy with it, just create really generic and simple ways to hide the companions. All those interactions with Brax could have been solved by the PC telling Brax to wait outside, or something stupid along those lines.
Most of these comments aren't personally aimed at Innoxia; it's criticism of their development path and ethics. If you don't like seeing that, maybe join us in encouraging Innoxia to improve and be more transparent? If any other developer behaved this way, you would see the same criticisms and they would absolutely justified. From these criticisms come actual progress, in that people are hearing the complaints and taking solutions into their own hands (Sarkath, for example). There's been great benefit to all this criticism; you discouraging it would justify this Dev's behavior and thus the cycle would continue as new people will find this game, see the same problems, and voice the same criticisms.
Outside of times when I had to explicitly differentiate between Inno and some of the contributors, I've gone out of my way to try and *not* mention "Inno" specifically.
This shit isn't personal. I'd be criticizing any dev for a game that's entertaining enough to be worth watching. I don't know Inno, I don't know anything about Inno, and I absolutely don't hate or disllike Inno personally.
But I'm still going to criticize stupid shit like taking a three week vacation when you're two months behind your already pushed back deadline.
I've stopped using the feature because a patch or two ago that was already happening. Can't remember what I was doing at the time. A patch or two, at this point, was like 6 months ago.
Edit: Mods are cleaning up the thread again. Looks like deleting all the posts relating to that last little spat.
I made a bit of a fucky-wucky on this one. Good thing I did some additional testing and verification, eh? o.o The savings are more like 33%. Still, not a bad improvement for a relatively basic change. Definitely going to have to make sure to check my work a bit better before posting results down the road, though…I get too excited sometimes.
I ended up dropping the change where I modify getNPCById() to throw a null instead of an exception. That's a pretty big code smell, but it impacts enough code for a relatively minimal benefit (roughly 0.3-0.5 seconds on my stress save) that I'm not entirely comfortable including that in a PR.
Speaking of PRs:
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And here's the newly minted branch if anyone wants to play with it on their own:
I made a bit of a fucky-wucky on this one. Good thing I did some additional testing and verification, eh? o.o The savings are more like 33%. Still, not a bad improvement for a relatively basic change. Definitely going to have to make sure to check my work a bit better before posting results down the road, though…I get too excited sometimes.
I ended up dropping the change where I modify getNPCById() to throw a null instead of an exception. That's a pretty big code smell, but it impacts enough code for a relatively minimal benefit (roughly 0.3-0.5 seconds on my stress save) that I'm not entirely comfortable including that in a PR.
Speaking of PRs:
You must be registered to see the links
And here's the newly minted branch if anyone wants to play with it on their own:
Out of curiosity, how do you install said branch? Is it the same as we would the original game (need to build it ourselves) or do we just download, drag, drop and replace the original files?
For example, the interaction between Brax and Sean in Slaver Alley has dialogue for Brax, Bree (femme Brax), and Brandi (subby, bimbo Brax), with lines for Brax with a covered mouth, as well as Brax-specific pregnancy reactions.
I love it that there's still corners of the game that can still surprise me. I have never played with Brax as a companion*. I stopped using slaves as companions well before support was dropped.
But perhaps the solution is to use the "op battle bots" to reintroduce this kind of content into the game.
I've raised the idea before of making Elementals into "Familiars". Basically, instead of summoning a creature made out of one of the game's five elements, you summon a pet that can transform into a morph of the same type (cat becomes Catte-Morph, raven becomes Harpy, etc). So the full detail of customisation that the player got with companions, but with the same mechanic that Elementals currently use to avoid the issues companions caused.
But in addition, something else could be done. Give the player some personality options to choose from.
So, make Familiars immune to Kink potions for starters. They're going to get their kink on in a different way.
The player can select from a short list of custom Personalities for their Familiar. Each gives a particular set of Fetishes, custom dialogue to match and unique sex scenes. So, your Familiar could behave like a loyal bodyguard, an innocent schoolgirl/boy, a strict tutor or whatever.
What's more, people could - well, I suppose they could, anyway - make personality mods of their own. Popular ones could then be added to the official game via the same process that has given us the majority of the content in the last several releases.
Is this a doable thing though?
*Though I have had him in the stocks and was disappointed that Sean didn't have a reaction to that. A custom scene where you both take the opportunity to use him publicly would be interesting.
Eh... the thing about Brax is that he's a unique NPC, along with Scarlett one of only two that the player can acquire as companions IIRC. Everyone else is a generic nameless rando who just gets generic dialogue if present. So yes, having a lot of named companions that each require their own unique dialogue variations would explode the complexity of the game and create a huge dev time sink, but the obvious solution is to not have a lot of such companions. Hell, there's already a quest in the game that takes Scarlett away from you. Do the same for Brax, and you're at a much more manageable point of only having to write two dialogue variants, one for players with a generic companion and one for those without. This would also not preclude the possibility of having temporary quest-specific companions; see Claire's quest for an example of that already working in the game.
This would also not preclude the possibility of having temporary quest-specific companions; see Claire's quest for an example of that already working in the game.
Having a temporary companion for certain quests is not a bad concept and certainly does work, but to offer it as a alternative for no longer having companions is a joke.
Out of curiosity, how do you install said branch? Is it the same as we would the original game (need to build it ourselves) or do we just download, drag, drop and replace the original files?
I didn't build any JARs, so at this time you'd need to build it yourself. If you already have git and a build environment set up, you can do something like this:
At that point, building the game from source will build it based on my branch. To change it back to the normal upstream branch, you can just use "git checkout dev".
I love it that there's still corners of the game that can still surprise me. I have never played with Brax as a companion*. I stopped using slaves as companions well before support was dropped.
I don't see any reason that the feature couldn't be realized with the current engine. I don't even think it would need that much modification, honestly. The transformation system is extremely flexible, and if I'm understanding everything correctly this shouldn't be all that dissimilar to the way that slime and demons are currently handled. Immunities and buffs could be provided using permanent status effects.
I imagine that personality mods for Familiars could be handled using the current modding system.
I didn't build any JARs, so at this time you'd need to build it yourself. If you already have git and a build environment set up, you can do something like this:
I am trying to learn how to get a functional game from github but I can't get it to work for the life of me using eclipse and this was just gibberish in another language to me lmao. Send help, please.
I am trying to learn how to get a functional game from github but I can't get it to work for the life of me using eclipse and this was just gibberish in another language to me lmao. Send help, please.
I'm not sure how helpful I can be with this as I'm one of those weirdos who usually use Git from the command line, and I don't use Eclipse, but I'll try to point you in the right direction.
The first step is going to be downloading the
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, or Java Development Kit, and install that on your system. Innoxia uses JDK 8 to build Lilith's Throne, so that's the version I linked to. You'll probably need to register for an Oracle account in order to download it.
The next step is to install some sort of software that can manage Git repositories. As far as free ones go,
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is generally pretty friendly, though I've also heard good things about
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. The general idea is that you point those to a Git repository (a URL, which you can get from the green "Code" button in the upper-right corner of a GitHub page), then tell it where to put the repository on your computer, and it will download the source code and everything else you need to produce a runnable build of LT.
After you have the code, you'll need to open it up in Eclipse. It's been about a decade since I last used Eclipse, but if it's anything like IntelliJ, pointing it to the pom.xml file inside of the source code directory should be enough. This file gives the Java compiler a general idea of how to build and execute the project. You'll see a bunch of stuff coming up on screen after you open the project, like a list of the various class files (the various bobs and bits that make up the game's internals) appear on the side of the screen, maybe some stuff in the main code window. If you decide to make changes to the game (go for it! If you're interested in learning programming, the best way to learn is to mess with a project you enjoy), that's where you want to go. If you just want to run the game, there should be something resembling a play button on the screen somewhere. Click that and it should start building the code, then run it when the build is complete.
If memory serves, Eclipse should pick up the JDK that you installed earlier. I think it installs to C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.8 (or something like that) by default. Sorry I can't be a bit more specific there; I generally do my LT fiddling on my Linux box. :x
One final thing to bear in mind is that Lilith's Throne has a ton of code behind it. It can take several minutes to build the game for the first time, though subsequent builds should be much faster unless a ton of files changed.
