Pink Petal Games
Feedback => Bugs and Game balancing => Topic started by: zodiac44 on November 03, 2009, 02:25:03 PM
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I started looking into what is happening when girls refuse to work. I noticed that once a specific girl refuses to do a specific job, she will never work that job again, regardless of what other jobs you assign her too, the length of time she spends not assigned to that job, amount of free time you give her, what you say to her, or what gifts you give her. It also seems that the refusal to work is time-related, not rebelliousness-related, as if the girl accumulates a "dislike" (for lack of a better term) of the job every time she does it. When her dislike reaches a certain point, she refuses to do the job any more. If you change her over to another job, she will perform that one until her dislike reaches the critical threshold, and then she will need a third job. So far, I have seen this effect with the strip bar, gambling hall, and movie jobs, but not the brothel and training jobs (I haven't tested the street job).
In the save files, some of the girls' stats can get high negative values (negative hundreds or thousands) while all other stats are 0 or positive (up to 100). Could these be the records of the "dislike" stats?
I'm going to start a test game to see if I can track the progression in the saves and see if I am right.
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I've also noticed that girls who refuse to work will always refuse that job, but not other jobs. Makes assigning tasks something of a jigzaw puzzle...
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I was wrong - it seems the stat line has 3 entries for each stat and skill: base, permanent bonus/penalty, temporary bonus/penalty. There simply isn't a positive/negative cap on the bonuses and penalties, though I surmise that in the game engine the skills and stats are still capped at +/-100.
Testing another theory now...
[Edit]
I think I figured it out: it's near the end of the character's save block, the line that reads "-20 -20 -20 -20 -20 -20" for new characters. Position 2 tracks the bar, 3 tracks the gambling hall, 4 tracks movies, and 5 tracks sex (brothel, street, and bar sex). Each time a character performs the job, the number increments some (random?) number, and when it reaches somewhere around 13-20, the character refuses to do the job. I tried editing the save file to reset the counters to -20 each, but the game crashes on loading (instead of the typical incompatible save game file message that crops up when I edit other parts of a save file).
Necno, is it possible to edit the talk scripts to decrement these variables? If so, what are the variables called so I can edit the scripts to account for them?
[Edit 2]
Interestingly (and appropriately, IMHO), the Nymphomaniac trait prevents the sex counter from incrementing. Does anyone know of any other traits having a similar effect for other jobs?
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Does a refusal lower the 'refusal count'?
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Nope. Once the counter reaches the threshold, it's stuck there, apparently forever.
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I have had an curious emcounter with refusing to work once. I tried to experiment with the item editor and make one an item that makes the character 100 on obediance and stat controled. And it turned out it didn't seem to do anything but possibly make them refuse to work more.
Then I looked around more options and then tried to add broken will and mind fucked and it worked for a while but then after some time that start refusing to work again and I tried to use stuff to get them to work and sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't.
It maybe that their is an error in the statuses and the atributes.
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I messed around extensively with adding and removing traits, raising and lowering skills and stats - nothing I tried had any effect at all except for the Nymphomaniac trait.
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Interesting, i will do some more testing. Yes to the scripts but not until i get 1.30 released which won't be for a while. I'm using the release break to do a few things extra as well as working on the code a bit more.
On the plus side, there are now 3 other coders working on this game. They are working on fixes and such for the current version (1.29). Once 1.30 is out the 4 of us will be working on the same stuff.
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Great news about the fixes, hopefully with a team of 4 the version rollouts shall be faster and more finished. Keep up the good work! ;D
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What we're thinking of doing is having "stable" and "testing" releases. So "stable" will mean playable, but probably a bit old. "testing" is going to be fast and up to date, but probably buggy.
The idea is we'd still like the bug reports and the testing, but hopefully we shouldn't leave everyone having to cope with major bugs for any length of time.
Of course, first we need to get to a stable release ...
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Well I don't mind bugs, major (Game breaking?) ones however should be hot-fixed a.s.a.p. (most have been have been, but I consider the pregnancy bug a considerable one)
Would the test releases be limiting their hot-fix(s) for issues that (almost literally) do no make the game playable, or will we see doable bugs done away with? It's hard to balance time and effort on bug-killing <-> new features, and exactly what is a doable bug? (Each case needs some time to figure out, try to resolve, test...)
Well I'd like this two-tier release system, it's always hard to downgrade yourself though when major features are in a version that you can't really enjoy because saving and back-up saving just doesn't work.
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Psssh. Stable games are for pussies. Everything always works, there aren't any neat little quirks to surmount... I like beta much more.
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Letmein likes to abuse errors in the systems of stuff
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It's all good. The guys who like to work around the buggy features can run the testing version, and we'll be most appreciative of the bug reports.
The guys who just want to play - or the ones who get tired of beta testing and want to revert back to a more stable version - we can cater for them, as well.
It's a win-win :)
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A question: Did traits like Iron Will, Yandere, etc mess with the numbers gained or the starting position of the 'Refusal count'? Like, were numbers or numbers gained consistantly higher with them? Did traits like Vroken will, Mind-fucked result in lower numbers?
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I didn't specifically test to see if anything exacerbated the problem, I was primarily concerned with finding things which alleviate the problem.
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Alright, I was playing with the new 1.29 hotfix and thought of something:
I have 4 girls to start with, all with a rebelliousness between -20 to -5 and they all refuse more than half the time. Add to that the fact that they are slaves means something weird is going on. I could understand free people refusing to work, but where's the logic in slaves refusing to work? Isn't the point of having slaves that they can't refuse? Especially when the girl who refuses the most has the trait 'Nymphomaniac'.
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Been getting extremely high refusal rates with the new hotfix as well, upwards of 75%
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Yeah the it still needs work, I don't think rebellion explicitly is factored in though.
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Any ETA on when the girls refusing to work thing might be fixed? it's discouraging to have very low rebelliousness -slaves- refusing to work ever again... game breaking, I would say.
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Should be next release. If not, I'll look at getting a hotfix out based on that.
Can't really do it now, because the tree is somewhat in flux, but once we have a stable point work from...
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Alright.. sounds good. I was just wondering. Other then that, enjoying the game. ;D
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noted that girls only refuse to work when their skills are low, i.e. if they do not enjoy their "work", correlate that with the other factors pls.
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It's strange: when I ran my test of trained vs untrained girls, no girls in either set ever refused to work a single day in the year I ran the simulations for. All had rebellion in the 5-15 range. This would be against the idea that skill plays a factor. It almost seems like there is a weird sign error that crops up around -40, where it acts like the girl has a rebellion of +40. It'll be nice to have the mess fixed, though, whatever the exact cause is.