stuntcock

Newbie
Jul 5, 2018
16
11
For a menu-driven game, what is that ideal engine?
<pretentious mode>You're asking the wrong question</pretentious mode>

No Haven has a lot of text content. Such content could not easily be converted to another format (such as cutscenes with voiceover narration). Therefore we ought to choose an engine which can deliver a lot of text (and provide tools for text formatting, sizing, alignment, scrolling, etc).

No Haven uses text-based menus to present information to the player, and to solicit choices from the player. The information is important. The choices are important. The menus are not important. They exist in the current game because they were the most convenient option available under RAGS. If No Haven had been written on a different platform then we might be forced to choose missions via an even-worse mechanism (such as typing the mission name into a text parser). In such a case, we would not be asking ourselves "which game engine has the best support for text parsers?" Instead, we would be saying "I'm very grateful that we can finally abandon the text parser bullshit because we have access to superior forms of interaction."

Let's consider an example. Currently, my vote for the least-pleasant aspect of No Haven's UX would be armor/clothing. It's a tedious clickfest which (at any particular moment) hides much of the relevant information from the player. Let's say that I want to assign the best possible gear to my newest recruit, Bill the Ogre. The armor menu shows only the set of unassigned gear. I'll need to click through each slaver (via cumbersome menus), note what they're currently wearing, manually decide which item is best, unequip it from its current wearer, equip it to Bill, and then choose alternate gear and equip it onto the naked guy. The whole process might consume 60+ seconds of playtime.

Note: XCOM2 suffers from a similar problem. In the base game it's manageable because the game encourages the player to use a small elite team. Mods (ie Long War 2) force the player to manage a much larger roster, which means that the player must waste time navigating through the Loadout menus ( ... or just send your team into combat with sub-optimal gear because you can't be bothered to deal with the frustration).

Instead, let's imagine that we show a graphical team roster (e.g. grid of portraits or paper-doll silhouettes) wherein each character is accompanied by an icon showing their current gear. I can reassign equipment by drag-and-dropping it from one character portrait to another. Comparison can be done by hovering the mouse pointer over a particular piece of gear. The operation could be completed in a few seconds.

I don't mean to imply that the game should become entirely graphical. There are some cases wherein Datagrids would be appropriate (for ease of comparison and player-driven sorting). Right-click context menus should be retained in many places. The choices which appear during missions should probably follow Visual Novel convention, because that's a familiar UX for players.

Dwarf Fortress
DF has godawful menus. Everyone knows that they're godawful, although there's some denial due to Stockholm Syndrome. Expert players can navigate the menus quickly, but that's due to muscle memory rather than good design. Large forts become borderline-unplayable without Dwarf Therapist.

uses a Therapist-style grid to present labor information and solicit player choices. This was a good decision. Re-implementing DF's godawful menus would have been a mistake. The developer wisely asked "what's a good engine to deliver the intended gameplay experience?" instead of "which engine can faithfully recreate the original game (warts and all)?"

what engine would fit the basic needs of a game like this one?
My preference is Unity, but it's a very biased position (example: I have an irrational hatred for Python, and my experience with Unity leads to ). It's currently moot, because BedlamGames is proceeding with Twine. Until we can convince him to reconsider that choice, the "best" question is academic.
 
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W65

Active Member
May 31, 2018
779
840
Christ. I'd say everything in No Haven in unpleasant because just about all the feedback for whatever you're trying to do is in a scroll of text relegated to the upper-left quarter of your screen. Select an option; wait for it to finish being printed; wait for it to finish being formatted; wait for it to finish being formatted AGAIN for different formatting; now I can scroll back up to the top of the information to actually read it. Once, of course, I notice where the new information actually started. But nothing is aligned and justified. Now let me translate abbreviations (across line breaks sometimes!) between the left side of the screen and the right. Pain in the ass.

Navigating a bunch of menus would be tolerable if it were at least quick, but then again I'm a hotkey user and am used to it. But in RAGS I guess you just don't have any choice how you're going to present things. It reminds me of the old NES verions of Deja Vu or Shadowgate, with arrowing up and down through long lists of crap, waiting for transitions to finish or stuff to draw. Pain in the ass.

For selfish reasons I'm glad I was able to get an answer out of you about the engine choice. I don't expect it to change anything for this game, but it's nice to have another opinion.
 

iamnuff

Well-Known Member
Sep 2, 2017
1,439
1,014
So how do you actually trigger the Rose's debt scenes? Is there a minimum amount of debt that you need?
 

Trapquest

Member
Feb 26, 2018
265
538
Is it possible yet to upgrade the encampment biomancy/corruption yet? And in turn, possible to do Futa TF on prisoners/slavers? It's alluded to but can't find any encampment upgrades specifically for that, and event bonus' don't make Futa TF possible, so either it's a future thing or an upgrade I can't find is somewhere.
 

Aetheron

Newbie
Aug 5, 2017
27
2
does someone have 0.821 version for share? :D?
Might be worth specifying that it's the TF (patreon) version being sought, unless you did mean the normal version and then like @cmacleod42 said... it's publically available from the site.

Edit: I have no idea why I felt the need to tag cmacleod there. I blame an insufficiency of caffeine.

Is it possible yet to upgrade the encampment biomancy/corruption yet? And in turn, possible to do Futa TF on prisoners/slavers? It's alluded to but can't find any encampment upgrades specifically for that, and event bonus' don't make Futa TF possible, so either it's a future thing or an upgrade I can't find is somewhere.
I don't think that mechanic has been incorporated yet AFAIK. The button to do it was added to biomancy during the last major biomancy patch but it auto fails last I looked.

There IS now a golem that lets you turn other people into other golems, so clearly there's been some coding done for species changes which might be a sign of things to come. (I vaguely recall it being on the "a few updates from now" list during one of the more future looking Q&A posts a while back)
 

Trapquest

Member
Feb 26, 2018
265
538
For those waiting for the TF version this mod: ( ) Has all the features of TF version, and also a bunch of features akin to cheating that are entirely optional, and can be ignored if you prefer the vanilla experience.

For some reason this mod always is uploaded before the vanilla TF version, so I tend towards downloading the mod and just ignoring it's other features. Orcm (the dev) apparently hates mods like this with a passion, and feels it ruins the game, so if that factors into your decision at all there's that as well.
 

philyb

Newbie
May 23, 2018
24
28
Does the game have "bad ends"? I ask because I had a critical failure on a mission with my character and there were no consequences, even though it said they were unable to escape. It'd be cool if it did have some bad endings where you were enslaved, outside of the low morality one. Kind of feel a bit weird just sending my dude on missions, getting a disaster and they just get a bit wounded.
 

Trapquest

Member
Feb 26, 2018
265
538
I believe bad ends are around but rare(I think there may be one associated with debt at the one visitable location with the mistress). More are planned in the future according to Orcm, but I dunno how high of a priority they are.
 

Tataro

Well-Known Member
Mar 27, 2018
1,089
1,584
So a big giant question. How do you increase the size of your dick and how do your procure supplies?
 

RNDM

Engaged Member
Mar 10, 2018
2,639
3,888
Get a Biomancer/run relevant assignements respectively. Dunno if there's some kind of dick-growth potion. IIRC camp envoys may also set up "supply chain" arrangements that semi-regularly bring in some supplies.
 

Tataro

Well-Known Member
Mar 27, 2018
1,089
1,584
Get a Biomancer/run relevant assignements respectively. Dunno if there's some kind of dick-growth potion. IIRC camp envoys may also set up "supply chain" arrangements that semi-regularly bring in some supplies.
Yeah figured out the biomancy. How do you set up the supply chain? Is there a walktrough of some kind?
 

RNDM

Engaged Member
Mar 10, 2018
2,639
3,888
Nah it's random like everything else the envoys do or don't. You just assign someone with more or less the recommended traits to the job and hope they do something useful during their long absences.
 
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