HardLife v0.2497-hf4 (supporter build)

Okay, its way down the road on engine v0.52, but I will add scalars that will allow adjusting the rate of growth/transfers between player and [gender]NPCs, and other such throttles. I think I'm going to keep these engine tweaks as a supporter only feature, as they are almost as powerful as the cheats system. If you want to disable the height-gain for a particular group on NPCs, all you would have to do is shift the multiplier down to 0.0x. The initial plan is to have these as downward only adjustments, ranging from 0.0x--1.0x (off to full). Other things that will be adjustable with these sliders include rates of karma and currency gains, damage rates, and just about anything else that returns a numerical value that merits rebalancing. --It will require the advanced settings menu planned for engine v0.51 first.

ShadowRx

It might require I design a more elaborate settings system. SugarCube gives us a very basic settings UI to work with, which only allows for toggles and lists, not tabbed interfaces, sliders, etc. If that were the only part (dividing PC vs NPC). it wouldn't be too bad, but it leads to a matrix of possible interactions... --If its on for one side but not the other, then how do we handle Drain/Feed? We might need to separate height gain and height loss. If we add this level of control, then do we really want all NPCs treated the same? Or, would we rather be able to set these by gender? Perhaps someone wanted males only to shrink, and females only to grow... again we have to consider how this works with draining, not just surges... if the Source can't be drained, then how can the Destination feed/grow? --I like the idea of having fine-grained settings like this, but it will take a fair amount of time and planning to implement properly. --Also we need to consider future situations where one NPC might be able to do this to another NPC, so it isn't just player(/gender?) vs NPC(/gender). --It also brings up some other interaction questions, what if, for example, someone wanted to be able to steal height from NPCs, but rather than gain height, they wanted it to go to muscle or breast expansion? Now we're talking about a 3-dimensional array of interactions for settings. --I'll see what I can do on the simple settings side, but we'll probably need to open up a poll and general discussion about which sorts of interactions should have separate filter settings. Perhaps we can come up with a design that is still easy to use, but gives up better control. (Can: [PC/NPC] of [gender] ?gain ?loose ?steal ?donate ?shift [content-x]) At the very least I should make a UI that allows us to separate the advanced filters like this onto tabs, which IS something I'm already planning to do because of the growing length of settings we already have (especially with cheats in there). Its slated to go in with a redesign of the menu system into a more classic VRPG screen with a list of all available menus on the (?left) side and a summary or the current menu content in the main area. (this would absorb the settings, save, and restart links along with all the in-game menus [unless triggered individually, like touching a "save crystal" might do], in which case only the content-area of the menu would be shown]; the save link would probably still use the built-in sugarcube save UI, but the settings would be a custom UI with a lot more power. [I might even add in the jQ-UI library to enhance the interface with tabs, sliders, etc-- but I need to be careful to keep it mobile-friendly and ensure plenty of space around controls, and that tap and drag works with it, rather than scrolling the screen] ) --I wish they'd let us split comments into paragraphs, lol.

ShadowRx

Just a small thing, but is it possible to toggle height gains separately for you and the NPCs?

Nice update. Some good groundwork for the future. Can't wait till stuff like powers are actually added in. :)

RocketNowWow

Close to having another small update already, I'm working in the Amazon-Index for the world. (Its basically just a ratio of female-power:male; lower than 1 is an m-dom world, higher is an f-dom world; and of course and index of 1 is perfectly balanced) I am starting it out pretty low, at the minimum allowed value of 0.1, but compensating by extending the fatal threshold for damage. Various events in world will cause the index to raise, over time it will cause you to encounter women with more amazonian attributes. (also, if height-gain is enabled their height will increase by an amount equal to the index [in inches]... if the index gets to 100, that would mean that females are on average 8' taller then before, which puts most of them in the 12-14' range-- of course, it would take a lot of work to get the index that high, and that would also mean their stats are in the 80-320 range for STR and 50-170 for END, SPD, PHY... and 20-40 for INS, WSD --- and those number would represent the AVERAGE woman with that index.) --This is something that will come into play in the distant future, after the "Amazon Apocalypse" event destroys civilization as we know it (sometime in the next 150-3000 years)... its a canon event for Earth in my story universe, so it is scheduled to happen, and if you recall the issue/question about what content to expect if your character winds up thousands of years into the future... this was/is the plan: a world overgrown with seemingly prehistoric monsters/beasts, where the only surviving humans are massive amazons to whom those beasts are like kittens. There's a story I started about a decade ago about a ship testing out an experimental propulsion system that got it near the speed of light, the near catastrophic event put them on the edge of our solar system, having run the engines for the intended 12 hours, but winding up some 2000+ years in the future approaching a world they do not recognize as the one they just left, on a 14 year journey back home without the experimental drive. (anyway, don't read too much into that, it just answers the question of what the world is SUPPOSED to be like in a few centuries, whenever your character gets there. --- though I will try to fix it so that doesn't happen after just 1 workout ;p )

ShadowRx

Yeah, I'm working on that. I need to actually track muscle and fat weight, instead of only shifting existing weight based on physique. I might need to further tweak the volume calculations, but they are a lot more realistic than they used to be, mass aside. Previous calculations would have been 5-7x bigger with those stats and tone (I think you'll find Annalee's toning is near maxed for each muscle group, and that's now the primary contributor to muscle volume) --But, when I switch how weight works, I'll need to change all the measurements (as they are strongly effected by weight). --It will be done, but its a complete replanning of the weight and size system.

ShadowRx

You can get some NPCs to have really illogical stats: like this slave: Annalee Yu Age: 19 Gender: female Caught: 06/29/2018 Height: 5'6" Weight: 164.0 lb figure: 98.4" J - 46.1" - 91.9" fat: 0.1% muscle: 56.3% level: 327 . . . caliber: 25 bicep: 61.3" quads: 107.4" Qi: -903858194 / 1510013 STR: 480.35 END: 453.18 SPD: 185.33 PHY: 321.40 INS: 106.79 WSD: 108.27 Her muscle have to be made of helium to have those dimensions and that weight

RocketNowWow

So being able to lock height is a great feature since now I can actually increase tone by healing/draining and locking height. Also being able to eat a 100 of an item still doesn't feed the main character enough calories or sugar (but works out for plenty of protein). I it's very difficult to get big without using drain/heal and fighting right now, maybe by design though. Would really love to see some beta superpowers and related activities though. This was a welcome hotfix and can't wait till next version. :)

RocketNowWow

Its looking for a temporary variable called _P1.name_first, I thought I had that fixed last night when I added to the current PC array and save-updates, but it might not copy over to the temporary variable for combat. --when their weight is that low, their height should be about 1 inch, so that is working as intended, but the bodyfat and muscle % estimates are sorely in need of replacement with something that actually tracks the mass of each, instead of the crude method I have, which determines fat by subtracting a multiple of the physique score from the base weight. (the reason they don't add up to 100%, is basically because they don't... I mean there is more to the body than just muscle and fat, so I take out base-height in inches as pounds for the skeleton and internal organs --- because of this approach, it can at times return values over 100% or in the negative. I'm planning on redoing that soon, but for a while it was helpful as an indicator of low bodyweight... that is usually when the weirdness happens) --Yeah, I'm wondering if I should leave the cup-size as a relative/proportional value (apparent cup size rather than the true measurement), it would be more meaningful that way. I could combine it with the exact measurement in the examine-self screen in case someone want the exact measure, and perhaps I could even have that on mouse over of the cupsize. When I put that in there, I really wasn't expecting characters to grow so quickly (its a little tamer after the last update, but still pretty fast)- but I did have the foresight to put height descriptions ranging from 1" to 1 mile+

ShadowRx

Also as a future note, it's really easy to get cup size OMG with the latest update. Maybe after the player outgrows bra, it's just gives the size of her boobs in inches or something.

RocketNowWow

Also the heal and feed loop appears to be giving some really weird stats to the other person. I can heal and drain them until they weight 0.1lb and have 0% bodyfat.

RocketNowWow

Love the new update. Occasionally I get "undefined continue to grow when I trigger a surge." Not sure if it's a text or logic error, but might want to look into that.

RocketNowWow

It was partly the calories from the activity, a typo was preventing the full benefit of the creatine/energy-recycling feature I added a while back to try to prevent this. But the calorie usage was just the catalyst, it was the calorie to weight balancing that really went haywire, iterating thousands of times and burning through tons. (the problem there was it was still using the adj_wt value, which is just the raw scaled weight for that height, instead of calling the calcBodymass() function which would have credited for remaining stamina/creatine reserves before burning calories. Now, if you do a 900,000 year workout and break spacetime itself, you will have a large enough calorie deficit to starve upon resting, but you will also have split your own causal chain/timeline, allowing (one of) you to come back from the abyss. Or, you could just put on a few tons of weight before resting if you're going on a long workout like that ;p (I'll work on the second-chance interface later, but its essentially a way to break through the game over screen, remedy whatever caused the death, and continue on as though it never happened... except for the massive karma boost from the experience, of course)

ShadowRx

I've confirmed the tone issue is due to calorie count. At 50ft tall, if I just nap for 8 hours, I die of starvation.

RocketNowWow

Glad to hear! Yeah a lot of things seem to break when you get really tall. How you can have a 500+ BMI with muscle and fat only equalling 60% of your weight lol

RocketNowWow

I've got a fix for the calorie issue, found a loop in the qi-flow that could hang the game with very high stats/durations, and then I hit the limit for javascript date objects... apparently it doesn't like it when you spend 900 thousand years on a workout... xD -- once I fix the duration limit I'll post the update. Sorry for the delay.

ShadowRx

You get however much tone they have, its a randomized value for each muscle group ranging from 1.0 to their caliber, which is generally around 4.0. It may not seem like much the first few times, but it will fill you to your caliber fairly quickly (if you don't gain a ton of levels from the serges) Anyway, caliber grows at roughly the 1.5th root of level, so it will eventually fill up. Have you torn off a bumper in front of the owner? I'm playing around with styling the dialog. --there's still a lot more things to do to the cars I want to try to add in this weekend, but you ought to be able to chuck them pretty far. (that might be another good contest for v0.4+)

ShadowRx

I see the issue and will get something patched around it, in the meantime turning on God Mode will prevent starvation. I'll try to get the calorie scaling sorted out so this doesn't happen (will also add in some bulk options for buying/using food)

ShadowRx

Basically it's really hard to feed only your muscle tone for now since height seems to feed so much easier. It's also impossible to get any reasonable calorie intake at higher levels of muscles even if I jsut down entire containers. I kind wish I could just get my character to go to an all you can eat and eat until full or something.

RocketNowWow

Woot this amazing! I love Wild Surge. It's so fun! Seems like you can get really tall, really fast without much muscle though (I guess because they have so much height to give). Can't wait to see future updates! I love how we have something that is affected by our strength now, (picking up cars). ;)

RocketNowWow