General Discussion

[CherryWood]

Question1: Does anyone mind if I update a few more of the npc graphics? (in particular, the which and the tailor shop... possibly the armor shop/forge girl as well)

Do not change the tailor and café girls please. I manage those. (something is wrong with them?)

[Pseudononymous]

Do not change the tailor and café girls please. I manage those. (something is wrong with them?)

Wrong, not necessarily, but the tailor girl in particular seems to be a bit behind the times. I simply feel that there are higher quality image choices out there. But hey, if it's your department I'll let you run it. This is why I ask rather than just going and changing things all willy-nilly. If that's you, keep it how you like sir. No change, no problem.

[Xela]

Question1: Does anyone mind if I update a few more of the npc graphics? (in particular, the which and the tailor shop... possibly the armor shop/forge girl as well)

Go ahead, almost everyone seems to want to replace them with sprites of their own choosing It's been done 2 or 3 times already.

Question2: Can I create custom icons for each of the shops instead of having the same "pointer" style icon for every one? I can also change the .json file to reflect this change, I've learned my way around them.

Sure.

Question3: I see this layout for all items, what does it mean?

Code: [Select]


    {
    "id": "Exotic Bouquet",
    "icon": "content/items/gift/eb.png",
    "desc": "This tastefully-arranged bouquet is comprised of many types of flowers that usually only grow in faraway lands. It's colorful, it's gorgeous, and it shows that you're willing to spend a lot of money to impress.",
    "price": 300,
    "chance": 65,
    "dismod": 30,
    "cblock": 5,
    "infinite": false,
    "locations": ["General Store"],
    "traits": {"Ill-mannered": 40, "Not Human": 45, "Tomboy": -20, "Noble": 15}

Is there a manual somewhere that explains what all of this means? I assume the following:
id, icon, price,infinite and locations are all obvious
chance: odds of the item showing up in shop (out of 100) every week or day. (each time new items are generated)
dismod: no idea
cblock: no idea
traits: how much the item affects a certain trait (0 = trait loss, 100 = trait gain) OR how much it effects a slaves happiness based on the whether or not they have the trait

I'm looking to start designing the new gifts that are to be mostly based on their compatibility with traits so this info will be very helpful. Also, if this is the old format of how gifts are constructed, I'd like a heads up on the new one.

There is a somewhat outdated explanation here:

http://www.pinkpetal.org/index.php?topic=1883.0

dismod stands for "disposition modifier" but we decided not to use it for now.

cblock blocks an item to be used again for the "5" amount of days in this case. It was not meant to be used with gifts, maybe we've agreed to use it in gift context to make gifts useless for the said amount of days but I do not recall writing actual code for that.

traits modify the disposition when gift is given and prolly also determine a response. Code may be broken atm, we've update core code a couple of times but not gifts interactions.

On an end note: I am currently working on making the smaller icons that correlate to traits, but I will switch off between all of this depending on if I get burnt out on one or the other. Always good to have a lot of things to do. Once I am done with a few trait icons, if I can't figure out how to implement them, I'll ask about that.

I'd keep gifts very, very simple. About the same as they are now... there is no point in over-complicating the design. I expect that some of the traits are gone by now unless Dark updated the file recently.

Simplest way to design them is to base traits bonuses off temperament, must have traits like body/breast/race/base. More specific modifications will require more work, there are too many traits in the game.

[Xela]

Do not change the tailor and café girls please. I manage those. (something is wrong with them?)

I forgot, you even changed music and wrote an event for the tailor

[Pseudononymous]

Cool cool.

Well there is a cblock on every gift item, some up to 30 days for high-ticket items. Should I implement cblock in the new ones or just leave it out? (If you and Dark need to discuss this just get back to me on it whenever you know what's up).

I'll do my best to keep it simple as you've suggested.


If he doesn't catch this (though I'm sure he will) I'll PM dark and ask about updating the trait file so that I know which are actually useful to consider for item development and which are not.

Any idea where the code for gift interactions lives? (what location in the repo?) I may be able to unbreak it and get it back on track. Looking to do any specific improvements/modifications to the basic system of gift interactions? (If I can figure my way to fixing it I may be able to implement some of the new ideas). I'm not talking any unique cases here, just the universally applied cases. 

[CherryWood]

Wrong, not necessarily, but the tailor girl in particular seems to be a bit behind the times. I simply feel that there are higher quality image choices out there.

...sorry, you mean that assistant schoolgirl, you can replace her freely, she's just a relic from first version I guess. Just keep tha tailor lady be.

[DarkTl]

dismod stands for "disposition modifier" but we decided not to use it for now.

Wrong, we decided to not use it for usual items. For gifts it is the base value for changing disposition.

So in the case of Exotic Bouquet we have "dismod": 30, ie + 30 disposition.
Then we look at "traits": {"Ill-mannered": 40, "Not Human": 45, "Tomboy": -20, "Noble": 15}, ie 30-20 = 10 disposition if Tomboy trait is there, or 30 - 20 + 15 = 25 if Tomboy and Noble traits are there. Of course we don't have these traits anymore, since we made gifts like 2 years ago, even before we introduced MPTrait system, and since then we were focused on other modules 

Also there are fields like "occupations": {"Warrior": 30} which used to work with occupations before we made them class traits. I suppose we will need to code a new field for such things now.

cblock blocks an item to be used again for the "5" amount of days in this case. It was not meant to be used with gifts, maybe we've agreed to use it in gift context to make gifts useless for the said amount of days but I do not recall writing actual code for that.

Yup, we had such an agreement.

Question5: Because the game is free I assume it is ok to use well known/copyrighted girls for the npc updates? Correct me if I am wrong. Also, I may stash a few backups in case we run into an oddity with someone releasing a shopkeep in a girl pack or something. Or do we simply want to avoid implementing any girl that we might want to be a slave as a shopkeep (a.k.a. keep it generic)?

Yeap, we don't care about copyright. Sometimes I even delete copyrighting signs from images if they are too big and noticeable for my taste.
Ideally as shopkeeps we should use characters that don't have enough images to make a pack, or original characters ie not from some game or show (it's basically the same, they usually don't have enough pictures for a pack too).

Well there is a cblock on every gift item, some up to 30 days for high-ticket items. Should I implement cblock in the new ones or just leave it out? (If you and Dark need to discuss this just get back to me on it whenever you know what's up).

I figured that we shouldn't allow players to spam the same gift over and over, and cblock was the only way to prevent it back then. I still believe that we shouldn't allow spamming gifts. You or Xela could code another way instead of cblock if you don't like it 

[Xela]

Wrong, we decided to not use it for usual items. For gifts it is the base value for changing disposition.

I see... this sort of means "universal gifts" which I wanted to avoid, it should be used with a lot of reservation... Most gifts should prolly have this set to 0.

Also there are fields like "occupations": {"Warrior": 30} which used to work with occupations before we made them class traits. I suppose we will need to code a new field

We should move specific occupations to "traits" field and leave normal "occupations" field for generalization strings such as "SIW", "Server" and "Warrior". It will make a lot of sense if done this way.

[DarkTl]

Yup, forgot about general occupations.

this sort of means "universal gifts" which I wanted to avoid, it should be used with a lot of reservation... Most gifts should prolly have this set to 0.

Yes, we'll have to balance it too, but it's not so bad when we actively use cblock. Such gifts simply can have weeks of cooldown.

[DarkTl]

Xela, I recall you mentioned something about custom buttons that appear in gui during quests or something like that. I suppose we'll need them to actually make my quests work, because I cannot think of a better way to advance in many cases.

[Xela]

Xela, I recall you mentioned something about custom buttons that appear in gui during quests or something like that. I suppose we'll need them to actually make my quests work, because I cannot think of a better way to advance in many cases.

Looks at Namis/Frogs quests, they ARE custom buttons, both Nami and the frog. What I was talking about is to allow placing those buttons into NPCs usual menus because it looks really bad when button is just hovering there instead of being a part of NPCs usual talking choices.

[DarkTl]

I mean buttons inside GMs too, not just hovering somewhere. I'm actually going to use matrix inside village to search for quests, but when you already found a quest, I want buttons to advance through it.

[Pseudononymous]

...sorry, you mean that assistant schoolgirl, you can replace her freely, she's just a relic from first version I guess. Just keep tha tailor lady be.

I don't think we're on the same page here, I mean the lady with the pink hair, with the scissors, in the tailor shop "tailor_kayo" is the name of the file. Not the cafe assistant in the maid uniform with the white hair or the tailor assistant in the school girl uniform with the brown hair. I'm pretty sure I mean the one you want left alone.

However, I'm not replacing anything at the cafe or tailor, you said that was your department and whether or not you prefer to keep it as is or update it I respect your decision. I don't like to go messing around with other people's active department. I'll leave it to you sir, but let me know if you want any help with alterations if you decide on any.

[DarkTl]

Since we took some traits names directly from wm resources, I'm afraid we made the same mistake by using double n in "Exhibitionnist" 
Gonna use autoreplacment function to fix it.

[Pseudononymous]

I figured that we shouldn't allow players to spam the same gift over and over, and cblock was the only way to prevent it back then. I still believe that we shouldn't allow spamming gifts. You or Xela could code another way instead of cblock if you don't like it 

Nope, that works for me.

But I'm not seeing the problem with the "dismod" method. Xela said it makes it them "universal gifts" meaning it affects all girls and so to avoid this he said most dismods will be set to 0 so that only traits affect it's disposition bonus, which makes sense. Still I'm not seeing the problem with universal gifts, they'll take more balancing, but I think the simplicity of the system is agreeable. Either way you'd have a simpler system with more complex balancing or a more complex system with simpler balancing.

In any case, are the trait files (the .jsons listing all of the traits) up to date? Because if some have been removed and it simply hasn't been updated yet I'd rather not waste time making icons for traits that are no longer going to be implemented. Also, I would need accurate one's for gift creation.