Scriptfixxz + obedience (Patreon)

i've already got some notes about it so i'll post them tomorrow like last time around here, and as we keep going, buuuut first i have a backlog 👀

some things to talk about that i didnt get a chance to post before actually starting stuff-- i mentioned that i was going to make a separate post about some long-standing bugs we were fixing! so here's a shortlist of some of the more notable ones!

Zoom Lens????????????

...apparently just wasn't implemented at all. like we thought we had caught up on all our items but... apparently not. it was in game. but there was just. no code for it anywhere.
but there is now!

Gridstuck

So since episode 15 when it became a thing there's been a problem people have had where they'd enter the Coral Water Grid in the treatment center, and titania would start doing her thing, and then they'd leave the room and the water would rise again, cutting them off from the control bit to lower/raise the thing

and for the longest bloody time i couldn't figure out why, people kept reporting this problem, and i thought at first i had just set the teleport event wrong, or was checking the wrong variable, but for all i looked over the various events after reports, i could never find anything that was changing the level of the water

well i've been a fool, a fool in man's shoes

when i was going over fixing stuff the other day it suddenly occurred to me that the only reason i shouldn't be able to find anything changing the water level is if it were never set in the first place

so i checked out the original story events for that part of the game, which it's possible i did, but there's two of them-- here 

those two events are pretty much the same, but i need two of them to cover both spaces the player could step on when moving down that way. both events should be the same, aside from moving the player an extra step to the left--
but actually
the event on the right had one more difference in that it was never setting the variable, whereas the left one was properly. that explains why it only happened to some players, and why i had such trouble recreating it-- it only happened to the unlucky players who walked down the right side.

all better.

AI sees through the smoke and mirrors

for most of the game's existence, zoroark has been pretty consistently useless. in the past, the ai was just too dumb to know how to not see through it, which considering how the illusion ability works in contrast to how AI would normally calculate something like type effectiveness, is not terribly unsurprising

I had thought maybe it would be better after our changes in E17-- it would be smart enough to pretend to be dumb, you know? but that wasn't the case. so i thought, I guess we just didn't do anything for illusion in e17 after all, we missed the forest for the function codes-- especially since there were repeat reports of AI continuing to see through illusion that we waved off as the ability not having been implemented to AI well enough yet.

as it turns out we did put in code illusion and (act surprised) i just forgot about it ^^; and also, it turned out that code was bugged. it was mostly correct, even down to making higher-skilled trainers figure out the illusion quicker than lower skilled trainers... it would then store the decision of whether or not the trainer figured it out in a variable
only.
in an oversight, we forgot to actually do anything with that variable.
oops.
..but now we have, and the ai is now using dark attacks against disguised zoroarks and all that other stupid stuff that makes it passable.

gotta stay smart to play dumb!

Genderswap Glitch

this one really sucks for players who started in E17 and wanted to make use of the genders no longer being locked to player characters-- and i feel reallllly bad about it.
so the problem is this: players pick an untraditional gender/protag combo, and for the start of the game it's all fine, other characters will use the correct pronouns (in the very few times they use pronouns at all) but after a certain point things start getting mixed up and the player gets misgendered from then on. oof. 

i figured out a while ago from reports when this was happening in-game-- it was just after beating noel. and i had a suspicion of what was causing it that turned out to be right. 

first, some context: i just mentioned very few characters refer to the player's gender at all, and that is especially true before noel... because in original development, it wasn't until E10 that i even had a way to check the player's gender. when i started E10 i retroactively fitted some variables  and a switch into the intro so it would be fine from that point on, but obviously that wouldn't do for the players of existing save files. so, i had the game update the player's gender at the start of the episode. E10 was radomus-- so E9 was noel. and the first thing that happened after noel was saphira busting through the mountain like sup so i had her event do the thing.

i only had one metric to define gender for existing save files back then-- the given genders of the player characters themselves. so, using a check of which character the player was, i was able to set the values now in the intro later for older players. because of how i had to make the tauros' work, it was also necessary for me to do that at the time. plus, then after that point i could guarantee all players would have that variable set, meaning i was free to refer to gender whenever instead of having to awkwardly avoid it all the time. 

so you might have figured it out already, but basically this part of the code didn't get removed when i updated E17's intro to allow free gender selection... i had completely forgotten about it. and therefore players' gender choice variables would get overwritten as soon as they got to saphira. 

I've removed it for E18 (and a similar piece of code left over from the tauros' which also isn't necessary now that those are in the scripts rather than events)... but there's nothing i can do for e17 save files past that point. they'll have been reverted to their player characters' original gender, and it'll have to be fixed on a save-by-save basis by correcting those variables. 

for anyone who wants to go debugging or spread the good word to those who can: switch 289 should be on if player wants female; off otherwise. variable 151 should be updated as well (its name lists which value is which).

it's an oof. sorry about that.

The Obedience Expedience

so here's the conclusion to the obedience discussion i opened a handful of days ago: 

• the rejuv style thing is a surprising minority, and because of how it would necessitate changes to trainers, it's probably better as a mod than part of the game or even an option. 
• toggle option is a no-no because of potential abuse situations but an in-game switch at the start could pass to choose between them for a playthrough-- but then there isn't much functional difference from installing a mod before playing anyway so shrugsville
• so og reborn style disobedience is staying but following up on discussion points, we explored how practical it would be to make it so disobedience no longer takes effect mid battle...
  
  as it turns out, lia is a boss, and so that change has already been implemented for E18, and we've been testing with it. so far no problems. i think it'll take some undue anxiety off of a lot of those fights! 

in addition to that, i'll also be exploring ways to enable rotations better in E19. we've talked about some ideas for that already, although I don't really feel super set on anything at this point. it'll continue to be a consideration and probably a future discussion.

for now, it doesn't stop us from moving forward

you'll hear more about how testing goes as i'm able to bring it here~