Plans for v0.48.0 (And an easier Business file)

No, the game stopped/crashed after showing the "loading images" screen even before the updated business.rpy. All versions run without issue on other pc's. That's why I am guessing something is preventing the image loading from the zipped files. I have no error message. The game just quits.

NuTrix

is it trying to load a new business.rpy and not edit it to resolve some bugs in it. while starting a new game??

No error message, the game just quits after it begins loading. Windows operating system. The game worked on my main PC until about 3 months ago. LR2 still runs fine on other PCs.

NuTrix

what error are you getting?? and what system are you running.

Thanks dude (or dudette lol)

You need to edit the file and change these around line 122 self.mental_aspect_price = default_aspect_price self.physical_aspect_price = default_aspect_price self.sexual_aspect_price = default_aspect_price self.medical_aspect_price = default_aspect_price to self.mental_aspect_price = self.default_aspect_price self.physical_aspect_price = self.default_aspect_price self.sexual_aspect_price = self.default_aspect_price self.medical_aspect_price = self.default_aspect_price

aevojoey

What PC/software items are required for the game to load the zipped image files? The game fails to "start" on my main PC. I have tried shutting down the security programs etc., so I don't think it's that. Other ren'py games work fine.

NuTrix

Working as intended,,,(sorry wrong game)..still, is this really a bad thing?

NuTrix

Is anyone else getting debug when starting a new game with this updated business.rpy file added?

One thing I have noticed that not sure if it is as intended or not, but seem out of balance. 'Sex' with somebody (from flirt, Grope, Give command) does not increment time... however 'Offer to knock them up' does.... Seems like they should be the same.....

Laughingowl

I have questions/problems with the contract generation code, specifically that it appears to create more impossible contracts than doable ones. I'm going to focus on tiers 0 and 1, because that's where they're most impossible, and where most of the players are going to be struggling for money already and so the frustration of rolling contract after contract they cannot fulfill will be most discouraging If my math is correct, tier 0 contracts can generate asking for up to 5 of their primary attribute, in which case they will also ask for up to 3 of their secondary. There is no combination of traits for any attribute except Medical that can add up to 5 at tier 0 and that's only if you pile in High Capacity, Basic Meds, and a Suggestibility trait or Birth Control Suppression, thus raising Attention to 1, which brings us to the second problem at tier 0. All tier 0 contracts are limited to 0 Attention, making all of the contracts asking for Sexual and most of the contracts asking for Mental impossible. There is only one 1 Mental trait at tier 0 with 0 Attention, Caffeine Infusion At tier 1, contracts can ask up to 10 of their primary trait, in which case they will also ask for up to 7 of their secondary. These ranges are more possible at this tier, except Attention only ranges between 0 to 2. If a player rolls a tier 1 contract with high attribute requests and Attention lower than 2, they're out of luck because the high attribute traits other than the Medical ones also carry 2 Attention At tier 2, Primary ranges between 7 and 17, Secondary 0 and 11, and Attention between 1 and 4 At tier 3, Primary ranges between 14 and 26, Secondary 3 and 17, and Attention between 1 and 6 My initial recommendations are to lower the requested attribute values and to raise the minimum Attention, especially at tiers 0 and 1 My followup recommendation is to allow the business policy that lowers attention to apply to contract requests, perhaps by including the business policy attention reduction value to the calculation on line 42 of Contract.rpy You might also allow Basic Medical Application and Clinical Testing Procedures to act as a "cover" of sorts, and reduce a serum's Attention if they're included in the formula I would also request that the Manual Synthesis Required side effect lose its Flaw value, since we're already penalized for having that trait during production, and the customer would not care nor even know about it since it has no effect on the final product

Baarogue

I ran into a situation where Lily had 2 requests active for getting sera for her to share with her friends because the first one fired well before I could afford to start making tier 1 sera with the mood enhancer trait. Once I finally had 10 sera, following up with 1 followed up with both. I should have seen either just one task in the UI or needed a second set of 10 sera to clear it. Maybe related to this, I can't seem to get Lily's sluttiness past 30 for any length of time. I've raised it a variety of ways such as having sex, during a trance, posing, but it always reverts back to 30.

tegalega

WRT putting Attention in a visible UI position, if the Review Staff and Check Stock buttons were on the same line there would be room for at least one more line. I'd like to see Production Costs there, but you're right about the importance of Attention, so it's probably more deserving of a place. Although Salary could probably become "Costs: $SalaryCost : $ProductionCost" or suchlike and still just add one line to that part of the UI.

Nona

Other sequence bugs I've found - a pregnant employee, at home, can appear in a lab-based accident and broken air-con.

GDwg

Ran into an issue where a "requires: likes incest" wasn't properly active. In this scenario Lily does have that trait at Likes Lily - Well, uh...You know how you kind of ... fucked my butt? MC - It's a little hard to forget Lily - I can't stop thinking about that... Lily - ...It's getting pretty weird After this, the option to pick "I know you want more though" should be active or maybe the text updated if it requires love incest?

tegalega

The tits visible setting for the suit jacket is wrong. It's set to false, but doesn't actually cover them.

tegalega

Edit: I realized what's going on here. Since employee reviews advance time, the chance to interact again was 1 time frame later and the trance had worn off. I think I've see the general request before to have the chance to take advantage of trances after dates, so this goes into that same bucket of let us interact with the characters before advancing time. I ran into a 0 turn trance bug. I was rewarding Steph sexually as part of the performance review. The UI said Your friend's eyes lose focus... Steph - I'm exhausted... Steph - You make me feel ways my husband never does... Steph - We both have feelings... MC - That's not what I'm here for... Steph - ...I couldn't have asked for a better performance review... Steph - Oh man, I'm a mess... You stand up and open the door... You approach Steph and chat... Steph - Good to see you... At this point there is not option to take advantage of here trance.

tegalega

Possibly on the "unintended consequences" pile. The event where Lily shows you her new underwear, and the event "drinking with Rebecca". Both of these have an option that increases Love, Sluttiness, and Obedience, but the Sluttiness one is basically useless now (capped at 20, if I'm not mistaken, and you can and should get to 20 just by Flirting). Obviously this is a consequence of the removal of the Core Sluttiness mechanic. I'm not sure what to suggest here. It probably isn't appropriate to send them into a trance (which is basically the mechanic that replaced it), but as it stands we've basically gone from a choice of 3 to a choice of 2 (or at least, functionally that is true).

GAZZA

Oh one other thing - can we either have the things that the girls call you matter, or remove their incessant requests to change it? I hate clicking on girls and being annoyed by their stupid "I think I should call you Mr" nonsense - I wouldn't mind if it made a difference, but it doesn't. If it's intended to at some point, fair enough, but if it's just flavour, then by all means still let us change it via giving them a command but I could do without the aggro otherwise.

GAZZA

After fixing the bug for new games with the patched Business.rpy, I started a new game. I will say that the new business stuff is a dramatic change to the game play, and I might suggest a few tweaks: - The "Face of the Business" goal is still to sell X serums. Previously this took at least a minor bit of effort because of the need to set your production to reserve some, so that your marketing departement didn't sell them first, but the new Auto Sell feature counts them as 'you sold it' regardless. That's probably fine, but you might want to change the goal to something like "increase the market outreach by X". - It is annoying to have to go into the Sell Serums bit of the Marketing department to see what the current Attention is, and you do need to know that (I got a nasty surprise that took me to pretty far negative, and was barely able to get out of the hole in time; poor Lily, I almost never take her Instapic money, but needs must). I would suggest this is probably important enough to list under Clarity at the top left corner of the screen; true, it isn't strictly speaking part of the MC, but the MC and the MC's business lines are fuzzy anyway (unless there's some future gameplay where the MC could end up with multiple businesses). If that's not felt to be a good spot, then perhaps on the Review Staff or Check Stock pages? - Speaking of Review Staff, can we have a summary on that page of our current total supply rate, production rate, and research rate? When you have dozens of employees it's annoying to try and calculate whether you are outsupplying or not. - And finally, is there really any point to the 'maximum supply' setting? I can't recall a case where I'd ever wanted to lower that, so in a practical sense you want it to be 'infinite' (that is, always buy more supplies). I suppose you could be in a position (perhaps early game after a fine) that you really had to stop spending money on supplies, but you could just move your supply workers to production for a couple of turns (this surely wouldn't come up very often).

GAZZA

I'm sorry, but an uncaught exception occurred. While running game code: File "game/script.rpy", line 258, in script call $ picked_option.call_action() File "game/game_roles/role_mother/role_mother_taboo_quests.rpy", line 812, in script $ mc.business.mandatory_crises_list(decision_event) File "game/game_roles/role_mother/role_mother_taboo_quests.rpy", line 812, in $ mc.business.mandatory_crises_list(decision_event) TypeError: 'RevertableList' object is not callable -- Full Traceback ------------------------------------------------------------ Full traceback: File "game/script.rpy", line 258, in script call $ picked_option.call_action() File "game/game_roles/role_mother/role_mother_taboo_quests.rpy", line 812, in script $ mc.business.mandatory_crises_list(decision_event) File "/Volumes/Games SSD/games/In progress Supported/Lab_Rats_2.app/Contents/Resources/autorun/renpy/ast.py", line 923, in execute renpy.python.py_exec_bytecode(self.code.bytecode, self.hide, store=self.store) File "/Volumes/Games SSD/games/In progress Supported/Lab_Rats_2.app/Contents/Resources/autorun/renpy/python.py", line 2235, in py_exec_bytecode exec(bytecode, globals, locals) File "game/game_roles/role_mother/role_mother_taboo_quests.rpy", line 812, in $ mc.business.mandatory_crises_list(decision_event) TypeError: 'RevertableList' object is not callable

tegalega

Contracts being quarantined from the broader market would make sense, at least in terms of effects on market sales. The U.I. change also sounds like it could make sense, although I admit the way I sold serums was either auto-selling them, or making them for Contracts. Granted, I feel like the way I previously made serums may not make sense going forwards, so... hmm.

Killer300

The extra LR1 serums right off the bat is an excellent addition, and could potentially solve a bunch of different problems. I'm also heartened to see you looking at Tier 0, as I'd say the worst part of the game right now, mechanically speaking, is how long players get stuck in Tier 0. More broadly, it seems for the best to have just a fixing update this time, as the game is clearly not ready for more mechanics right now. After this, other than maybe tech advancement stuff, I'd recommend 0.49 to focus more on story stuff again. Heck, maybe have more plot stuff with your head researcher, so as to tie everything together in that update. Finally, do you think you have any idea when the game could hit feature freeze? I bring this up because so many of the game's issues right now relate to having to introduce new features that break stuff, then release a patch that fixes things while also balancing them, and then repeating the cycle with the next mechanic. All the while, part of the community remains frustrated because there's never new story stuff to enjoy in this, or when there is, it seems tied to yet more new mechanics that can break.

Killer300

Two other things with the Sales/Marketing functions and UI: First, when you're selling serums you have the choice of -1 or -10, but if you have <= 9 serums in stock, -10 is greyed out. It would be preferable for QOL that instead it would change to -X, where X is however many you have left. As it stands, you need to push -1 9x to sell 9 serums, which is not ideal. Functionally, the -10 button is the mass sale button, and the user will still want to be able to use it for the last 2-9 serums. Second, as a balance issue, it might be preferable for contract fulfillment to not impact market demand for various features. As it stands, when you sell a specialized and narrowly-tailored serum to a pre-determined customer via contract completion, the demand of the broader market for those features goes down. This is slightly counter-intuitive, but it also reduces the incentives to jump through the hoops required to fulfill contracts. Since the contract isn't being directed at the market at large, and it's not general demand that's being fulfilled but rather something narrow and tailored that only certain products could satisfy, there's a certain amount of sense to not having its completion change how the general buying public clamors for your product. Additionally, though, it rewards the player for engaging with the contract system by not giving them a potentially-large demand hit all at once - much like contract fulfillment already lets you avoid heat from high-attention serum sales.

Nona

WRT the market reach action (Find new clients), it currently stands out from all the other actions in that it has no base result: if you're 0 Charisma, Marketing, and Focus, you'll add 0 clients every time you do it. In keeping with the other skills, you should probably have some constant amount you add each time (possibly 5 since that seems to be the scaling factor here) so the player can personally add a few clients even if they're very bad at it. Alternately, rather than an additive constant, it would also work to set a floor of 5 per action. WRT other changes, I'd just repeat what I said elsewhere: we need a UI indicator of Daily Operating Costs outside of the end-of-day summary since it's too easy to miss there. Ideally, it would be next to Daily Salary Cost, but the UI is pretty crowded in that one particular spot. UI-wise, it would probably also be good to add current market reach (and/or new clients added today) to the Daily Statistics summary.

Nona

It really looks like the Business.rpy change is savegame-compatible but not newgame-compatible...

Nona

First off, I really appreciate that you responded to some of the criticism and provided a quick fix to a very big problem. I understand that you now want to round off everything that has been added over the last few updates, because a lot feels unfinished. That is in my opinion a very good idea. And I'm really glad that you don't want to touch a core system to change it. But this is also where my greatest concern begins. You mentioned the technical and unfinished integration into the game but not a word that some of the supporters would like to have more content in the form of stories. And I don't mean Insta pic and stuff! I mean character storylines. When will the story of the mother continue? When is the auntie? When is that about the cousin? When are Stephanie's? When is Alexa's? Even if these were just examples, I hope that's understandable what I'm talking about. I don't mean RNG events or taboo stuff. It would be really nice if you could tell us when you intend to continue stories and if at all. And that would also signal that you take the feedback in the comments seriously.

Victor

I get an exception when I try to start a new game; after distributing stats and naming myself and my company, when I hit "Finish Character Creation, this happens: [code] I'm sorry, but an uncaught exception occurred. While running game code: File "game/script.rpy", line 154, in script call call initialize_game_state(store.name,store.b_name,store.l_name,return_arrays[0],return_arrays[1],return_arrays[2]) File "game/script.rpy", line 558, in script python: File "game/script.rpy", line 723, in main_business = Business(business_name, m_division, p_division, rd_division, office, office) File "game/major_game_classes/business_related/Business.rpy", line 122, in __init__ self.mental_aspect_price = default_aspect_price #These are the actual current values of each aspect, which will vary from day to day NameError: global name 'default_aspect_price' is not defined -- Full Traceback ------------------------------------------------------------ Full traceback: File "game/script.rpy", line 154, in script call call initialize_game_state(store.name,store.b_name,store.l_name,return_arrays[0],return_arrays[1],return_arrays[2]) File "game/script.rpy", line 558, in script python: File "renpy/ast.py", line 923, in execute renpy.python.py_exec_bytecode(self.code.bytecode, self.hide, store=self.store) File "renpy/python.py", line 2235, in py_exec_bytecode exec(bytecode, globals, locals) File "game/script.rpy", line 723, in main_business = Business(business_name, m_division, p_division, rd_division, office, office) File "game/major_game_classes/business_related/Business.rpy", line 122, in __init__ self.mental_aspect_price = default_aspect_price #These are the actual current values of each aspect, which will vary from day to day NameError: global name 'default_aspect_price' is not defined Windows-10-10.0.19041 Ren'Py 7.4.8.1895 Lab Rats 2 - Down to Business v0.47.1 Sun Dec 12 14:05:20 2021 [/code]

Shinnjin