SamuKata
vrengames
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Coding a Text Messaging System

Despite being set in the present day piece of ubiquitous piece of technology that is only occasionally mentioned, and at times can seem completely ignored: The smart phone. Lab Rats 2 v0.37 will begin to correct that, by introducing your phone as a way to interact with girls at any time of day, follow their online presence (if it exists), and have information delivered to you.

The first step, which I have tackled over the last couple of days, has been adding support for receiving and responding to text message sent to you by girls. Mechanically this is very similar to the way dialogue scripted, with the key difference that the player decides when they want to respond to a text instead of having it forced upon you by the game engine. Eventually I will have a properly themed text window and text history for your phone when texting girls, but for now all of this takes place in the same text box that dialogue uses. I need to spend some time now taking all of the random events that lead in with "[A girl] texts you:" and convert them to the new system.

Of course our phones do more than send text messages, they also provide near constant access to the internet. This update will include the first bits of content related to a girls internet presence. Some girls will post picture to Instapic that you will be able to look up, or share videos of themselves on various sites. These may start out as innocent, but a girl becomes Sluttier what she feels comfortable sharing will change.

 Much of the above will still be a rough framework for v0.37, so I'm putting in extra work to make sure Jennifer has some sizeable storyline content too. My most recent work is all related to how her reputation and attitude at her office changes as she becomes Sluttier, especially if you convince her to seduce her boss for a promotion.

Lots of work still to get done, so I better get to it!

Comments

Fixed this and the bug you listed above. Good catches!

Vren

Good catch! I ended up writing some functions to compare a girls outfit to existing uniform templates to resolve this. This means all of the events that deal with girls and uniforms now correctly handle situations where they strip off pieces of clothing or add their own accessories. It even handles fringe cases like a girl stripping off a piece of clothing but that stripped down state now matches a different uniform..

Vren

And while I'm here: In dates.rpy line 448 reads: $ her_hallway = Room(the_person.name +"'s front hall", the_person.name +"'s front hall", standard_house_backgrounds[:],[],[],[],False,[3,3], visible = False, lighting_conditions = standard_indoor_lighting) I think you meant $ her_hallway = Room(the_person.name +"'s front hall", the_person.name +"'s front hall", [], standard_house_backgrounds[:],[],[],[],False,[3,3], visible = False, lighting_conditions = standard_indoor_lighting) The difference is an extra [] between the names and the background. You should also probably add a '$ mc.location.show_background()' around line 493 or this location doesn't display at all. Currently the 'back to her place' will crash if she tries to accost you in the hallway.

I have an easier fix for a different bug. In crisis.rpy, line 3214 reads "the_person.draw_animated_removal(the_item, half_off_instead = True)" but you probably meant "the_person.draw_animated_removal(clothing, half_off_instead = True)" because you're for-each looping an object group and the objects are 'clothing' not, 'the_item' (which is used elsewhere in the crisis for while loops) Currently this causes the strip to fail and the event to end early if 'fuck her' is chosen during the horny at work crisis..

Hi Vren, You've got some beautiful dialogue branches written for flirting with girls who are in uniform but they'll never display because the_person.outfit will never equal the_person.planned_uniform, even in an 'complete outfit' where a combination every possible item is included (mmm, 3 different pairs of glasses and ALL the rings :P) This is tested in the personalities file for each of the flirt_response_low and flirt_response_mid, ect, line number varies depending on which personality but probably around 450ish. I'd also guess that it might cause some weirdness for the 'girl out of uniform' punishment event, but I haven't actually had that fire yet. I /think/ this is caused because uniforms, like most outfits, are merged with a characters existing outfit by apply_outfit. Since the outfits are dynamically created, I'm not certain there's an easy way to determine if a character is 'in uniform' by trying to compare what they're wearing to what they 'should' be wearing. You could have the outfit decider throw an unique ID string at whatever it creates and then pass that along to self_outfit. Then you compare the Unique IDs instead of the objects. I feel like this is open to future problems though, the passing of that ID could become a complex thread to follow in debugging. To me the simplest fix just seems to be to give your 'person' object a 'is_wearing_uniform' bool. Have apply_outfit set it to false by default unless its triggered by wear_uniform. So far as I can see you never apply an outfit except by using 'apply_outfit' or a uniform except by using 'wear_uniform' so it /should/ catch all current cases. Hope this helps.

hi still getting the errors of after births, the girls do not get back to work


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