Newlife 0.7.1

Hi all!

Here's the newest version of Newlife. Unlike most releases, there's not much in terms of new content. Instead, this version has focused on two big changes.

First, save files and saved templates are now completely different, in json format. This involved some major internal changes and took up the bulk of the work, but I think it'll prove to be a real improvement. It has three main advantages:

First, it should fix an issue some people had experienced with loading games using the latest version of Java.

Second, save files and character templates should now work across versions unless the internal data structures change.

Third, the save files are now in json format which means that players can (carefully!) edit them in a text editor. When doing so, I recommend using something with a plugin that will format the json: the save files are initially created as walls-of-text, but when I ran tests I was able to use the json-viewer plugin for notepad++ to make them nicely readable. Do back up your save files before making changes though, as it'd be easy to break something.

The second change is the addition of hairstyles, but only internally. This is because the new save system did not play well at all with Newlife's build process so fixing that took up the time I'd been hoping to use for a stylist scene.

Still, Hairstyles are technically in the game, although in a very basic way where men all have either bald, shaven-headed or short hair and women all have long hair.

I'm thinking of putting out a mini-update early in May which adds a stylist scene and a bunch of hairstyles, and then jumping into lesbian content for a larger release to come at the end of the month.  

As such, I'd like to hear your suggestions for hairstyles you want for your character or for NPCs. 

If you're suggesting a hairstyle, it'd be interesting to know where you think it should lie on the cute-sexy and elegant-casual axes, as hairstyles in Newlife do have an effect on the player's stats. They also have a length (none/short/shoulder-length/long) which can be important - for example the various hair-pulling actions generally need long or shoulder-length hair.

Beyond this optimistic talk about hairstyles, I also should ask you to report any errors you find. There were a lot of problems with the new save system at first and I've been bugfixing today pretty much since I woke up. It's possible that there may be bugs left, so if you find that a game refuses to load then please let me know!

Major changes & additions:

Completely replaced the way Newlife saves games (and templates), along with some significant internal reworks to remove bloat from the files. 

Added support for hairstyles internally, although it currently isn't possible to change them except for save-editing and the values are largely placeholders.

Changes for user-submitted content:

Added a getHairstyle() method to characters in custom scenes.

Bugfixes:

Fixes to text issues. Thanks to  and  for reporting some of these.

Fixed a bug with the new error logging added in 0.7.0e. Thanks to DGF for finding this!