closed.

[shylock]

http://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/viewto ... 16&t=10889.

Thread is obsolete.

[shylock]

Current things I can't figure out, a continuing series. Feel free to leave advice.

-How to implement the world map. I can't just show a picture of the whole region of Europe because I'll lose all geographic detail, so I need some way to drag around it (e.g. Google Maps) or some other solution to this problem.

[shylock]

Bug status:

Fixed all reported bugs to date.

[DaFool]

Screenshots? Or is this a skeleton with no art?
(self-bumping is no problem, although if attention is needed there's the GxB forum for that).

[Ren]

It's good to see something different on these forums, I wish you luck with your game, and I hope you indeed find the help you need.

A couple of things: I'd arrange the menu for when you buy stuff to sell later on - as it is, you have, reading from left, the object you can buy on one column, then the ones you can sell and then the quantities... I had a bit of trouble understanding that I was supposed to click on the quantities first, and then the objects. I'd suggest arranging them in the opposite order (with the quantities first) so that they're easier to read. Perhaps it would even be a good idea to provide a small explanation about that in the form of a short message/tutorial before you start.
I found it a bit confusing when I wanted to buy the salt I got in Rostock once I got to Lubeck, and buy something else. I'd organise the menus in a different way, so that the quantity that you're selling or buying goes back to zero after every transaction. It would also be nice to be able to have an option to bring a quantity to zero in general, for example if I choose to buy 25 bags of salt and then think again and want 10 and 10 of cloth, I have to roll back, which isn't so elegant.

I also realise the UI is still at an embryonic stage, but I will still mention that as I chose a long name for my ship (Wonderfulia Megadeth), I had it overlapping with its stat:

As a word of advice, I'd keep it in mind when you come up with the final layout for your game and either make it so the name and the stat aren't so near to each other, or so that there's actually a character limit for the name itself.

When your meet your crew, there's a guy called "Andreas, of Rostock", but his displayed name is "Ariane".

I also spent all my money but 0.10 Groshen, but by the time I met the guy who wanted to sell me some info and asked me 5 Groshen, I was still able to pay it. I only seemed to go into negative figures after I slept. I understand this picky, and you possibly just left it out for the moment, but I thought I'd mention it anyway.

I had some problems keeping track of the various prices etc. while I was playing, but I've never tried Patrician III nor I've played this kind of game before, so I don't know if I just suck at it and I should take notes or eat more fish and do something about my memory. Perhaps it would be neat (depending on how feasible it would be programming-wise) to have a short description of the cities, in the map, so that the player can be reminded of the characteristics of the city itself.
On the whole it's a rather interesting concept/gameplay, and I'm definitely interested in seeing how it will be once you'll have worked more on it.

Story-wise (the aspect that I'm usually interested in the most, and that keeps me playing, usually) I don't think I can say anything much, yet, other than I hope I can cheat on Arianne with the maid. I can't stand her, I'm afraid: the moment she started talking about what's important for her and such, I really hoped a meteor fell in Lukas' lounge, killing only her and leaving him, his breakfast and the rest of the house intact. On that regard, I also hope you will create some more interesting female characters.

What is there to say: sorry for the huge game-tester ramble and good luck!

[Jake]

Regarding the zero-prices thing that came up on IRC - the problem is with save and load, as you might have guessed.

Basically, when Ren'Py saves a game, it saves the point in the script that you've reached, and the current state of any variables it thinks have changed since the beginning of the game. However, it only notes a variable as changed when you literally assign a new value directly to the variable, not when you change members of that variable. So if you do this:

Code: Select all

  $ myList = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

then 'myList' counts as changed. If you do this, however:

Code: Select all

  $ myList[2] = 45

then 'myList' doesn't count as changed, because you haven't actually assigned anything new to the variable.

So when Ren'Py loads a game, it does the following:

• Blanks everything - starts a new context
• Runs all the init blocks for the game
• Sets the values of all the variables it had saved
• Starts running again from the point it left off.

You can probably guess what's happened by now - in the init block, you're setting the bprices and sprices matrices to be full of zeroes, before you start filling them with data. Then, right at the beginning of the game, you call the update_prices method to set the actual values in there... but because you only set individual list indices and never assign something in particular to the variable, it doesn't count as having been changed post-init, and doesn't get saved.
So when a game is saved, it doesn't save the values for bprices/sprices... but the save point is already past the point in the script that update_prices gets called, so when it loads the game it doesn't run update_prices, and the empty matrices from the init remain empty... and the player gets confronted with a trading screen full of zeroes.


To fix this, the easiest option is to just move the initial setting of bprices and sprices to matrices full of zeroes to a point just past the start label - like this, they've definitely had a value assigned to that variable post-init, and they'll get flagged as changed, and they'll get saved. There are other things you could potentially do, but this is the most straightforward.

[shylock]

Bumping from the middle of page 3 due to more than a month plus new demo (see OP) plus still recruiting, hopefully that doesn't ruffle anyone's feathers. Now featuring period-appropriate music and events beyond the prologue. As always, I appreciate criticism/suggestions/etc, and am actively looking for recruits.

[SusanTheCat]

I am willing to be a tester and a programmer.

Susan

[shylock]

I am willing to be a tester and a programmer.

Susan

I sent you a PM but I haven't heard back from you. I figured I'll post here in case you usually don't bother to log in. Hope to hear from you.

[SusanTheCat]

I did email you back! I will PM you when I get home from work.

[shylock]

[Five months later]

It's been awhile and in the interim I wrote (most of) a different visual novel on a not-that-related topic. I will definitely point you to it when we have a substantial demo out in the very near future and subsequently the full game when it finishes.

In the mean time, I've been thinking about putting some more work into this. If you think it's interesting and feel like you could contribute, I'd love to hear from you. I also appreciate any feedback. Take it easy.