Yeah, you have to get to a point in the game when you do the Aversol stuff, then get a student from the assignment, get the assignment again and use the student, get a critical success... then after you finally have Severina, it takes another 2-4 months to get this new assignment. So no wonder no-one's had a go at it yet, without the loaded dice mod.
- Thread starter Frank N. Stein
- Start date
You joke, but I very well have done this once or twice. If the universe has it out for me, why wouldn't bedlam?
This time isn't one of those time though. I'm just running 945 through the extra finicky parts of the mod and the minute they stop giving me hell, I'll be releasing the update.
RAGS being... well, RAGS... I'm kind of curious what manages to be the extra finicky parts?
person new to rags here, its being kinda janky, when i start up and am creating a charecter the window with the options disapears, and i cant progress, is there a fix or obvious thing im overlooking.
- Aug 26, 2017
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Quoted from the No Haven thread, specifically "Important RAGS information" :" Please ensure that you are using 2.4.16.0 or 2.6.1.0 of the RAGS client. As of 0.803 you may also be able to play it without problems using 3.0.60.0 other than occasional formatting issues as a trade off for better performance. Any other version of RAGS is still not a good idea. "
Rags is derpy as fuck depending on the version of the engine and the game you're trying to run, so it may very well be a simple version issue, as mentioned in the above.
so far as im aware i downloaded the newest free version. but might just be derpy.
- Jul 17, 2017
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One day when Bedlam finally finishes his twine import will you be making a modded version for that as well?
Funny enough, that's a hard question to answer.
It's usually things that are constantly being changed by Bedlam. Or where's there's a whole lotta tedium involved in transitioning it between versions. Things with lots of moving parts.
Things like Slave Leader and Biomancy/Corruption.
With Slave Leader, it's woven deep, deeeep, into the code for slave training. It's already a chore to put together with each update. It's a compliment to say it's held together with duct tape. It pisses and moans if I have a slave leader check above a standard slaves check for an event (which shouldn't matter).
Now, bring in the added fun of Bedlam updating slave training in some new and fun way every single update. Fun might not be the right word though.
Biomancy and Corruption are better though. Well, worse, but easier to work with.
With the above, I have a changelog to weave my way through the alterations and find why it's being bitchy. Like having a map that tells me where not to go.
With Biomancy and Corruption, Bedlam seems to change them on the fly, without mentioning it in the changelog. I'd need an extra set of arms and legs to count out how often I've gone into the game to find new variables in biomancy and corruption. Or changed ones. Because the mod doesn't use things like loopchecks and fails, it tends to throw a fit whenever it encounters one. So I pull them. All it does for the core game is raise the encounter chance for a handful of events. I've missed one every now and then and every now and then that's why biomancy or corruption will constantly autofail.
Probably not right out the door, but yeah, it's planned. There will be a period where I build it just to break it and get it working straight, and I'll very likely hold off on adding anything big until I have a firm grasp on how he's handling the variables for the twine version (if we're lucky, he'll have added things like futa creation and race change by then).
Once that's all done, and I've got it stabilized, it'll be a lot quicker to update than this one. Content transfer and testing are easier in twine, and bugs will be a lot less tedious to hunt down.
- Oct 17, 2017
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in your opinion, it's born only in bedlam horribly coding skills and bad programming behaviour or is an extra complexity put in the game to make your works harder? (making it worse, a lot worse)
Can't speak for Mr. Frank N. Stein, but as a part-time system programmer for my second job, I'd personally say that it's all of those.
To begin with, you have to remember that Bedlam isn't a native programmer - this is something he learned on the fly. A lot of the methods, mentalities, and logic that native programmers adhere to are things he either doesn't do, or only does partially. Slave Leader is a great example of this, something Mr. Frank N. Stein said above. Logically, it makes sense to put it in with the rest of the slave training code. But from a coding standpoint, this is a nightmare because you now have two huge events that are co-dependent, without necessarily needing to be. He also has a habit of making new variables for absolutely everything - though some of that is beyond his control because of RAGS limitations .
Then you also have to consider RAGS. The engine is, quite simply, not designed for huge, branching, ongoing d20-style games, but short hallway, exploration-style games. You make a number of "rooms," you tie events to them or put them on a random roll, the game rolls a dice at the start to see what room you go to and then the further dice rolls determine what happens (if anything) and the availability of future rooms to go to. Repeat. Bedlam's game, with its many missions, unique events, items, characters, etc, is a nightmare for this sort of engine, simply because it has to constantly check everything and new "rooms" must be created for everything.
Think of it like a bus station or the military's depot system. At the start, everything leads back to central. Makes sense. But when you start having more routes, you're looking to offload some of that because central is becoming a shitshow. So you make a branch hub and keep expanding branches as your capacity grows. Those branch hubs communicate with central but operate semi-autonomously.
RAGS doesn't handle this well, if at all. Everything is a "room," with multiple dice rolls being called to determine events. So you can make your hub, sure, but odds are that it'll need to make the same calls that central is making...so you end up with a branch hub that has just as many, possibly even more calls than central. Even worse is when you're storing data, which Bedlam does on multiple occasions. So now you have multiple branches calling back for data alongside their usual demands.
Then you also have the way RAGS handles data in general - it stores everything as-is in an array, in system memory, and just appends ad infinitum. So you can see how this becomes a problem right quick. The lategame slowdown people have complained of since day 1 will always exist, largely because the more you play, the larger those data dumps become. And again, this ties into the original issue of RAGS not being designed to handle large numbers of independent variables.
And lastly - at least for this giant fucking wall of text - its just how RAGS operates. Again, this engine is designed for small exploration-sim games. So it runs almost exclusively on conditional loops and introduces the myriad variables and counters that come with the territory. And I'm sure you can see where the problem is. Last I had a look, No Haven had over a thousand independent variables, many of which only do one or two things, and conditional trees for some of the bigger loops exceeded 6 checks.
So to sum it all up, this game is a mess. Some of it can be laid at Bedlam's feet, but an even larger chunk of it is outside his direct control for the simple reason that he's using RAGS. Which is why people have been pushing him to swap over to Twine for quite some time now. But you need to remember that, again, you're asking a non-native programmer to switch from the platform that they've devoted 5-some years to learning to a completely new platform...and learn an entirely new language alongside it. The fact that he's recognized and acknowledged the issue is already a significant concession, let alone that he's (allegedly) working on a conversion.
- Oct 17, 2017
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i'm having a little coding background myself and i tried to check rags, i simple desisted. it's only a mess, an archaic mess. it's a gameframe form another era, and the situation only grow worse and worse each year passing. (most from is null support, but the evolution of other frames put it beyond what is considered mandatory features this days)
but i'm not talking about the mess called "rags" or bedlam bad coding behaviour (and in five years if you learn nothing about decent coding standard doesn't speak any good about you. even for a totaly neophyte of the coding 'world'), but the avversion of bedlam about any possibile cheating in his game(s). i seen a couple of his reply about the subject. i'm talking an event years ago, but i doubt he changed much, based on the proposite to 'encrypt' the twine version (a thing i put in the top 5 of foolish thing i ever heard). so a lot of code change and complexity can be born only for making cheater life harded. as it had ever stopped the works of this mod (and I can only give my deepest thanks to frank to doing this herculean works) and the only result is making every life hard, bedlam included.
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I'm a debugger primarily, and I actually was able to made a mod (before I found Loaded Dice) for Bedlam's Base version to fix some of these by clearing uncalled variables. But like Frank N. Stein says, Bedlam changes variables and paths too much to make a fix
Honestly, this is where Bedlam's lack of formal knowledge really shows itself. If a AAA+ Game Studio doesn't hard encrypt their games, there must be a reason why. The reason is because it always breaks more than it fixes. A simple hidden variable would slow down most cheat attempts but there is no way to do that in RAGS, at least without some insane amounts of extra code.
You absolutely can speak for me. You got across everything I was trying to say and then some, plus you followed it up by wording it far better than I could have hoped to. That was a marvelously detailed and clear response.
On another note, I am done everything from the transfer, testing is almost done (Rose event threw up an error on my last run and am just trying to replicate/figure out why), and after that I'll upload the mod.
Updates out.
Went through everything one last time so I'm fairly damn certain I didn't blunder any of the cheats... Just be sure to hold me to that for when you find an issue.
I did not figure out what the error with the Ensnared Rose was, I could not replicate it, even with a quicksave from almost right before. So keep an eye out for it if ya remember.
It might be tied to my fix for the disappearing player bug, as that did occur alongside the error message, but again, I couldn't replicate it, so it could've also just been RAGS puking.
Went through everything one last time so I'm fairly damn certain I didn't blunder any of the cheats... Just be sure to hold me to that for when you find an issue.
I did not figure out what the error with the Ensnared Rose was, I could not replicate it, even with a quicksave from almost right before. So keep an eye out for it if ya remember.
It might be tied to my fix for the disappearing player bug, as that did occur alongside the error message, but again, I couldn't replicate it, so it could've also just been RAGS puking.
Youre the best, Frank. Its my bday tommorow and im gonna play the shit out of this.
Ive got a question tho, i downloaded the rags 3.0.60 from the link bedlam has on patreon or twitter or possibly tumblr? I dont remember where exactly, but i downloaded it and when i start nohaven it says its rags 2.6.1.0. I dont know if im retarded or what but i dont know if thats the way its supposed to be? The ingame text is also small and not in bold even when i do the update text to html option. What am i doing wrong?
Ive got a question tho, i downloaded the rags 3.0.60 from the link bedlam has on patreon or twitter or possibly tumblr? I dont remember where exactly, but i downloaded it and when i start nohaven it says its rags 2.6.1.0. I dont know if im retarded or what but i dont know if thats the way its supposed to be? The ingame text is also small and not in bold even when i do the update text to html option. What am i doing wrong?
That confused me for a second - you listed the the update as Feb 19 2020. You don't really want to go back to 2020 do you? 
That confused me for a second - you listed the the update as Feb 19 2020. You don't really want to go back to 2020 do you?
- Jun 5, 2017
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@Frank N. Stein
Hey Frank, I know it might come out of the blue but I was messing around the "insides" of the newest modded version. I'm trying to learn a thing or two about the way RAGS is used in NH and there's just one thing I really don't get.
I'm talking about the forced event (rape at night) and the betrayal event.
I'd be grateful if you could share at least some directions for me to work with
Hey Frank, I know it might come out of the blue but I was messing around the "insides" of the newest modded version. I'm trying to learn a thing or two about the way RAGS is used in NH and there's just one thing I really don't get.
I'm talking about the forced event (rape at night) and the betrayal event.
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I'd be grateful if you could share at least some directions for me to work with
quick question from a random thought.. is it possible to add the option to change the camp leader's name mid run? or too much work? not at all worth it if it is too much fuss, but the game has a few things that can force name changes on the leader that sometimes come up with some less than ideal names. quick as you like and a male leader changing to female I believe can come with name changes (not sure if there are others) and just thought it'd be nice to be able to either undo those or pick something else without save scumming for it.