iamnuff

Well-Known Member
Sep 2, 2017
1,454
1,018
There are no anti-cheat fatures that I know about.

The cheat-version of the game here on F95 is great, but sadly on haitus due to technical issues. the dice-fixer is also great, if a little more limited.

Fortunately, you can make a character in the cheat-version and give them all sorts of traits an stuff, then export them and play them in the newer upated version of the game. (or the dice-fix version)

Unfortunately, you can only export in char-gen, before actually starting the playthrough, and the traits you can add in chargen (even with unlimited points) are a lot more limited than the stuff you can do with the outright cheats.

Shame, but there's hope that the dice-fixer will eventually incorperate the cheat-menu from the cheat version.
 

brynhildr

Compulsive Gambler
Jun 2, 2017
6,476
56,843
it is fun to play ? since no pics, no idea how it looks.
Even though it's mostly text, some pics are there fortunately. So it's not that "poor" in that "field". However if you don't have the patience to grind or to deal with the heavy RNG that this game have, then don't waste your time, seriously.

Or download one of the two version mentioned in the previous page, post #200. While one regards, If I understood correctly, mostly the RNG of the game the other instead, it's a complete overhaul of the game itself that makes things much more easier than the original one - this of course. So take your choice!
 

stuntcock

Newbie
Jul 5, 2018
16
11
it is fun to play ? since no pics, no idea how it looks.
I'll re-use .

Does the game have a clear idea of what it wants to be? Yes.
Does the game deliver on its premise? Yes.
Is the game immersive and interesting at some moments? Yes.
Is the game often confusing, frustrating, unbalanced, or tedious? Yes.
Does the game have bugs, rough edges, and unfinished content? Hell yes.
Is the current game fun to play? Your mileage will vary.

It's mostly a text game. Input is almost entirely mouse-driven; you won't need to type in commands or do any WASD movement. But you'll definitely need to do a lot of reading. Because the game is built on RAGS and its loop optimization is poor, there are noticeable load times (e.g. half-second delay after clicking a menu item). It doesn't ruin the experience, but it can be off-putting at first (especially if you're already feeling annoyed by the game's early difficulty and the absence of a tutorial).

A few scenes have commissioned artwork depicting the specific event taking place (such as the corruption and mutation of a slave by demonic energy). Most scenes use "borrowed" artwork which roughly matches the events being narrated - or at least artwork which depicts the appropriate combination of gender+species. The selection and curation of material is fairly good; BedlamGames has collected work from various artists but you'll rarely be dismayed by the juxtaposition of clashing art styles. A single glance at the screen is usually sufficient to deliver the "tone" of a scene, because the game colors its text intuitively (e.g. a critical mission failure is denoted by big angry red capital letters).

The game focuses on the management experience of running a slave enterprise. Your player character is not an omnipotent vehicle for wish-fulfilment fantasies. The game's trait system prevents you from "maxing out" all of your stats and being good at everything. Traits which provide a bonus in combat (such as "Strong") will often incur a penalty during infiltration, exploration, seduction, etc. If your player character is good at capturing slaves, then he'll probably be rubbish at training them. You'll need to recruit a balanced team, and you'll need to get used to the idea that your slaver teammates will regularly rape "your" slaves as a leisure activity. You can restrict them from doing so ... but it involves so many menu-clicks that it's simply not worth doing.

You'll gradually accumulate slaves of various types, but you're not supposed to cultivate them as waifus. You'll never get detailed multi-paragraph erotica scenes in which you tenderly make love to them. This is a dog-eat-dog world. People are disposable. You're supposed to break their will, teach them to fellate a dick, and then sell them to a filthy brothel. If you screw up very badly then it's possible for your player character to become enslaved (via debt, hypnosis, corruption, mutiny, etc). I think that this is intended as a deliberate path for submissive-preference players, rather than as a bad-end for dominant-preference players. There's also sissification and gender-transformation content, if you're into that kind of thing.

The game allows you to extensively customize your player character's attributes, and these are extremely relevant to gameplay. Your PC can potentially be a marauding warrior, or a sneaky explorer, or a stay-at-home administrator, or a debauched sex addict, or a literal demon who wants to bathe the world in green fire. Your character's gender is somewhat significant to gameplay. But your character's appearance is almost totally ignored by the game. If you want to extensively customize cosmetic details (such as hair color, waist size, anal circumference, etc) or carefully dress up your player character, then you should look elsewhere. No Haven doesn't fulfill that particular niche.

The game relies very heavily on randomness. You can always see the odds, and you can usually skew them in your favor (e.g. if the mission involves combat, then choose someone who possesses the "Strong" trait). A success usually means that you gain resources (e.g. gold or slaves) while a failure means loss of resources (e.g. injured or dead slavers, wasted time, surviving slavers acquire negative traits). What's notable here is the level of difficulty - events that you encounter in the early game might give you a success probability of 60% or worse (also: it's not practical to defeat the randomness via save-scumming). So it plays out a bit like X-COM. If you can "roll with the punches" then it provides opportunities for role-playing and emergent narratives. You might find that one of your early slavers fails a bunch of missions and becomes Cowardly, Scarred, Injured, etc. These traits make them even less likely to succeed in the future. So you might decide to punish their failure by demoting them into a sex slave. Or you might allow them to tag along on milk-run missions with strong teammates, so that they can gradually redeem themselves and rebuild their reputation. Or you might just ragequit and restart the game.

Alternatively, you can use cheat mods if you want to play the game as more of a wish-fulfilment power fantasy.
 

Daba

Member
Jan 22, 2018
266
220
FUck this game,i cant stand devs who implent anti cheat features, why do you care how i play the game and how i want to enjoy the most
You can try "Cheat Mod for No Haven v0.79 TF". Mod isn't updated anymore (don't when or if ever will be), but last build works like charm (at least in my case) and I highly recommend it. I personally don't intend to play any RAGS game without cheat mod ever again.
 
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TheHologram

Newbie
Feb 15, 2018
91
115
Found a huge performance improvement for .NET BinarySerializer that vastly improves the performance of Rags saves for No Haven. It sped up loading a game save from 50 seconds to 10 seconds on my computer and appears to be very safe. The main requirement is that you have .NET 4.7.2 installed which I believe you have to install separately.




Here is an article about the change itself:


Here is a file for that for Rags.exe. Just replace the existing config wherever you installed Rags.
[mega]

Ok so that was nice. I consider performance problems in Rags an interesting challenge so before I found this I hacked the Rags 2.4.16 version to be slightly faster though the config change is really nice.

What I did was the following (a little too much detail for most but whatever):
  1. Remove the hidden save game that it does before you try to exit or hit the load menu. If you want to save use the save menu. Save several seconds of waiting.
  2. It sorts the variables and picture lists and then uses a binary search when trying to find things in the lists. Basically the game is doing linear searches through large lists constantly which is just bad programming.
  3. There was a slow Guid to string conversion that was being done constantly so I optimized that but left it as linear cause sorting the object list seemed to cause problems
This stuff just speeds up little things over time which avoids some of the jumpiness when scheduling raids. But I've had few issues so I'm going to use both.

I cannot fix everything in Rags but these seem reasonably safe. Also this should work for any Rags game and not just No Haven.

Patched Executables Download:
[mega]

Warning: The patched files might cause problems that I'm not aware of so use at your own risk. Make backups and all that. The other config change should be totally safe.
 

R.

Newbie
Nov 9, 2017
44
17
You can try "Cheat Mod for No Haven v0.79 TF". Mod isn't updated anymore (don't when or if ever will be), but last build works like charm (at least in my case) and I highly recommend it. I personally don't intend to play any RAGS game without cheat mod ever again.
It is possible to copy CHEAT object into latest release and have it work.
 

Semeicardia

The Real Slim Semei
Modder
Donor
Mar 11, 2017
776
985
It is possible to copy CHEAT object into latest release and have it work.
While that is indeed possible, some of the functionality, such as the body modification / biomancy options in my cheat mod is entirely changed in 0.805 and it will not have any of the new races, traits or aspects for selection.
My cheat mod also makes changes to other parts of the game, which will not be transfered by simple copying the cheat object.
So it would only be a temporary solution.
 

W65

Active Member
May 31, 2018
779
842
At what point does a developer finally cut bait and run to a better engine? I mixed about three metaphors there but I think I said what I meant. This is clunkier than that time I tried to remake a Nintendo third-person shooter in Visual Basic. It's like playing a game on an old 90s dumb terminal: display me some lines, then go back and format them.

There seems like there's an actual, playable game in there somewhere, but I'm far too old to have the patience for this UI.
 

jack_px

Member
Oct 21, 2016
186
27
I'll re-use .

If you screw up very badly then it's possible for your player character to become enslaved (via debt, hypnosis, corruption, mutiny, etc). I think that this is intended as a deliberate path for submissive-preference players, rather than as a bad-end for dominant-preference players.
how do you get one of this paths?, usually if your slavers are angry you just get a game over
 

stuntcock

Newbie
Jul 5, 2018
16
11
At what point does a developer finally cut bait and run to a better engine?
BedlamGames knows that he needs a better engine. He has acknowledged it.

Unfortunately, he's constrained by several factors:
  • he needs to continue releasing new playable content in order to keep his fans happy. If he disappears for three months and comes back with a skeletal tech-demo game then he'll lose a lot of interest and funding (even if the "new" game has a much stronger technical foundation, better UI, greatly improved performance, iOS/Android support, etc).
  • he's working on several games simultaneously, which limits the amount of attention that he can devote to any particular project.
  • he participates actively in community management and fan feedback (via livestreams, Discord, etc) - which reduces the amount of time available for primary game development work.
  • his communication strategy isn't optimized for software development. For example: he receives many bug reports via Patreon and tumblr, which means that he spends time responding to outdated or duplicate reports. These systems aren't easily searchable, so it's possible for fans to accidentally submit duplicate bug reports and redundant suggestions even when they're actively trying not to waste his time.
  • he's a self-taught amateur programmer, so he doesn't always choose the best tools for the job (or use industry-standard coding practices, or include inline documentation, or use proper version control, etc).
  • he's fairly strict in the project management role. He hits his release dates much more reliably than other adult game developers ... but he often does so by sacrificing code quality, increasing his future maintenance workload, or just brute-forcing a solution via hours of tedious work (e.g. IF statements nested twelve levels deep). There's rarely time available for refactoring or cleanup - let alone migration to a new engine.
  • he sees this as a personal accomplishment and a labor-of-love. He could potentially ask a programmer to silently rewrite his games using proper development tools and practices, and then "hop over" from the old tech to the new tech without missing any release dates. But he'd then be dependent on the programmer to teach him about the new tech (software architecture, code syntax, debugging tools, etc). If the programmer gets hit by a truck, then BedlamGames might be unable to continue development of his own games. And even if the collaboration works perfectly and the games are highly successful, they would not (in an emotional sense) be "his" games anymore.
a better engine?
He's currently migrating to . It's better than RAGS, but I don't believe that it's a suitable platform for No Haven.

I mean ... we're in the current situation because he chose an engine intended for interactive fiction and then built a simulation/RPG game on top of it. The apparent solution is "upgrade to a different interactive fiction engine, then stuff it with content and add GOSUBs until the codebase becomes impossible to manage."
 

W65

Active Member
May 31, 2018
779
842
BedlamGames knows that he needs a better engine. He has acknowledged it.

Unfortunately, he's constrained by several factors:
  • he needs to continue releasing new playable content in order to keep his fans happy. If he disappears for three months and comes back with a skeletal tech-demo game then he'll lose a lot of interest and funding (even if the "new" game has a much stronger technical foundation, better UI, greatly improved performance, iOS/Android support, etc).
  • he's working on several games simultaneously, which limits the amount of attention that he can devote to any particular project.
  • he participates actively in community management and fan feedback (via livestreams, Discord, etc) - which reduces the amount of time available for primary game development work.
  • his communication strategy isn't optimized for software development. For example: he receives many bug reports via Patreon and tumblr, which means that he spends time responding to outdated or duplicate reports. These systems aren't easily searchable, so it's possible for fans to accidentally submit duplicate bug reports and redundant suggestions even when they're actively trying not to waste his time.
  • he's a self-taught amateur programmer, so he doesn't always choose the best tools for the job (or use industry-standard coding practices, or include inline documentation, or use proper version control, etc).
  • he's fairly strict in the project management role. He hits his release dates much more reliably than other adult game developers ... but he often does so by sacrificing code quality, increasing his future maintenance workload, or just brute-forcing a solution via hours of tedious work (e.g. IF statements nested twelve levels deep). There's rarely time available for refactoring or cleanup - let alone migration to a new engine.
  • he sees this as a personal accomplishment and a labor-of-love. He could potentially ask a programmer to silently rewrite his games using proper development tools and practices, and then "hop over" from the old tech to the new tech without missing any release dates. But he'd then be dependent on the programmer to teach him about the new tech (software architecture, code syntax, debugging tools, etc). If the programmer gets hit by a truck, then BedlamGames might be unable to continue development of his own games. And even if the collaboration works perfectly and the games are highly successful, they would not (in an emotional sense) be "his" games anymore.
He's currently migrating to . It's better than RAGS, but I don't believe that it's a suitable platform for No Haven.

I mean ... we're in the current situation because he chose an engine intended for interactive fiction and then built a simulation/RPG game on top of it. The apparent solution is "upgrade to a different interactive fiction engine, then stuff it with content and add GOSUBs until the codebase becomes impossible to manage."
I dunno. From my standpoint as a potential player (I guess potential customer is more like it), that's all beside the point. I just want the game to be playable. Him having this big list of inefficiencies makes it more understandable why it's in the state it's in, but it doesn't make me any more willing to contribute money to him.

It's his game, though. He doesn't owe me anything. He's the one making the money, and he's the one with the onus to his patrons. He'll decide how much effort he should put into attracting new players and how much he needs to do to keep the ones he has. And all I do is wait and see if the situation gets any better. Doesn't sound like it will.
 

stuntcock

Newbie
Jul 5, 2018
16
11
From my standpoint as a potential player (I guess potential customer is more like it), that's all beside the point. I just want the game to be playable. Him having this big list of inefficiencies makes it more understandable why it's in the state it's in, but it doesn't make me any more willing to contribute money to him.
Don't tell us; tell .

There are people who consider the status quo acceptable, to the extent that they're willing to fund the project. They vote with their dollars, telling BedlamGames that he's on the correct path. A few of the long-term fans also influence game design priorities via their feedback:
  • diehard fan achieves mastery of the game.
  • diehard fan discovers strategies and optimizations which allow him to overcome the game's challenges.
  • each release adds new content, but it also breaks savegame compatibility (because of bad technology). Therefore the diehard fan ought to spend many days building up a new team and gradually exploring the new content. But he's so experienced that he can speedrun the game in his sleep, and so he experiences all of the new content within a few hours.
  • diehard fan exhausts all of the game's new content and then gets bored.
  • diehard fan asks for future content to be gated behind high-difficulty challenges, rare events, or extreme RNG (in order to extend his playtime).
  • difficult/secret/RNG content gets added to the game.
  • the game becomes confusing or unapproachable for newcomers.
  • discussion of the game on random internet sites (i.e. loci for recruitment of new players and new customers) tends to focus on cheat mods ( ) - because those mods make the game newbie-friendly and fun.

There's an obvious risk of echo-chamber effects. Current/paying customers enjoy close communication and greater access to the developer. Potential/future customers aren't welcome in the Discord server, so they cluster around cheat-mod creators on external forums. The inner group considers the outer group to be a bunch of ungrateful software pirates with unreasonable expectations about game development; the outer group dismisses the inner group as a sycophantic hugbox.

This is a genuine problem, but it's not insurmountable. If you find the game interesting/promising then I encourage you to .

And all I do is wait and see if the situation gets any better.
Please try. I approached him as a programming nerd and criticized his tech choices; I failed to convince him. He may be receptive to other angles of persuasion.
 

W65

Active Member
May 31, 2018
779
842
Don't tell us; tell .
Well, change is more likely to happen if I say something instead of saying nothing. I'll probably try it.

Incidentally, what engine would be appropriate for a game like this? People make text-based games in things like Godot and Unity. They seem kinda over-feature-rich for just a text game though.

Last thing like this I ever tried was a CircleMUD that I never got off the ground, so I'm not exactly up-to-date. (Although I was able to connect to it, which was I guess more or less a success.)
 

stuntcock

Newbie
Jul 5, 2018
16
11
Incidentally, what engine would be appropriate for a game like this? People make text-based games in things like Godot and Unity. They seem kinda over-feature-rich for just a text game though.
For delivering the narrative text - you're right, it's overkill.

But the output text is only one aspect of the game. It also uses text-based menus in circumstances where text alone isn't ideal.

Consider the list of available missions. Instead of being presented as row within a list, each mission could be represented by an icon on the game map (think X-COM). The player could filter the map to exclude markers denoting irrelevant or impossible missions. The icons could be colored (or bordered, or subtly animated) to indicate difficulty level, remaining time before expiry, maximum team size, etc. Different icons could denote Marauding missions vs Infiltration missions vs Etc.

When a team is dispatched, dotted lines could be added to the map showing the team's travel path towards the mission site. During end-of-day processing, the player could watch the "team" markers slide along their paths towards the mission sites. The game already distinguishes these operational phases (travel vs work), and provides situational bonuses (e.g. harpies travel more quickly but work at normal speed) - but we could present the information visually on the game map so that the concepts are more easily understood.

Similarly: consider team selection during mission prep. Each team member could be shown as a small headshot/portrait surrounded by colored symbols (or radial bars, or whatever) representing their influence on the success of the mission. If you see a guy in the roster surrounded by green markers, then it's probably a good idea to drag-and-drop him onto the mission team. If you want to fine-tune the details, then you can hover the mouse pointer over his portrait to see a tooltip listing all of his traits and their expected contribution to mission success. Or you can just press the Auto-Choose button, watch the AI pick an appropriate team, and then review the tooltips to learn why this team is expected to succeed (example: each individual's merit is poor, but there's a leadership bonus which compensates for most of their flaws).

Even in situations of pure text output, there are potential benefits from using a more "heavyweight" engine. For example: I rely heavily on the end-of-day report, but once I have a dozen slavers in camp the report becomes cluttered and unreadable. I scan through and find a particular line which describes the molestation of a camp slave. I right-click on that line, and from the context menu I choose "Hide this type of message". Molestation reports will thenceforth be suppressed. I almost overlook another line, mentioning the escape of a slave. I right-click this line and choose "Emphasize this type of message". Any future escape reports will appear in bold uppercase.

Let's assume that I overlook the escape message. I may notice a new mission marker appearing on the game map, because it's immediately adjacent to my camp. Since it's a quick-expiring mission, the mission marker will have a glowing/pulsing border to attract the player's attention. We could potentially even include audio cues for important events (such as slave escapes, crafting of legendary gear, mission failure, injury, levelup, etc).

It would still fundamentally be a text-based game. But if it's authored on a robust gamedev platform then there's potential to smooth out the UX, ease the learning curve, and eliminate pain-points. Also: there's potential for structured and intercompatible modding, instead of the free-for-all source code chaos which arises when editing and redistributing Twine games.
 

W65

Active Member
May 31, 2018
779
842
@stuntcock

But in concrete terms, what engine would fit the basic needs of a game like this one? With something like Godot, I can't escape the feeling that you're trying to hammer a text-and-menus game into something that's really most appropriate for 2D/3D interactive games. I've seen these kinds of games made in just about everything from hand-built "engines" in flash to the wildly-inappropriate RPG Maker--you could code it in fortran if you were so inclined and probably end up with something that would look and act like Dwarf Fortress. But as important is what sort of library of code assets already exists. Has some intrepid Unity asset developer created a framework for menu-driven games? It would be silly and inefficient to pick one engine with a bunch of great features when some other engine exists with fewer great features but a great framework for what you're doing. I can almost see how something like RAGS would appeal to the amateur, who just wants to display numbers on the screen without the intimidating generalities of a "node2D" and the infinite possibilities of inefficiency it presents.

For a menu-driven game, what is that ideal engine?
 
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