Hotfix rolling out to fix some stuff. Check the bottom of the post to see what!

It’s been a bit of a weird week behind the scenes. I’ve had my head deep into standing up Cordova for a variety of reasons, and in the process I’ve decided to do a bit of outstanding cleanup on all the processes going on to generate builds – a lot of annoying little problems that didn’t have good, easy solutions to hand have built up over time, so I decided to pull the bandage off entirely and just get it all done. None of this really makes the process more reliable, it’ll just make it much easier to continue expanding it over time with additional build configurations as and when we need to add more.

As for Cordova – it’s essentially the Android version of Electron. I’ve realised that, even if the PWA work I’ve been doing works 100% perfectly, it’s still not going to be as convenient for some people as just having an APK they can download and slam onto a device. I’m not fully finished with getting it all working yet, but it’s already coming along. Though I am kind of thinking I should get a Real, Actual Device to test it on rather than just continuing to rely on emulators to do the needful.

Dealing with build process stuff always eats up time, so it gave me ample opportunity to think through the specifics of how I want the autosave system to work in practice.

And then I built it.

Android APKs technically work right now, but I haven’t had much opportunity to test them fully, so they’re not releasing yet. Another week or two, depending on where I can squeeze time in to messing with it some more.

Some more details about the autosave system:
You can find it under the usual data menu.
Hitting the button on the sidebar labelled “Autosaves” will flip the slot display to showing the current autosaves that have been made.
The buttons at the bottom will allow you to toggle its state and set the duration between saves.
The system simply keeps 14 autosaves, and when it attempts to make a 15th, will eject the oldest autosave to do this; to aid this, the saves are shown in order of ascending age. Slot 1 will always have the most recent save.
Autosave slots have no direct relation to the regular save slots, which means this works with saves loaded from file too!

The sidebar menu there looks a bit barren for now, but there’s a few other things that I’ve roughed out that I will be polishing up over time that will extend this menu with a few more features; I’m not totally sold on the layout being like this, but I’m more concerned with getting it working and worrying about the details later, once we have the full lay of the land around what needs to fit together.

TiTS 0.9.013:

• Backer: There’s a new little thing for stumbling over SyriCrew watching movies aboard the ship that the player can stumble over. (Savin & Gedan)
• Public: Verusha’s lover expansion is now available; the merc goes on a little job and has a few revelations about things in the process. (By Doots!)
• There is a new Autosave system available. Find it under the usual data menu! See above for more details!(Gedan)
• Dhaal extrameet events got some fixes (DrunkZombie).
• Some Verusha scenes were erroneously clearing themselves out when merging, leading to only half-scenes sometimes being displayed. (lowercase_donkey)
• Initial work toward cleaning up how we handle formatting in the codex has started, now that we have access to actual HTML formatting rather than the janky actionscript kinda-sorta-a-bit-of-it we had to work around in the past. (lowercase_donkey).
• There’s been some more work put in around Jasvalla and Dzaan addiction in general. (Leek)
• Some fixes to Carrie and Cora. (lowercase_donkey)

TiTS 0.9.013 Hotfix, builds 2331+:

• Public downloadable builds should have their images working properly again. (Gedan)
• Disarmed should no longer block switching item types other than weapons. (Gedan)
• Shield generators have been properly marked as not usable, so the inventory UI should never improperly display a use button that would immediately make the game crash. (Gedan)
• Some minor content tweaks for Evening, Saendra, Kiro, Shizzy and Cherry. (Gedan)
• Melee and Ranged attacks built around the default attack implementations should properly handle default accuracy values. (Gedan)
• The autosave button should properly update to display its state as soon as it’s clicked. (Gedan)
• The elevator up to the Ops Deck should be properly disabled in public builds rather than crashing if you attempt to go up there. (Gedan)

I am absolutely melting, so it’s gonna be another short one for a blog toast today.

Couple of very productive discussions have happened over the last week that I’ll summarize as quick as I can:

We’re changing speech formatting to be similar to CoC2; that is we’re going to move from disabling italics for emphasis to bolding the emphasised words.

I’m gonna spend some time figuring out how to best get some animations we’ve collected over the years into the game and as part of the image pack.

We figured out what we want to do finally when it comes to displaying embedded images, mostly as a consequence of really needing to do something about it for the animations.

Feedback about Jasvalla has kind of crystallized into a few points that I’ve made with the rest of the team and I think I have a really solid way to explain it when it comes up; it’s a difficult thing to really pin down and explain in a succinct fashion, but it’s very much a case of “when you see it, you know it” kind of deal. This has already had a few knock-on effects on upcoming content to avoid some of the issues raised.

Ideas™ were shared about how we handle race-determination for the player; the current scoring system has become more unwieldy as it’s had to grow to encompass an ever-expanding list of potentials, and some of the options are now at the level of needing a byzantine level of specificity to get them. I think we have a direction to clean this up finally that will provide greater choice to you as the player though!

I’ve been in the bug-fixing mines most of the week, I think Fen has been clobbing away at the Zika Gangers a bunch, and I know Savin turned in the first of the documents for NextPlanet, Will has been putting the final polish on EvilBun, Adj is still delivering consistent good draws all over workchat on the regular, and Jacques has successfully managed to not drive himself insane continuing to work on the playing card faces, so it really feels like everybody is getting back up to speed post-port.

TiTS 0.9.011:

• Backer: The first part of the Zheng Shi operations deck is now available, featuring a layout for the sprawling quarters belonging to the officers, gang leaders, and other high-ranking criminals running ZS. (Will & Leek)
• Backer: Nonesuch has written a series of orgies for the OpsDeck with a unique character included. (Nonesuch & Leek)
• Public: Narc’s expansion is now available to the public; it’s a new quest that ultimately unlocks the ability to give her a dongle of her very own, and a few new scenes to go along with it. (Fr0sty & Gedan)
• A metric ton of various fixes for Jasvalla have been rolled out, along with a few general nerfs and having an easier time disabling her via Penny. (Leek, DrunkZombie & Gedan)
• A bunch of fixes have been made to the inventory and shop displays to better handle selling ship weapons, interacting with a few items, and ensuring weird things don’t happen when you hit the escape key. (Gedan)
• Inessa’s belt is properly shown. (Gedan)
• A few blackjack win/loss state disagreements have been cleaned up, and the ability to bet custom values has been re-added, although its implementation is not ideal. (Gedan)
• Penny’s crew menus should work again properly.
• A few more changes have been made to save-loading to handle saves in weird states, and there’s a new request for your browser to allow “persistent data”, which should help with instances of your browser just deciding to clean out your save slots. (Gedan)
• Eitan sparring should work as expected. (Gedan)
• There’s been a few minor changes to how race scores are calculated. We’ve discussed a larger overhaul that may make it in over the following weeks. (lowercase_donkey)
• A few more creatures have had their utility methods glommed together into their creature object. (lowercase_donkey)
• Mitch has had a few more content tweaks and issue clean-ups. (lowercase_donkey)
• Dizzy will no longer annihilate your ship crew menu. (Gedan)
• Chased down a long-lingering “ballFullness is NaN” issue. (Gedan)
• Some missing breedwell functions have been returned. (DrunkZombie)
• Cum-bubbles should be throwable at enemies again. (DrunkZombie)
• Charged Shields should work correctly. (DrunkZombie)
• The start of a system to be able to embed images in mails is coming along; a discussion happened around embedding images in general so there should be updates to that effect soon. (Gedan)
• And a bunch of other little bits and pieces all over the game.

Didn’t get as much done on the things I intended this week, I took a dive into the bug forum and just started chopping through some of the longest standing bug-bears that have been sat around for a while and just going at them to get them done and out of the way finally. A few of these have turned into extremely spooky and cursed delves into the code to figure them out which always ends up sapping a lot of hours – but they’re done, and they’re fixed and now I can close the door on that code and pretend like I haven’t just seen the horrors that I have.

Back into the code mines I go!

TiTS 0.9.010:

• Backer: Jasvalla has been added to the game, a Dzaan Alpha stalker seeking to make the player her beta. The player can submit outright, make her earn the right to collar them, or have her dealt with by the proper authorities. If the player chooses to submit to her, they will be invited to her home to undergo repeatable training events and eventually a Bad End. You can kick things off by bumping into her in the Tavros elevator, after visiting Mhen’ga at least once. (Nonesuch & Leek)
• Public: Now available to the public, Bizzy’s mom, Deziere, has been added to the Paragon Playground brothel on Dhaal, as well as a substantial recruitment pack that will allow the player to reunite mother and daughter and put them to work together in the player’s porn studio. (Nonesuch & Leek)
• Fixed the piercing equip menu so that it can actually support more than 14 concurrent options. Also fixed a few crashes around the process not directly related to the menu. (Gedan)
• Cleaned up more Verusha things, including some errant broken tags and time-access issues. (Leek & Gedan)
• GooArmor now properly modifies player ass/vag during penetration. (Gedan)
• More bust tweaks and fixes across the game. (Gedan)
• A lot of internal character data setup got cleaned up as part of further standardization of character data that will allow us to better handle menus in various parts of the game. (lowercase_donkey)
• Reworked some portions of the inventory ui to avoid a few issues cropping up as part of the system calculating open/free slots. (Gedan)
• Made some changes to how lipMod works to better support the ability for lipMod to potentially completely override lipRating as that value is entirely derived from femininity, this avoiding the fixModSize handler from firing. (Gedan)
• Mitch tweaks and fixes. (lowercase_donkey & Leek)
• Equipping weapons in combat should now work. (Gedan)
• Playing cards got some more updates. (Jacques)
• Rare Drops have been reworked somewhat to reduce the effect of having a stuffed potential loot list reducing the drop chance of certain items. (Fenoxo)
• Fixed some keybinding issues relating to opening and closing the inventory. This should allow the inventory to be closed using the keybind whilst in combat, without escaping combat. (Gedan)
• Lots of other assorted fixes around content all across the game. (Leek, lowecase_donkey & Gedan).

Hotfix builds #2245 and up:

• Properly renamed the new piercing equipment menu generation function.

After the last couple of weeks cranking on things as hard as possible, I’ve mostly just had a bit of a slower week to recover. Chip away at a few bugs and try and polish up a few things but nothing really huge – and made myself a couple lists of things that bug me around the game to get on fixing and cleaning up in the near future. Nothing really huge, just bits and pieces of inconsistency that now that I’ve seen them I can’t unsee and it’s going to bug the ever loving shit out of me until they’re handled.

Aside from that, I think this week I’m gonna spend a bit more time in the bug mines and then get back onto the PWA thing. When I left it to handle the Electron image pack stuff, it was right on the cusp of working at a base level, close enough to feel like it was actually going to work for what we want it to do. It even has a pretty strong effect just for regular online play by increasing how much data we can cache, and thus, makes repeated loads of the game feel way, way snappier.

TiTS 0.9.009:

• BACKER: Edan pregnancy is now available for backers. I don’t think I need to explain any more than that! (Skom & DrunkZombie)
• BACKER: The Pudding Panic Porno codex is available. (Frogapus (maybe, didn’t put a name in the source document so who knows!) & Leek)
• BACKER: A bevy of scenes from Will, spread around the game. Something for Shekka, Able and Anyxine. (William & Leek)
• PUBLIC: Mitch is now available for public consumption. Check ’em out on Canadia Station. (Mitch & Lowercase_Donkey)
• Verusha has had a bunch of bugs fixed. She should no longer appear in Anon’s bar before she should, multiple sequence breaks in the process have been closed up. There may still be a few lingering issues because the process is complicated behind the scenes, but it should be much more correct. (Gedan)
• The Zil Village on Mhen’ga has had a few tweaks to block access to scene-only rooms. (Gedan)
• The Omnisuit should no longer duplicate itself when resetting it through the Interact interface. (Gedan)
• Using a Taxi on Uveto should no longer skip proper execution of a Syri scene on arrival, replacing the buttons to continue the interaction with her with one that just dumps you back to gameplay. (Gedan)
• Clobbered a bunch of missing variables in various places in the code. (Gedan)
• Reworked how we handle the active NPCs at a bar so that the active one should serialise appropriately when saving. (Gedan)
• Removed the big warning shown when loading out of date saves; it has served its purpose and now things should be much more stable. The message was only ever intended as a heads up to pay attention to the details because something might be off with the loading process considering how quickly things were being moved around. (Gedan)
• Cleaned up the save version upgraders to handle older saves with much more grace. This should resolve a bunch of undefined/push errors when loading saves. (Gedan)
• “Limber” now counts as part of the isFlexible check. (Lowercase_Donkey)
• Player character names should no longer display with extra spaces at the beginning or end. (Gedan)
• Bunch more busts are fixed. (Lowercase_Donkey)
• The ship inspect interface now lists the available storage spaces and categories of the ship- these might not yet be fully wired up to actually limit the stored items properly, but I don’t think we’ve ever really had any different values so I trust if we do, we’ll find out about it pretty quickly. (Lowercase_Donkey)
• The map now displays tooltips if you hover over a room for a bit to show the name of it- will likely see more tweaking in future. (Lowercase_Donkey)
• Fix hard light items that were in storage rather than just in the players inventory directly when importing a save. (Gedan)
• Fixed a map rendering style issue with rooms flagged as SPIDER_WEB. (Jacques)
• Feian flags have been fixed. (Lowercase_Donkey)
• Fixed a few lingering logic statements that could never trigger. (DrunkZombie)