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Code:
cost = 200
if (popularity > 9):
cost = 25 * popularity
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redle
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That means 100g isn't the floor of cost, but 75g is. Not sure any girlpack or someone doing manual edits has used a Popularity=6, but that would make cost 150g (with half obviously being 75)
On a completely separate note (and feel free to ignore, the following isn't directly aimed at you Disgruntler) I decided to do a least a relatively quick glance through of some of the GUI and interactions.
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I misstepped there, editted it, the cap is 10 for scaling to start, not 6.
But I did rigorously test it with a wide selection of girls and popularity.
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No. You just have 100 and a girl who works for 100. That one girl will work, the rest will take the night off. Not having enough to pay a girl just means she takes the night off. So if you have one girl working you're able to make money and get back to being able to pay the others.
I really appreciate the advice, and I love the work that you guys are doing with these games, and the willingness to help. And I'm absolutely not trying to be an ass or a troll, but if I have a bunch of girls where the popularity is set to zero, and some are asking for 200, others 500, some 1200, and some 2500, is there something else going on? And it doesn't seem to be random, as the same girl will ask for the same payment every time I restart and meet her again.
On a different note, I noticed that about 75% of my girlpacks have the popularity set to zero, but a handful are other numbers that the creator set and I never changed, and the girls with those larger popularity numbers never show up in TUSC for me. I'm going to experiment setting all of those to zero and see what happens with a new playthrough.
EDIT: I saw your other post after this. So you're saying that any girl who's popularity is more than 10 won't show up in the game? That explains what I've been seeing if so.
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No.
But, if a girl has a data.yml file where the there's an illegal value, that girl doesn't show up. So, if they have a proficiency higher than 4, and so on. The data.yml has primacy over the description.json and anything in the former will be looked at by the game if it exists. It only looks at the json if the yml is missing.
redle
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What his post said (in English rather than Code):
Anyone whose popularity is between 0 and 9 will have a suggested starting salary of 200.
Anyone whose popularity is 10 or above will have a suggested starting salary of 25 times the value of their popularity.
- popularity = 10; salary = 25 * 10 = 250
- popularity = 62; salary = 25 * 62 = 1550
As for manually editing the girlpack and not seeing the above results...
- check that you do not have girlpacks in 2 different places on your harddrive where you are editing one but the game is using another
- check that the data file used by the game is where your changes are actually being made (as an example Disgruntler pointed out that there are 2 different potential data files that a girl pack may have and TUSC has its own rules as to where it gets its data
- if all else fails on getting a girl into the game, try downloading the Example Girl from the OP and copying the data.yml file from it into the girls folders (edit it with the proper girl's name) and then try again.
You said that you only asked for randomized prices because of the selection process always favoring some girls over others, which I agree would help replayability if implemented, but this would limit our selection in the early game regardless. After I explained this, later you agreed with me that an one-time lowering of the Popularity values, thereby lowering the costs for every girl across the board, would achieve a better result than random high salaries for some (or fixed high prices for certain girls as it stands now)
Therefore, I lowered all my popularity values to below 50 using the VC girlpack editor in less than 5 minutes, and that fixed the limited hiring options and terrible financial choices issues in the early-game. So, I don't understand how that didn't address at least one of things we were talking about.
Bear in mind, some of the prices haven't changed in my current playthrough because I think the character data was already loaded into the save, but any new girls I've encountered do show up with a reasonable asking price, which can be reduced -50% by grinding relationship to 100.
Also, some girls who have higher Popularity values seem to show up in establishments other than the typical bar or gym, but I haven't done enough testing to know if this isn't just perception bias. I do know that girls with 80 or 100 popularity used to show up, and now, ones with 50 still show up. There are some I haven't seen yet in either playthrough, but I don't see any correlation to high popularity ones not appearing.
Please report your findings after lowering the popularity to zero because I've only changed mine to ≤50. If this works as intended (everyone costs 200 to hire), then I don't see how this particular pricing issue isn't resolved by just "normalizing" popularity values.
===
In any case, I'm glad Everglow is considering adding messages and popups to show what actions do and their results as well as indicator text for skill/stat checks. Happy to hear you agree with our suggestions, thanks.
OK, thank you for that info. All of my girlpacks, along with the VC and TUSC games and their associated files are stored on the same external drive, and I have so many that I've just dedicated one exclusively to them.
I keep my porn videos on a different external, and when I add scenes that I cut myself, I then save those directly into the girlpacks. Its been a pretty effective system for me.
Then I open the Lst_Venusclub program and make any adjustments to them as needed, checking boxes and making sure the pictures work, etc.
redle
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Your answer was fine. I was never complaining about it or saying it was not useful (in general, it just wasn't a solution to what I wanted). But the game has varying pricing. And the game has a popularity stat. Both of those two elements have obviously been intentionally placed in the game and used by the game creator. So my expectation remains that either there is a purpose to having both or in the future as the game evolves they will have a purpose (or the developer will decide on his own to remove one or both). My initial post was never intended to be "about right now." I am not trying to "fix" anything in the existing version. I am thinking of the future. My post was about the future. As the game changes and evolves and popularity has value and maybe even is required to succeed, I see no reason to plan on manually editing my girl packs every time there is a new version to best "cheat" the current release. I would rather the game work well out-of-the-box. And so I provided a suggestion that I thought would improve future releases.
As for limited selection in the early game, I have no problem with that existing as a game mechanic. The concept that as a new business manager I can only afford to hire employees from the bottom rungs and need to work my way up, I find that concept perfectly reasonable. However, yes, the exact current release is very light on any real strategy. If I lowered everyone's popularity and thus their wages I could treat everyone equally and hire whomever I choose. That could work just fine. It is not what I was seeking, but I agreed with you that it is a viable solution for the current build for those that seek to make play easier or have greater freedom of choice.
Either way it is nice to know that a pack editor exists. I may or may not make use of it for other purposes. But for the point of having different people be expensive and cheap for different playthoughs, that's a feature I would like added to the core game (unless the developer decides to do away with the mechanic and make everyone cheap). My assumption is that a new business owner will always need to seek out the cheap employees as their early hires.
The fundamental issue is the dev didn't decide whether anyone is expensive or cheap, so it's not directly intentional design; it's only indirectly related since it's based on the arbitrary value the girlpack creator decided, as it stands now. So, if most girlpack creators put 0 popularity, then that's totally valid. It's not "cheating" because the value was arbitrary, perhaps intended for VC mechanics, and isn't related to other skills/stats, which I think should impact the price rather than suggesting it be more random in the future.
Again, I think the randomness is something that I would not like. For instance, if you disassociated price from popularity and made it completely random, then popularity would matter even less. You're right in that there is a logic, if popularity works as intended, increasing the draw of customers, thus increasing earnings; but I'm not sure there is such a strong relationship between popularity and earnings versus other stats and unlocks.
I wouldn't mind differing prices for different respective earnings levels, but only adding random prices would make the salary/wage disconnect worse, not better, in my opinion. In your example, you're imagining prospective employees with differing experience and proficiency levels being hired for different salaries, but the reality of implementing this would be an even greater discrepancy between price and revenue, meaning bottom rung prospects would be expensive while skilled workers might end up cheap. Whether we randomize popularity linked to price or randomize price in isolation, I think the end result would be a worse experience, especially for new players.
That said, Disgruntler did mention making a script to randomize popularity with the option to scale it to training stats and work proficiency, so that's much better than just randomizing popularity or price, imo.
CaptC
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...or have the local loanshark advance you a loan, at ruinous interest rates.Holy moly, the last 3 pages are wild
A suggestion dev
Don't you think it's better to be able to start the bar even if you can't pay all the girls in advance, but you lose the game if you go negative after the night is over?
For that matter, having a 'take out a loan' option works even if the girls still demand their money up front. "A shady guy steps out of the shadows. 'Nice club you got there. A shame you can't afford any staff tonight. I am prepared to lend you $500 to let you open tonight... But you gotta pay me back $1000 first thing tomorrow.'" Player then chooses one of 'accept loan' or 'skip opening club'.
redle
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The thought of randomly shifting prices without also shifting the price drivers to match never even crossed my mind as a possibility. I agree that would make no sense under any circumstance. If price is simply arbitrary then there is no point to it. Either salary difference makes sense and has value or it does not. If it does not then it should not exist in the game. Whether it exists or does not, at this point doesn't matter at all to me. That all depends on design decisions and how balance and strategy is going to be implemented as the game continues.
No, I never gave any example at all. I have no interest in low cost but high value and high cost but low value people. You may have heard me asking for price variation and assumed I did not think that price drivers would be shifted to match, but that was never the case. All I ever said was that I do not want the same people to be out of reach every game and correspondingly the same people be who get owned early every time. Maybe everyone else likes it playing the same every time. Maybe everyone else goes and manually changes all their people before they start a new game. Personally I'd rather get variation, and I'd rather have it built into the game. Therefore I suggested it as an idea for future inclusion. You or anyone else is free to say you dislike this idea. The developer is free to implement it or not.
redle
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Sounds like a cool tool. Who knows, maybe it will eventually be incorporated to some degree. I haven't looked at it any, but of course you can always add slider settings to allow for more or less of those crazy price points.
And yeah, I mentioned paying at the end of the day rather than before, having a loan mechanism, or adding in a cash-reserve system as at least 3 potential ways of dealing with the problem. Also mentioned the game really needs to tell a person their game is over when they really are never going to be able to "open for the day" ever again.
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To this point, the randomizer I am working on for TUSC relates proficiencies and persuasion-related stats to the scale of popularity and therefore expense. More popular girls are less likely to reject you in training and more proficient in performances which directly impacts earn along side their popularity.
I haven't figured out what distribution of 5ers to the rest of the field I want (even with 1/4th the field as 5ers it feels like too many to me) but I can say that with relationship halving the price of girls the actual 'is the juice worth the squeeze' on earn shows up a lot sooner and you can afford to take on more expensive girls. When before, you'd take on pop5-10 girls to keep your spend in the 200-250 per range and feel squeezed, remember that same amount of spend gets you pop16-20 and I do recommend testing the earn rates for those girls. I've even started testing having 30-40 pop girls (750-1000 base means a more affordable 375-500 after affinity grinding) in my early few girls and finding decent success with it. But the relationship grinding also means that you're not as likely to be hiring more girls than you have slots to work them, so you can match with upgrades in a more organic manner.
Then again, I've never been a fan of 'just buy Bar 3 and then invest in bar snacks' way of gaining money, it feels too much like I'm ramping up to do things I don't actually care about. Being able to start with VIP 1 out the gate and even possibly get its slot filled out the gate sits well with me.
redle
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Well, I only just tried the game recently for the first time. So I don't really have any previous trends or styles to compare it to. My main experiences at this point are... try to play the game yourself and fail miserably because there is no clue or indication how negotiation works (and end up hiring everyone for Double rather than Half). Then reading on here about how negotiation works and went straight to hiring 100g people. So I can't say I have actually tried getting a minimum-price high popularity person early. I can say that sticking to 100g people early had me earning money hand over fist and upgrading often quite quickly.
Of course without manually editing any files and without the game rebalancing, one is subject to the whims of the pack creators. Depending on any given person's taste, someone could by pure chance download almost exclusively 0 popularity girls and someone else could unknowingly download virtually no low popularity girls at all. So playing with stats determined by random 3rd parties, different for every player, and never rebalanced by the the game already means the game has zero chance of ever achieving any sort of "balanced play." (Sorry drifting on a tangent here)
For me the existing stats are a bit too hidden, a bit too obscure how anything functions, and a bit too micromanagement for me to take interest in them. So I have even less of a clue right now how they do or do not effect profit. About the only thing I really noticed was that hiring only a single person and sitting on that for a while seemed to be the best option. The first person was solidly turning a profit. Hiring a second and third barely changed gross profit at all, meaning they were at best barely paying for themselves and not increasing profits at all. My guess is that it is a customer count thing, as ticket sales seems to be the primary profit driver early, which doesn't matter at all how good, bad, or what type of job anyone is working.
Perhaps I misunderstood you, but I thought we were talking about randomizing popularity and/or price. My bad, if I was mistaken... ideally, price would scale with earnings drivers like we suggested, but personally I'm satisfied with my popularity cap of 50. I didn't have to edit anything but once, and the dev didn't have to do anything.
I don't quite understand why you want this feature "built-in" when girlpacks are user generated and customizable, which I think is a strength rather than a weakness. I wouldn't like forcing hiring limitations on everyone when the early game is already a pain. In my opinion, the whole point of a game like this is to set it up how you want instead of it being balanced giving the exact same experience for everyone.
Anyway, I absolutely agree with what you said about the negotiations being too opaque and the effects of the stats being too hidden though. You're right that the game doesn't give enough clues about what actions and stats do. For example, upgrading the club seems extremely potent, so it makes even less sense to pay more for hires in the beginning.
Thanks for the update. If popularity does impact other earnings-related stats, which I thought were randomized, then that's pretty much the solution to the pricing issue. I'm not sure if I want this built into the base game though, but I would run it against my packs when you're ready to share.
redle
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Just my own personal opinion, but as far as I'm concerned the use/benefit of girl packs is 100% the imagery (photos and videos). Whether some random third-party creator decided this person "has skills" and this other person is "unpopular or unskilled," and has thus hard-coded those values as completely intertwined with the imagery is really not of interest to me. And it is not so much that I could not open all the files and change them myself so it was not a 3rd party's decision... I don't really want static data (I would agree the imagery coming in the form of girl packs is a strength; I would disagree and say that stats being part of the girl packs is a weakness). If they were unpopular for me personally I would not have downloaded that set in the first place (or would be inclined to delete it). So for me, if they are left in the game I would be interested in seeing them. I would prefer that the packs contained no stats at all. Any stats needed to play the game were randomly assigned during the game. I don't want these 5, 10, however many specific girls to always be the ones that end up in the vip, this other group is always my bouncers, etc... I don't want the stats to pigeon-hole people (whether it be preventing them as an early hire or making them specially aimed at a specific job). The only real potential downside to completely random (and I'll clarify here since this seemed to be a sticking point for you before)...
By random I do not mean take every stat, salary, value of any kind and roll each one completely in isolation. If there are logical links such as a stat that increases earnings and a cost (i.e. salary) or any other relationship, one does not write code to roll these values separately. One is rolled randomly then the "matching" value is generated from the first value (with potentially some wiggle room).
...potential downside is if a given pack has missing categories of imagery. I'd still probably prefer completely random for myself, but a very solid argument could be made that available content for the pack should hedge the possible results for any specific character. I'm more in games for the game aspect then the porn. I like adult games, but I prefer my games to first and foremost play well.
But at this point I've tried explaining myself 3 or 4 or so different times. I imagine the point is beyond belabored here. I'd prefer variation over repetition... that about sums it up.
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To really sum everything up, succinctly--you want Scramble Mode.
When it is 'ready for prime time' I'll have it for you. Don't expect much in the way of presentation.