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Post by limith on Apr 9, 2018 8:14:49 GMT -8
One day there might be gameplay with Starnova..... Just have to mod it in...if I have the time xD
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Post by limith on Apr 5, 2018 17:58:06 GMT -8
What abouts:
Sola is secretly Maray brought to past by Claude, genetically engineered to be able to awaken, and then brought back to the future. Her blase attitude is her attempt to forget the genetic engineering treatment. ____ I thought Arcadius came from offworld Cera?
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Post by limith on Apr 4, 2018 21:00:53 GMT -8
Well, it could all be a dream of a dying Arcadius like Dark Mirror's Playtest or something like that. Who knows?
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Post by limith on Apr 1, 2018 2:38:10 GMT -8
Didn't they already do that in return?
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Post by limith on Mar 30, 2018 11:06:04 GMT -8
Dynamically downloading data is pretty easy actually, probably the best solution.
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Post by limith on Mar 27, 2018 19:23:30 GMT -8
You could, if you gave it the same package name, a higher version number, had the user turn on development mode (which is unsafe from a general user perspective), and made them download an .apk. Keeping track of heads/tails of that is hard, easier to just release a 'separate' apk (what lezhin does). You could also go the route of dynamically downloading data (eg most mobile games do this) instead of packaging it within the app. You'd have to hide that feature from the reviewers though (see the timegate workaround I noted)
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Post by limith on Mar 27, 2018 18:00:49 GMT -8
The cynic in me says it'll happen if making another Sunrider is profitable for LiS (including opportunity cost). Maybe it's not what LiS wants (Sunrider is Sam's baby in a way so it's not as if he isn't motivated and I know the folks must have scraped to get Sunrider part 1 and 2 out for free). Still every commercial endeavor has to account for the economic truth that making video games is a very challenging industry. Opportunity cost is important, it's why Valve basically doesn't make games anymore as they have Steam, or why there are so many low quality games that exist but are still profitable.
___ Digression: I think the general secrecy surrounding games' true costs (coupled with lack of awareness by the typical gaming consumer, even if we see headlines of studios going bust) plays a role in this. Eg the various kickstarters that can't possibly have raised enough money for a game. Even Muv Luv which raised more than a million on KS I'm pretty sure lost money given ixtl/age was sold (with 90+% of the shares wiped out), Degica imploded (?) and the sales were nowhere near the cost. Although my own estimates of costs of games may be inaccurate as well. My estimates are based off typical salaries on glassdoor and some industry knowledge as a general programmer but not as a game dev. Now that I think about it I might be able to glean more information from looking at SEC filings but those are really hard to read. ____ Anyway, for folks who want a Sunrider sequel the best way of getting one is making sure Starnova is a success. Promote it everywhere. Worst case maybe Sam blesses a fan project and goes the route Tearring Saga Part 3 went (aka released for free by the dev + friends who chipped in on their free time ____ Another digression: So given the true cost of production, I chuckled when some fans of DH told us they would give us 300 euros to make a sequel (which I estimated to cost at least 2.7 million for a sequel if we paid folks to do it, unlike the original which was made by experienced modders who volunteered). On the other hand, I know as a fan myself that $300 is considered a significant amount of money and near the upper limit of what I would consider (and basically only if I'm getting some good rewards). Kinda ironic.
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Post by limith on Mar 27, 2018 17:29:12 GMT -8
Play Store is pretty easy to get an app on, not sure about difficulty of porting it. If you wrote it in electron/node.js should be easy to port with phoneGap (iirc VNMaker is written using node.js/alternative to electron given RPGMaker MV is using node.js, both are using a somewhat dated version though and afaik they have no plans to update the base framework so ymmv with support from them).
My sideproject group did not have fun developing for iOS, we highly hate the dev environment of iOS. I dabbled on Android dev 2 years ago but it's no my main job, my sideproject friends are both android devs though.
The problem with the stores (in both Android/iOS) is they have some min wage folks manually approving apps and stuff that gets allowed in one patch version might be disallowed in another. (You can do workarounds like time-gate features they don't like, release an apk with no images for the reviewer version but works properly once you are 'approved'). There's also BS like Apple disallowing in-app registration so FB's workaround was 'we'll open a webbrowser/view in Apple so the app doesn't have registration' and then Apple banned webviews a while later.
On the Android side you can release an .apk yourself outside of the store (eg Lezhin has their own apk you can download on their site). On iOS you can't do that so easily.
iOS store does anti-competitive BS where they will look for excuses to disallow apps that compete with their core apple apps (if your app is tiny, large players they can't do the BS). Swift programming language also goes through backwards incompatible changes like month and Apple mandates you update your swift language version as well so expect to have to rewrite your codebase every month in apple land (afaik the mobile friends I know at FB tell me they hate Apple).
Android store doesn't have these problems. However there's like a million and one stores beyond just google play. Amazon Fire store, and some specialty app stores in China. The chinese app stores are filled with ad-ware wrapped around legit western apps (eg I tried to find ESFileExplorer on my step-mom's phone and there was one, except it was fake, filled with ads, and definitely not the same es file explorer folks in the west use). Also because android users don't get forced into upgrades all your features require backports (but there's libraries for that).
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Post by limith on Mar 27, 2018 17:25:48 GMT -8
Update: I meant to say OpenGL is broken on Linux in the latest ren'py version (6.99.14), so it's good you guys aren't going to upgrade to it.
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Post by limith on Mar 24, 2018 0:01:42 GMT -8
The current version starnova uses works on linux with no problemsThis is mostly to warn in advance as another ren'py project I played ran into this bug: Ren'py version 6.14.x and <= 6.15.3 doesn't work on Linux 64 bit (and also seems to crash in WINE quite often). www.renpy.org/doc/html/problems.html#bit-linux-problems. Just in case you guys decide to upgrade ren'py before release (doubt it).
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Post by limith on Feb 27, 2018 15:42:47 GMT -8
I don't really care for permadeath in these types of games. All it means to me is that if one of my characters dies mid battle I have to restart the battle unless I want subsequent missions to be less fun. Depending on the game that could be 30+ minutes of playtime lost for a mistake or something unforeseen happening. That's more frustrating than the challenge of finishing without losses is fun. Penalties can also create balance problems. Depending on the severity of the penalties, if you aren't dying as much as the game expects you to it starts becoming too easy and gets boring. The opposite is true as well. Unless the game offers a way to grind out money or upgrade points the game might eventually become impossible to finish which is certainly not fun either. I think the difficulty system is OK considering the scale of the game and the budget. I agree it could be better though. While simple stat changes are appropriate in some of cases, changing the number of enemies or the types of enemy that appear can create something that feels a little less artificial. What I'd like to see instead if they made a new Sunrider is change the way missions are designed. From what I've read it seems I'm not the only one who found that sitting in the bottom left corner and letting enemies come to you while picking them off is the optimal strategy. Moving and attacking using the same resource(AP) means that it's almost always better to attack another time instead of moving. The way Flak and Shield effects work, particularly the stacking effect encourages the player to create an iron curtain death ball. Also, the ships closest to the enemy get focused the most and being closer gives them more accuracy. "Terrain" based obstacles are rare and there's no line of sight which also reduces the need to move. However, one of the biggest causes of this is that the start locations are always the same and how effectively small the levels are. Almost every ship has the ability the accurately deal damage across at least 30-50% of the map. This combined with the cost of movement and the sheer amount of enemies littering the battlefield means that there's really nowhere to go. I liked Mila's turnwheel in the recent fire emblem Echos game. Allowed you to rewind a limited amount of steps back each battle so you didn't have to restart but you could only do it a limited number of times.
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Post by limith on Feb 27, 2018 15:37:48 GMT -8
Full Forward/All-Guard combo is possible if you do damage using nukes and vangaurd as you'll build enough CP to use both. Aggro on the Sunrider is okay if you have aoe shield around it, but that requires upgrades to shields.
For the level you mentioned I believe I beat it before with the sunrider barely alive by sacrificing a few ryders as distractions when I played with no upgrades before. You have to have played it before and know where the spawns will be
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Post by limith on Feb 26, 2018 19:07:28 GMT -8
You get access to all the old chapters if you are on the max tier ($25) + you get your name in the credits. If you are I think $15/$20 above you get the previous 1/2 chapters instead of only the current. If you contributed $30 or more lifetime you get the game on steam on release. Something like that, the $15 might be $10 and $20 might be $15 don't recall.
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Post by limith on Feb 26, 2018 14:03:15 GMT -8
Sounds like an encoding/locale issue. I know there's some locale ANSI that has an apostrophe which shows up as unrenderable in UTF-8. Also there's quite a few apostrophe and quotes that might appear the same to you but it's different. If you aren't using UTF-8 I recommend doing so as most things support it now. Though this other game I was modding last night crashes when I try to use UTF-8 (kinda crashes all the time with no error messages though, gave up on it)
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Post by limith on Feb 4, 2018 1:39:36 GMT -8
Has ren'py stopped using reflection for its code? Cause cutting that out will surely increase performance. All I remember is seeing it use reflection back in the day. Literal code eval will probably have higher performance than reflection. ____ That aside on the topic of python memory management: python doesn't seem to actually actually ever 'free' up the memory used on a system level even if you import the garbage collector and tell it to clean up. That is to say if you start a program and end up using 2GB of memory for 1 second python won't release that memory back to the system even if you only used it for 1 second. Python internally has its own tracking for memory and it may only use say 30 MB of memory even though it has latched onto 2GB of memory. What the gc call is doing most likely is making sure the internal memory cleans itself up so it doesn't have to alloc() anymore system memory.
This is why for certain occasional memory heavy jobs at work (on machines which are also running other jobs) which take a long time (but most of the time uses very little memory) we use subprocesses in python. A subprocess may eat up say 2GB of memory but when it is done it will free up the system memory.
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Post by limith on Jan 24, 2018 21:16:05 GMT -8
So the standard deal with me: Deploy forward position. with sunder in back line (surrounded by shield + flak. FULL FORWARD COMMAND Send Icari forward to slash the enemy ryders with flak (usually 1 hit kill), or bombers. Use Gravity Gun Flak Down remaining support ships Sunrider deploys nuke missiles to cruisers. Draws aggro. Teleport Sunrider to use the vanguard cannon command. Draw more aggro. Have Sola snipe some supports, or cruisers. ALL GUARD COMMAND end turn All enemies send their missiles at sunrider who is flak protected. No flak needed on Icari. All guard provides flak for all units as well. As long as you vanguard cannon + aoe nuke on turn 1 sunrider should get enough aggro that icari doesn't get targeted.
In terms of how I split weapons upgrades: Black Jack pulse barrage is pretty good in awakening mode. It pretty much 1hit kills most things. I only reduced the energy cost so I could fire it 3 times in 1 round. I also upgraded her melee a slight amount since late game Icari can't kill everything herself. Sunrider is mostly there to draw aggro + kinetic cannon Icari is my main ryder killer with focus on melee damage and movement Sola gets 2 shots per turn on her snipe Claude's focus is on gravity gun, ocassional shield down. Kryska kinda sits pretty and provides shields for the team, lol. Occasional cleanup if needed. Chigara another MVP with flak down, aim up (on sola), and repair on the sunrider who's tanking all the agro.
Why lasers suck - not enough damage, everything has shields late game. Why kinetic is decent - on Sola it's great. Also see lasers sucking Why assault sucks - icari's melee does more damage, costs less, and has higher hit rate. You shouldn't need to use assault with anything else. Why pulse sucks - Only good on black jack due to awakening and cheap energy cost. Kinetic does so much more damage on everything else. Full forward command + aim up means kinetic does a reasonable job of hitting (+ accuracy upgrades)
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Post by limith on Jan 24, 2018 17:02:07 GMT -8
Send Icari forward to deal with em.
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Post by limith on Jan 23, 2018 23:52:04 GMT -8
Is the release day golden week? (Shameless reserving the first reply spot while running on 0 sleep from being overworked) ___ random thoughts as I play the route. ooh we're getting a background story scene so early. ___ On energy drinks: Don't start drinking them and you'll be okay. Get 8 hours a day, but you can do 4 + 4. That's the sleep cycle. Also orange juice best energy drink - can't get addicted (working while tired = more mistakes and less creativity/productivity anyway). Have some of the 10 kilos of persimmons from Nattan xD ___ lol nemu's offer for sasami. ___ Things play out differently once more as well. ___ What is a "Juice Cleanser" ____ Mariya shows a new face in this route. o.O ____ Julie shows a new face in this route o.O ____ Mika: "Finally I have all the money to buy all the games I want on every console, but none of the free time to play them" - TOO TRUE. T.T (also idols have money???) ____ Has Nattan's hair always been a question mark? ____ Didn't Nattan mention something about silver hair? maybe too tired ____ Work until you die from Aki. o.O ____ I can't tell if I'm on the bad end or good end with the way things turned out. xD. I mean, they aren't idols anymore but they are surely being paid better. Reminds me of the 'happiness' ending in Crimson Gray which imho was better than the 'True' Ending.....and the ending says good end. Okay. ____ Overall: I thought it was pretty down to earth, like her character.
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Post by limith on Dec 23, 2017 17:02:34 GMT -8
Minor typo in epilogue "With the passing of seasons came Mariya's decision from graduate from Starnova" Should be decision to graduate from Starnova. ____ Listened a bit to the music today and it's pretty good _____ I liked how the epilogue was more complete than previous routes. Also liked how mentions of things in other routes were added. Not sure about how spoilery they are hmmm......noticed how starnova disbanded here while it didn't for some other routes. Aki seems to have matured differently than in one of the previous routes.
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Post by limith on Dec 20, 2017 1:49:17 GMT -8
Citers (don't need to cite the previous post)
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Post by limith on Dec 12, 2017 20:59:51 GMT -8
Rice (eaten by mice)
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Post by limith on Nov 30, 2017 18:26:13 GMT -8
Feet
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Post by limith on Nov 29, 2017 23:27:54 GMT -8
Bell
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Post by limith on Oct 20, 2017 22:49:33 GMT -8
I just realized this was acted upon in chapter 6. Great to see feedback in action!
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Post by limith on Oct 11, 2017 0:20:31 GMT -8
Your traceback is suggesting you are using the starnova demo as the base. Are you trying to merge the patreon betas with that? Not sure how that would turn out, especially given Steam likes to overwrite the files inside it on a whim. The advice I remember from back in the day was to move the game out from steam if you wanted to make changes to it. Even if you do that I would recommend you not mix the patreon betas with the demo.
I've been testing the latest patreon betas with all the .rpy/.rpa carried over. It is possible that some graphics are missing from the betas without previous .rpa/.rpy.
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Post by limith on Oct 10, 2017 17:28:33 GMT -8
It sounds like the game cannot detect your sound device.
1) Disable your audio device in sound -> playback. The reenable it after restarting your computer (right click -> show disabled devices to see it) 2) Do you have an audio driver installed? If yes, try uninstalling and reinstalling it. If you just reinstalled your OS, you may need to find an audio driver for your hardware. You can look up hardware ids online (you get this from device info in device manager) to figure out the manufacturer and model and then try your luck in finding a driver for it. If the manufacturer does not have a driver available you can also search Computer OEMs for other laptops with the same hardware and if they offer a windows 7 driver install that. Also some drivers for win8/10 will work on win 7 if the driver lets you install (I had this problem trying to find a win7 wifi driver for my laptop) 2b) If this is a new OS install you also want to look for chipset drivers as it affects audio 2c) Windows might have a built in non-generic driver for your audio device that works if you cannot find a win7 driver. You need to go device manager -> update drivers and fiddle around with the wizard until it lets you select a make/model of the device (it's not select a driver from disk or look online but it's hidden under the let windows detect flow iirc). It's pretty hidden in the wizard I don't recall off the top of my head, on linux right now so I can't walk you through it. 3) Do you have a microphone port? Is it broken (eg always on/off)? I had this before, had to do some fun hackery to turn back on audio. Google is your best bet here.
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Post by limith on Oct 10, 2017 13:06:54 GMT -8
Might be the sprite is missing from the steam demo version?
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Post by limith on Oct 9, 2017 18:18:48 GMT -8
>.>
Bad things happen if you see a space whale. <--
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Post by limith on Oct 9, 2017 0:54:54 GMT -8
Something to surface for the ren'py folks for Tom to look at maybe. Not sure if this is even a bug. Definitely not something you guys should worry about.
Reproduction steps:
1) New game
2) press enter/space a few times to advance text
3) shift+o, jump JULIEOCT192017
4) repeat step 2
5) Scroll up (rollback) text back to the start of new game
6) Press enter/space a few times to advance text. Notice it does not remember the jump and continues past where the jump happens.
7) shift+o, jump JULIEOCT192017
8) Text shows up as 'previously read/scroll back' gray-blue instead of normal color. Not able to scroll down.
Probably WAD behavior for debugging and wouldn't affect users.
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Post by limith on Oct 9, 2017 0:35:45 GMT -8
If you get your upgrades well you generally don't need Sola to use awakening. At least I generally don't.
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