General Discussion

[DarkTl]

Great, now filters just need a decent gui 
For instance, we cannot provide a separate button for every existing building in the characters list, it will be a mess. So I suppose a drop-down list of buildings or something like that is needed.

[DarkTl]

Hm. Characters lines still don't support everything. I left a few ー symbols by mistake, and the game doesn't know how to show them.

[Xela]

Hm. Characters lines still don't support everything. I left a few ー symbols by mistake, and the game doesn't know how to show them.

Long vowel mark for Kanji? Aka:

30FC
KATAKANA-HIRAGANA PROLONGED SOUND MARK
Modifier Letter

(no, quotes, I am just gonna pretend to know this sh1t off the top of my head  )

If you want to support the whole existing unicode range (100k characters, give or take), I suppose we could install one of those 50+ MB (butt ugly) Microsoft fonts that sometimes come with office/some of their other soft to take care of really exotic/foreign stuff.

This one isn't supported even by the default English DejaVuSans, which afaik is considered to have a really decent character set. There is a Japanese version of the same font that should have it though... I don't know how reasonable such an approach actually is thought.

[DarkTl]

Right, something is broken. Here is the line, here is the code

$ rc("Ehehe. What is it? ♪", "Muhuhu♪ Did you need something?", "Nuu, what's up?", "Eh? What, what is it?", "Huhu, what is it?", "W-What? Did I do something wrong...?", "Aaah! U-um...wh-what...?", "Waah!?　D-don't startle me like that, jeez...", "Aah!　D-don't scare me like that...")

The game doesn't know how to show a space? 

It might be an unusual space of some kind, I searched for it and found 19 hits in whole interactions. But still, I don't think it's a rare japanese space for special cases.
 

[Xela]

It might be an unusual space of some kind, I searched for it and found 19 hits in whole interactions. But still, I don't think it's a rare japanese space for special cases.

Well... it  obviously  is an ideographic space used in languages that use Chinese-derived ideographs (one of them is Japanese).

This is a space:
This is an ideographic space:　

The difference is quite obvious, is it not 

[DarkTl]

As long as we rip lines from translated japanese games, we'll keep having issues like that. There is no way to know that a space is wrong until you see the line in the game 

[DarkTl]

Huh. When you enter a location with foreword, such as beach or park gates, the buttons to look around and meet characters are available immediately, even before location introduction ends. If there is an event tied to looking around, it also starts immediately after you look around, right in the middle of the introduction.
It's... not very failproof, I think.

[Xela]

As long as we rip lines from translated japanese games, we'll keep having issues like that. There is no way to know that a space is wrong until you see the line in the game 

I'm adding jap support, found some 5mb free font for it.

Huh. When you enter a location with foreword, such as beach or park gates, the buttons to look around and meet characters are available immediately, even before location introduction ends. If there is an event tied to looking around, it also starts immediately after you look around, right in the middle of the introduction.
It's... not very failproof, I think.

Don't know... I tried adding modal to say screen once but there were other issues with it. I need a list of all bad cases in order to come up with a logical system somehow.

[DarkTl]

Well, it's not like it causes CTDs so far. But if event will jump somewhere, it might be another story.

I have battle backgrounds in game\content\gfx\bg\be, such as b_city_3, b_forest_4, etc. And code like

    if "park" in gm.label_cache:
        $ back = "content/gfx/bg/be/b_park_3.jpg"
        ...
    $ battle = BE_Core(Image(back), start_sfx=get_random_image_dissolve(1.5), music="random", end_sfx=dissolve)

I want to pick background randomly, like not just b_park_3.jpg, but any background from the be folder that has park in its name. I suppose I could make it work like choice (background name 1, background name 2), but I wonder if it can be done easier, like the random choice for battle music you added recently.

[Xela]

I have battle backgrounds in game\content\gfx\bg\be, such as b_city_3, b_forest_4, etc. And code likeI want to pick background randomly, like not just b_park_3.jpg, but any background from the be folder that has park in its name. I suppose I could make it work like choice (background name 1, background name 2), but I wonder if it can be done easier, like the random choice for battle music you added recently.

I don't know when it becomes "easier", we'll prolly have to rewrite all of these file searches we do and access it using internal Ren'Py functions. If you have just the few background, plainly listing them is prolly easier.

===>>
I've added support for Japanese characters (along with some 5mb Japanese font). It's kind of hack because I cheated and use a huge unicode range to cover them that includes some other crap as well like some obscure arabic range, random weird characters and etc. We can do it properly if we run into even more issues...

Seems to be working at any rate. I've also grabbed the latest de ja vu sans from their website, it 'might' have better character support than what we were using, file is larger at any rate.

[DarkTl]

I suppose when it works like
list = []
if "park" in gm.label_cache:
    for n in (folder with backgrounds):
        if "park" in n:
            list.append(n)
result = choice (n)

This way they are prone to deleting and adding new ones. But if it will have to be rewritten eventually, then I suppose it makes no sense.

[DarkTl]

Alright, after some editing all locations have more or less suitable backgrounds to fight. I'm gonna make a few "evil" options for interactions, and fights with characters require this.

[Xela]

Oki, I'll try to put in some time into interface and resume making new FG + SimPy code playable. After that's done, there will be only couple of smaller issues left with the jobs/businesses and we can start working on a job events system.

We'll also need meaningful upgrades to businesses and sound manager bonuses and maybe some ways to control/enhance those bonuses. I'd love a system where such things can really make a difference, now it's possible with SimPy but it still requires a lot of imagination/thinking through.

[DarkTl]

If there will be one manager per building, managers have to be much more rare than other chars. Otherwise there will be plenty of useless chars with needless manager class.
Either that, or managers should not have a unique class, and anyone with for example high intelligence can be one. Actually, that might work pretty well, like if you make manager from a warrior, warriors in the building will get a bit of extra bonuses, and so on for other classes.

[Xela]

I'll take that into consideration when updating random char generation routines. We may allow or even require more managers in the future or something like that. If you (or anyone else?) want to write a full "concept", it''ll always be welcome.

Otherwise we're rolling with the usual: Prototype ==> Improve ==> Prototype ==> Improve routine and adjust the code accordingly. Codebase needs a cleanup (refactoring) but it's a LOT cleaner and better suited for this type of development today than it was an year ago (not speaking of two years back when SimBro rewrite concept was in play and all code was written without expansion/change of concept in mind).