Most of my time over the last week was eaten up by finally getting my hands into the race-determination code and reworking it extensively from the old system. The old way presented a few weird and troublesome nested conditions in order to achieve a couple of potential results from the system and it was proving ever more difficult for people to navigate the requirements in a satisfactory way to say nothing of how annoying it was becoming to add new possibilities into the mix.

The new way of doing things is a lot flatter, but it’s based on the same underlying requirements of the old way – which is a long winded way for me to say that this will probably need a lot of tweaking going forward to file off all of the edge-cases that have been left over. There’s been three core changes that I’ve made to the old requirements, which in some cases may have left certain score-identifiers very unspecific:
Score penalties are mostly gone
Where possible I’ve tried to remove specific genitalia requirements (because it was easier than ensuring the requirements were present and appropriate for all score functions)
Nested type-becomes-type tests are gone

With all the saves that I have, the results have proven to be pretty on the nose for what I expect but I didn’t want to get deep into the mines on trying to blindly fumble through messing with the existing requirements before I got some feedback from people with more esoteric player data… so it’s time to update and wait for the probable pile of bug reports.

Apologies for no new backer content this week, but I haven’t had the time to get into the backlog and get something implemented with all the time spent on trying things with the new race-score system.

TiTS 0.9.015:

• Public: Edan preg is now public.
• Player races are now determined by a new system. (Gedan)
• Jasvalla has an updated intro sequence that allows her activation to be avoided. There is also a cheat to reset her interactions back into this state for people that have already engaged with her. (Nonesuch, Fenoxo & lowercase_donkey)
• Disarming Jasvalla stops her from using her slut ray. (Gedan)
• Mitch has questlog entries. (lowercase_donkey)
• A crash during KaraQuest2 when moving the players ship has been resolved. (lowercase_donkey)
• Codex formatting has been updated in a bunch more places. (Jacques00)
• Yammi’s food menu now supports being broken up to not overflow the 15 buttons. (Gedan)
• The Rotate Minigame should now properly support limited moves and total failure attempts. (Gedan)
• A few items that only make sense to be purchased one-at-a-time have had purchase limits applied. (lowercase_donkey)
• Perdita should now only show stories you do not already own. (lowercase_donkey)
• The Punk SpecOps should no longer crash when submitting to them without entering combat. (Gedan)
• Fixed an instance of an undefined function being shoved into the event queue. (Gedan)
• Cocksocks and cockrings are now presented on the “Your Piercings” inventory tab, allowing them to be interacted with and removed. (Gedan)
• Hardlight dongs should no longer impregnate Haley (DrunkZombie)
• It should now be possible to correctly delete autosave slots. (Gedan)
• The persistent storage popup has been removed entirely. This proved to be unwieldy to properly manage under certain browsers because of how they grant the persistent storage permission. (Gedan)

Another weird week; I caught somebody asking questions about the backer-credits thing and had a sudden realization that I hadn’t gotten around to setting the system back up for the JS port. I jumped on that immediately and combined it with the thinking that we should also be doing a much better job of crediting all the people that have contributed to the game over the years. The list is in no way complete as yet, I’ve been putting the word out and letting people get back to me with the details if they want putting in the credits for any writing, art or coding that they’ve done for us.

If you’re a contributor that hasn’t got the message already, send us a word with how you want crediting in the credits page and we’ll get on it!

After that we didn’t have anything pending in the code-merge queue for new content ready to go out, so I jumped on the first thing at the top of the Ready2Code list and pulled this Love Starz expansion out. Took a little longer to get through than I had hoped, but I stumbled into a few things to tweak along the way and cleaned up a few other bits and pieces as I was getting it together.

Everybody seems to have stuck their face into big, weighty projects all at the same time so there should be some fat new content drops coming along soon!

TiTS 0.9.014:

• Backer: A weighty expansion to the Love Starz is now available. Once you’ve worked your way through the existing events, the group will split up and head off for their own little vay-cays that the player can stumble across. (Fr0sty & Gedan).
• Backer: A buttstuff scene for Anyxine as a bonus! (Savin & Leek)
• Public: Jasvalla is now available to the public; 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)
• A credits screen has been built to handle all of our staff, contributors and backers. (Gedan)
• RotateMinigame beams can now properly reach the far edge of the right and top sides of the board when passed into a 4-way-open node. (Gedan)
• More Dhaal busts should be working and wired up appropriately. (lowercase_donkey)
• Inseminator Pro should ensure an absolute minimum cum value that won’t potentially break things. (DrunkZombie)
• Cleaned up some more combat things, including a reworking of Charge Shield that should better format its output. (Fenoxo)
  • [Fen wrote ‘dis part] – Previously charge shield would simply wedge a damage pop-up into the text of enemy’s attack, often with the descriptive output suppressed. There were some real confusing moments this would cause where it would look like you were getting hit harder than you were. I made it proc once per turn max and made it show up in the end of round procs with full descriptive text. I also change the combat initializing code to assign every combatant a unique number so that the charge shield statuses can better “remember” who set them off.
  • [More Fen] Urbolg’s combat will now end if you defeat him, even if his drone is still up.
  • [More Fen] Cleaned up a number of issues with the Queensguard/Taivra fights.
  • [More Fen] Adjustments to HP made via “changeHP” should properly output the HP change in combat.
• Gabilani Chemists should no longer progressively increase the amount of loot they’re carting around. (DrunkZombie)
• Roxy should no longer break the buttons during her first encounter. (DrunkZombie)

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.