Another one? I don't know if you're aware or simply forgot but she took a 2 week break back in mid March... I don't want to state the obvious but this "disappointing update" is exactly what she has been working on before AND after her break. I mean, unless you're suggesting just taking a whole month or two off... more breaks aren't going to help here her, delivering results will.
I wasnt aware. Dude, I work 40 hours a week and only have--- 2-4 hours to pop on and check these sites, I cant fish for details that deep unless intrigue gets me, but thats sad news. Yikes.
I'm now glad she stayed off Itchio. I would feel like a massive dumbass giving someone like this (especially when I kindly asked whats up with the world map content and got a "coming in .4 we see you hear you like the 80,000 others"). Now I get the jazz Inno gets over this. She is literally the "guy putting a stick in bike tires and falls" meme.
Sarkath, one of the members of our community, has made a few improvements to the game on their own branch. The caveat is that you have to build it yourself the same you do preview builds. Fortunately, there are instructions on how to do so, I'll include them bellow, along with the repository.
PS: I don't know if Sar is keeping their version up-to-date, as these posts were from before the .4 release. Best wait for their reply before committing.
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'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.
A long while back my husband wrote a guide for doing this, if I can find the link for it I'll post it here. The only difference is it used the community edition of IntelliJ vs Eclipse (and honestly the IntelliJ Community edition in my opinion is better than Eclipse for simple development).
To begin with I'll go over what I've been working on since the last progress post, and then I'll outline what I need to do before the preview release of v0.4.0.5 is ready.
Keep in mind everyone, because this entire patch cycle is a massive scam, the patch she's talking about is only available for paying users of her free to play game. Because, you know, we've finally pushed her to the point where she's working on the game that's her full time job, so she needs you to pay.
Inno said:
So, as I mentioned in my previous post, I spent Sunday getting the sex manager support finished off, and then I moved on to adding the main quest content. Meraxis has one of the main roles in the Fields main quest content, and she makes an initial appearance when you leave Dominion for the first time, so I've started with her content.
While adding Meraxis's scenes, I ended up needing to add a few custom sex actions, and so I ended up adding support for defining sex actions in external files (like I did with sex managers). I also thought that it would be best to add her repeatable content (which includes combat and sex) at this time, and so I made a slight detour from the planned main quest content to get that added. I ended up adding a lot more options to this repeatable content than I originally planned, and so it's taken me the past few days to get it implemented (and there's still some writing of it left for me to do).
I'm now at the point where I've got to finish up a few things with Meraxis,
Holy shit, it only took like two months to get that one encounter she's been talking about working. Wait, fuck, we're half way through May now. Its actually been four months. Oops.
Just imagine if she had started actually working on this when she said she was, like, a year ago. The patch could have only been five or six months behind, rather than more than a year.
Inno said:
then I can add the centaur transport content (which will be relatively simple), as well as demonic centaur encounters (again relatively simple).
A difficult encounter took four months. I suspect an easy one should be done in... lets go with a month. Unless she needs another month off.
Oh, don't forget to factor in the extra month or three before the patch is made public, because fuck you.
Inno said:
Having those in the game will take me 90% of the way to v0.4.0.5's release, with just a few things then to add to Elis itself. I'm not going to be able to get all this done by the end of this week, but I am hoping to have v0.4.0.5 released some time next week.
Again, it's not a joke, she's literally been working on this since she gave up on Nyan's abysmal rework months ago (after like 9 months of lying about working on it). And She still isn't done with Elis. And still doesn't know when its going to be done.
Inno said:
I'll most likely make the next progress post once I've only got writing left to do, and will be able to give you a fixed date for v0.4.0.5's release then. I'm expecting to be at that stage and therefore make the next post some time around Tuesday night.
Thank you all for your continued interest in Lilith's Throne, and I'll get this preview version released as soon as I possibly can!
But remember, the version is for substar members only. So that's basically just her lying about the v0.4.0 content being released, even if she still doesn't know *when* its going to be released.
There are no tips that allow you to actually play the game, sorry. You can limit NPCs in the game to the point where you're ignoring most of the systems, and then it'll be... well... still really bad.
There was a user working on fixing the performance, but I'm 99% sure he gave up just like the rest of us. Because the entire design of the game is completely fucked.
I wasnt aware. Dude, I work 40 hours a week and only have--- 2-4 hours to pop on and check these sites, I cant fish for details that deep unless intrigue gets me, but thats sad news. Yikes.
I'm now glad she stayed off Itchio. I would feel like a massive dumbass giving someone like this (especially when I kindly asked whats up with the world map content and got a "coming in .4 we see you hear you like the 80,000 others"). Now I get the jazz Inno gets over this. She is literally the "guy putting a stick in bike tires and falls" meme.
You should start working on a porn game. Then you can work a few hours a week, and take months off, all while lying to your customers without any repercussions. It's a fool proof plan.
New blog post! (Technically, Tehlemon already posted it, along with his review, but I just thought it would be easier to read if the entire post was put together.)
Limit your creation of children. Even if you remove them from the game, they're still technically existing in the save file. It's a bit of a stupid design.
You can also go through the thread and find the engine mod someone made that turns the status checks down and see if that behaves better for you.
Keep in mind everyone, because this entire patch cycle is a massive scam, the patch she's talking about is only available for paying users of her free to play game. Because, you know, we've finally pushed her to the point where she's working on the game that's her full time job, so she needs you to pay.
But remember, the version is for substar members only. So that's basically just her lying about the v0.4.0 content being released, even if she still doesn't know *when* its going to be released.
Um.. the code is on github. You can compile it yourself. And everyone that follows the game knows that. Yes, even these pre-releases. The only thing 'paid' for is the pre-compiled versions by Inno herself, but she even gives instructions on how to do it.
If the code wasn't on github, we wouldn't know this 0.4 that we got was supposed to be 0.3.21.. as I mentioned 2-3 pages ago, closer to when 0.4 dropped.
Sarkath, one of the members of our community, has made a few improvements to the game on their own branch. The caveat is that you have to build it yourself the same you do preview builds. Fortunately, there are instructions on how to do so, I'll include them bellow, along with the repository.
PS: I don't know if Sar is keeping their version up-to-date, as these posts were from before the .4 release. Best wait for their reply before committing.
I'm planning to merge in the 0.4 changes Fairly Soon™, preferably tonight if I have time (just got my second shot of Moderna, so I could very well be a withered husk by tomorrow).
I mean yes, because you deserve to be rewarded for your good work but also... no?
I think platforms like Patreon/Substar are cursed, like a deal with the devil, you get money but what cost? They always turn decent/semi-decent people into greedy bastards over time. The more money they make, the lazier they become. Sometimes, the best projects are from those who make very little money (because its a passion) but the moment it becomes a job/chore it seems to ruin everything... I don't know, but it's a common trend I've noticed.
PS: I wish you well. Hope the shot doesn't do any major harm.
Besides, I tend to be future-focused in a lot of ways, and I can't see many prospective employers reacting favorably to seeing "wrote smut for a bunch of horny furries" on a resume.
Incorrect. Anyone can play the preview builds (aka, SubStar updates), the only difference is that if you're a "free" player then you have to compile the game yourself. In order to do so you have to use the repository from Github, just follow the instructions Inno provided (or the community).
Also, make sure you choose the right GitHub branch ("Dev") because the other ones haven't been updated in a while.
I used to compile versions myself and the first time was always the hardest. Subsequent compilations are much easier because everything's already pre-configured and ready to go in just a few clicks. Eclipse was a pain and kept throwing errors left and right, InteliJ provided a better experience IMO. Now I'm just lazy and wait for a kind soul to share it here.
--From Inno's website--
As always, you can also build these releases yourself from the public github's dev branch (which is always kept up to date with the very latest version):
You must be registered to see the links
(There's a build tutorial
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.)
IMPORTANT: If you're building through github, you'll now need to place the 'liliths-throne-public/res' folder in the same directory as the exported .jar!
Um.. the code is on github. You can compile it yourself. And everyone that follows the game knows that. Yes, even these pre-releases. The only thing 'paid' for is the pre-compiled versions by Inno herself, but she even gives instructions on how to do it.
If the code wasn't on github, we wouldn't know this 0.4 that we got was supposed to be 0.3.21.. as I mentioned 2-3 pages ago, closer to when 0.4 dropped.
Besides, I tend to be future-focused in a lot of ways, and I can't see many prospective employers reacting favorably to seeing "wrote smut for a bunch of horny furries" on a resume.
Separately, I just wish this could be rewritten in primarily javascript (+typescript). I'm a big fan of modern java, but UI stuff fits best with JS/HTML/CSS. I wouldn't want to invest time into java UI frameworks. JS could incentivize more contributors, since the skills would be more transferable. These are just my musings, though.
Oof, that's rough. I have the literal opposite problem going on right now, all my projects ended like a week or two ago, and now I'm stuck covering helpdesk duties this week for a bunch of people who are out on another project.
Holy fuck helpdesk duty is booooorrrriiiingggg. I'm so glad I moved past this kind of work ages ago. Like, I actually forgot how incredibly boring it is, and this is while I can work from home and watch youtube all day.
That's one thing I'm thankful for: at my job there's enough work that I never have to worry about being bored. My last job was a helldesk job and, yeah…no thanks.
FWIW, as IvoryOwl mentioned above, the first time is the trickiest, mostly because Inno isn't really making the best use of Maven (the build system). If they pulled in JavaFX in the Maven dependencies, building it would be as simple as cloning the repo and hitting run.
I set up a
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a while back that includes the necessary changes to do this if you're interested in trying it. That branch should let you build LT against any Java SDK from 11 through 14 without having to manually dick around with the OpenJFX SDK.
Separately, I just wish this could be rewritten in primarily javascript (+typescript). I'm a big fan of modern java, but UI stuff fits best with JS/HTML/CSS. I wouldn't want to invest time into java UI frameworks. JS could incentivize more contributors, since the skills would be more transferable. These are just my musings, though.
Most of the display layer in LT is already based around HTML/CSS, so I guess it's about 25% there. JavaFX is pretty much only used to set up a bunch of WebViews which are fed by the core game engine, and an embedded JavaScript engine is used to allow for some level of scripting in the game's XML data files. The core engine, of course, is all Java-powered.
As for rewriting the core engine in JavaScript, I can't help but think that losing guaranteed type safety and strong typing could be a rough thing to work around, given the amount of data that LT tracks for each of its objects. At the very least it would require a pretty significant rework. This would be mitigated somewhat if TypeScript were used, in my experience it can only do so much (it still compiles to JavaScript at the end of the day, after all).
I think something like Blazor WebAssembly might be a good fit for something like this, but it's still a bit too new to the scene for me to know how well it would scale up to this sort of level. That would at least get it to run completely within the browser, and with AOT compilation the performance might not be too horrible.
If you discover your child, then use the prompted 'remove from game' option after fighting them, that'll properly remove them. But yeah, any other method keeps them around.
Buggy > Misc tab > Offspring. They're still loaded, you just can't encounter them anymore. Which means they're still bloating your save. Unless you send all your children elsewhere and then manually remove them from the save file (or be extra careful to remove any you don't want while keeping the rest, because good luck sorting out any duplicate names).
I was gonna say something about the "next update" part, but IvoryOwl covered it to a T.
I just updated all of my feature branches to 0.4, so they should be up to date if anyone wants to try them.
I did notice that the game doesn't run nearly as smoothly on my new box (technically a downgrade from my previous system, but I was tired of 1) dual-booting my gaming rig and 2) dealing with NVIDIA's shitty Linux drivers). I'm kind of glad this is the case, as it makes the performance deficiencies a bit more obvious than they would be on a CPU with consistently fast single-core performance (my new box uses a mobile CPU, so its clock speeds are far less consistent).
But yeah. All updated. Hopefully more improvements coming soon.
Most of the display layer in LT is already based around HTML/CSS, so I guess it's about 25% there. JavaFX is pretty much only used to set up a bunch of WebViews which are fed by the core game engine, and an embedded JavaScript engine is used to allow for some level of scripting in the game's XML data files. The core engine, of course, is all Java-powered.
As for rewriting the core engine in JavaScript, I can't help but think that losing guaranteed type safety and strong typing could be a rough thing to work around, given the amount of data that LT tracks for each of its objects. At the very least it would require a pretty significant rework. This would be mitigated somewhat if TypeScript were used, in my experience it can only do so much (it still compiles to JavaScript at the end of the day, after all).
I think something like Blazor WebAssembly might be a good fit for something like this, but it's still a bit too new to the scene for me to know how well it would scale up to this sort of level. That would at least get it to run completely within the browser, and with AOT compilation the performance might not be too horrible.
Yeah, the "significant rework" is the main problem. I wouldn't worry too much about type-safety. Typescript + a dumb webpack setup will last a project's lifetime. If a maintainer is lax about typescript use, chances are the project didn't have much hope in the first place. BTW, a fair amount of the frontend in LT is stringly-typed to begin with.
Blazor wouldn't be needed; just a web page built and deployed somewhere. Except instead of text, buttons, and logic, there's... text, buttons, and logic, but pushed further. I have some functional examples out there somewhere; one has basic animation (which I should get back to, but it's tedious - I think the PornEmpire dev has done something similar, and said the same thing).
Yeah, the "significant rework" is the main problem. I wouldn't worry too much about type-safety. Typescript + a dumb webpack setup will last a project's lifetime. If a maintainer is lax about typescript use, chances are the project didn't have much hope in the first place. BTW, a fair amount of the frontend in LT is stringly-typed to begin with.
True, true. I think the problem is that I'm looking at it as though such an endeavor would be spearheaded by the current management using the same development methodology that they currently do. The way LT handles its data structures and game events would leave any browser gasping for air.
It might not be a terrible idea to make an extensible, general-purpose engine for stuff like this. It might save people the hassle of starting an overly-ambitious project with Twine only to either be forced to jump ship (Tentacle Slave, Summoned By Accident, probably more…) when things get too hacky (or evolve into a Cthulhu-esque monstrosity like Degrees of Lewdity's codebase).
Blazor wouldn't be needed; just a web page built and deployed somewhere. Except instead of text, buttons, and logic, there's... text, buttons, and logic, but pushed further. I have some functional examples out there somewhere; one has basic animation (which I should get back to, but it's tedious - I think the PornEmpire dev has done something similar, and said the same thing).
I'm referring to Blazor WebAssembly, which produces standalone client-side web pages by compiling the .NET runtime and all of the supporting libraries in web assembly. I don't know why they gave it the same name as the Blazor web server, but Microsoft's gonna Microsoft I guess. It's supposedly production-ready (as of .NET Core 3.1, I think?), but popular opinion seems to think that it still needs some time in the oven.
And yeah, I know even that wouldn't really be needed, but I'm a filthy .NET shill who likes C# and tends to be biased towards desktop apps*, so using some engine libraries, Blazor WASM, and insert UI toolkit here would allow me to multi-target without much hassle.
*To be fair, I think this is mostly caused by the angst of having to occasionally support Classic ASP apps written with Netscape 4-era JavaScript at work.
It might not be a terrible idea to make an extensible, general-purpose engine for stuff like this. It might save people the hassle of starting an overly-ambitious project with Twine only to either be forced to jump ship (Tentacle Slave, Summoned By Accident, probably more…) when things get too hacky (or evolve into a Cthulhu-esque monstrosity like Degrees of Lewdity's codebase).
I've never looked at working with QSP, but what I've seen of those games isn't super encouraging. Similarly, Trap Quest and Flexible Survival use some odd interpreter (wingit?) that seems.... odd. I'm kind of amazed at the variety of tech being used (abused?) to make these types of games, especially when most of them are conveying the same data (Probably a text box, an image, with the occasional stat screen/sidebar or tilemap).
But if the mainstream game engines are any indication, there's no tech that will survive a project with overambitious and overconfident developers. When I think about the nightmarish conflicts of interest that go into the typical patreon-as-an-early-access-model game... Yeah, I'd rather go back to junior whipping boy on the inept devops team. It's nice seeing things like Steam kind of helping to legitimize these games, but the situation really isn't all that conducive to making good products.
The situation with LT just seems super fucked and any realistic course of action for Innoxia is probably going to come with endless salt and criticism. I don't envy that in the slightest, rather I almost feel bad for her.
Those use an evolution of the format that Infocom used for their classic text adventure games (Zork, et al). It's pretty well-established within interactive fiction circles and has some libraries to handle some of the basics for you (score tracking, inventory management, movement, etc) but it's generally pretty niche.
The situation with LT just seems super fucked and any realistic course of action for Innoxia is probably going to come with endless salt and criticism. I don't envy that in the slightest, rather I almost feel bad for her.
I'd still put myself in the camp where I still feel bad for Inno. When you take a deep dive into LT's code it's clear that a lot of thought went into the overall game and systems design, but the technical aspect needs a ton of work. In all fairness, she's gotten a hell of a lot better over the years, but it's a lot easier to dig yourself a hole than it is to dig yourself out of one.
Plus, the things that are getting fixed are great things moving forward (easier to add new content? Great! Better modding support? Even better!) but it seems like nothing is being done to resolve the underlying technical issues (such as the game updating literally all of the NPCs all the time and iterating over large swathes of objects every turn for no real reason) or even porting the old systems to the new modular approach.
I guess we'll see what happens moving forward. Either way, it's been a hell of an interesting ride so far.
