This may have been asked before, but do you think they'll put the other chain quests in the global variable tab?

Quote from: TBBle on Apr 11, 2023, 11:58 AMI've wondered this myself. I'm not sure if they want to move more quest chain status vars to the global variables, or actually would prefer to move the existing quest-chain global variables out into the phone VEE file as many quest chains currently do. The latter would make more sense if there's some heavy or undesirable cost to the global variables, since the phone event for showing quest status should be relatively stable, even if the rest of the chain is rewritten.

I prefer the former as it acts as a clearer walkthrough than the more vague phone journal.

Quote from: TBBle on Apr 12, 2023, 10:55 AMI'm only talking about where the _variable_ is held, which should not matter (or even be visible) to general players; the phone journal is still going to be the walkthrough, providing clues or directions as appropriate to what the next step of a quest line is.

And I reckon that the comment that _describes_ the meaning of those values is still going to end up in the phone journal too, as it's the place that already needs to handle every possible stage of a questline, and there's more room for comments etc. in the phone journal VEE, particularly because there can be conditions _other_ than the progress-tracking integer that affect a quest chain's flow.

Anyway, if we're talking about debug/developer experience like the Global Variables tab, this is probably the wrong thread for it.

Quote from: barteke22Chain tracking will be moved to globals with time, the description preview is something I added because I was tired of jumping between events any time I needed to confirm what each bit does. It's not really aimed at players.

If we're requesting UI rearrangement, I'd like to ask that the buttons for switching between Mrs. Hooters' bedroom and her living room be moved closer together. If I had a touchscreen it'd be fine, but moving the mouse back and forth to click while waiting for her to get home when she's out slutting around during our "date time" is frustrating

Quote from: TBBle on Apr 17, 2023, 02:33 AMYeah, looking at those photos, I agree, I'm not fond of the drop-down menus in the world UI; the gym is another one that I hit every game-day.

There might be a technical reason they're used (related to some of the choices being conditionally enabled and/or mod-integration support to easily add choices), and some might simply be because there _are_ multiple things you can do at a single spot (like the principal's various armchairs/sofas).

Some of them could definitely be split up, like the gym (different exercises use different equipment) and player's bathroom (the bath and the shower are visibly two separate things in this Japanese-style bathroom; although if you're going that way, using the bath implies a shower first anyway... Hmm. That might be an interesting change: You can only use the bath when at grime 0, then only one or the other would be enabled anyway, which I believe disables the drop-down.)

Quote from: barteke22 on Apr 17, 2023, 04:43 PM

Quote from: Dimka2010 on Apr 15, 2023, 11:10 AMnot friendly UI 2.
why not move this function somewhere here and make a separate button for this action?

I'd say that filling the screen with a million buttons (the place you're pointing to will overlap with above button if a few mods are used), instead of having a few categorised ones so mods can just expand them, is the exact opposite of friendly UI.

Office is already too messy, some of the others maybe.

Some feedback about that "have some fun" with Karin Hardman's cum addiction scene after confronting her. I was not aware it would involve the principal drinking some too. Could we have some warning or an alternate path to avoid that? I'm all for feeding it to her, but that's not my thing for my character >_<

Ditto for the pissing student scene that ends with taking him back home to bathe and then letting him assfuck the principal when the principal's cock is too big. Again, I'm always ready to pitch, but catching isn't my thing

Quote from: TBBle on Apr 17, 2023, 01:03 PMFor the former, it seems like a fetish or content-filter could exist to trigger an alternative route for that. Although I don't know the scene itself, your description makes it sound pretty fetishy.

For the latter, was this a missed "attracted to gender" check, i.e. is your character not attracted to males and the scene shouldn't have gone that way at all, or is that distinction simply not enough to make the appropriate difference, i.e. do all principal-male-attracted assume principal is open to receiving anal if male-attracted, and that's a faulty assumption. (Again, I don't know this scene off-hand, and haven't pulled it up to check.)

All else failing, of course, an explicit player-choice could be added to those events; I'm just wondering if there exists a mechanical way to get this right already, as I personally like it when events fit to my declared character, rather than forcing me to reaffirm the choices each time.

I imagine other events may land on similar traps (*cough*). Well, maybe the latter one, I honestly don't remember any cum-drinking scene at all, let alone multiple ones that need to be consistently handled.

There isn't a "cum drinking" or similar option in the content filter tab. "Cumshots" exists, but I don't think that's it. And I wouldn't want to turn off all cum drinking content because I love feeding it to folks, nor put the burden on whoever would do the work to add separate filters for all situations. Splitting the "have some fun" choice into "have some fun (only she drinks)" and "have some fun (drink with her)" would do it, with the lines about the principal tasting and drinking cum along with Karin simply omitted from the one branch, with the author's permission. Everything else was great. Definitely fits what I wanted to see

For the pissing boy>bath scene, there aren't separate "all gay is okay" and "pitching gay only" filters, and I wouldn't want to ask anyone to go through and make new filters and then have to tag everything that was gay to match them. My principal is male with equal attraction to the three genders so it wasn't an attraction check failure, but I avoid any "catching" content because that's not my thing so that scene was a bit of a surprise. I've avoided it in my new game through the expedience of simply not growing my principal's dick too large to fit even after the bath (there appears to be one last check to see if the principal will fit after the student has loosened up in the bath, and if not it ends with the student assfucking the principal), but an option to end it at the post bath blowjob if my principal still wouldn't fit would be super nice

Quote from: barteke22 on Apr 17, 2023, 04:33 PMI've tweaked Karin to require 'Swallowing' fetish, it previously assumed that if you were non-straight male you wouldn't mind sperm.

Added choice to the... other... one.

Ah, the fetishes. I was looking at the blacklist/whitelist content filters. So, my principal does have the Swallowing fetish at 50, because I like seeing that content when someone else is doing it. I didn't know it related to my principal doing the swallowing. What will happen to that event if I remove that fetish? Because everything except his participation was great

and thanks for the... other... one. lol

Quote from: TBBle on Apr 18, 2023, 02:06 AMYeah, a few of the fetishes aren't specific in their participation direction, e.g., Pet Play, Age Difference. The fetish list is mostly a list of things you'd watch, i.e. there's no distinctions in any of them for how the MC would be involved, as seen with Swallowing.

(I'm guessing the fetish list was based on some porn site's list of tags originally?)

A bunch of them could assume that the MC is always the dominant side when involved, e.g. Pet Play, Swallowing, Mind Control, since the game's main underlying theme is domination, i.e. corruption, blackmail, mind control, etc... (That's probably why scenes where the MC is doing something traditionally submissive tend to be surprising and/or need alternative routes?)

The least-complex generalisation that occurs, short of doubling the number of fetishes to have active and passive versions, would be to have each fetish include an "active" checkbox and the various fetish-getting VEE nodes would need to be told if the check was for doing the act or merely seeing it. A fetish check that is active, but the fetish is not active, would return 0 (or -10 or something?); we'd have to assume that if the character is into doing, they're also into watching, which is probably still inaccurate but good enough for the game.

That's not a small change, and I'm not sure it's the right approach anyway.

First of all a big thank you to the various contributers and developers who are keeping this game alive. There ain't much like it out there. Develop whatever you desire to develop, that the "team" approves as being in line with the vision of the game. But if you want some inspiration (and I believe this threads ask for exactly that) I do have something to say.

Related to the Journal/VEE data summed up in #76:

I just sorted through the image files for NormalSchool, removed all meta files, images for PD and items. Leaving what I presume to be a fair assessment of the images related to events in the game. The final tally was above 6000 images. And It's a mess. Some characters have their images in specific locations, some in events, and some (Hardman) have them all over the place. But that is a product of the ad-hoc development and time. And it is the domain of "the writers and content team".

There is a lot of content in this game. Most of it "marked for rework" #98. As a player you miss most of it. There have been various guides over the years, lists, talks of a wiki etc. The Phone should be the one stop button for players to read the state of the game. The problem is that it sorta only handles one event chain per "character". And doesn't show you what you have done, and very importantly, if there might be a time limit or a branch following a choice. (I personally start a game after a major update and keep using it for months. Keeping track of what happened last month is hard. )

Spoiler

Yes, it's a writing and content thing. But I tallied the games event images because I am glad that this game is still alive and I think It's time I stepped up and contributed. I found soo much stuff that I dont think I've ever seen in the game.

The VEE is getting there. More functionality regarding states that can be enforced is welcome. But I can make do with it and make/overhaul events within the capabilities it delivers.

The main motivator for me would be knowing that players will actually see the majority of my contributions.

Spoiler

Don't develop stuff for me. I'm just sharing my curent state of mind as context for the request. I've plenty experience of biting of more than I can chew. Writing the chain, logic, branches and finding images is the easy part. I tend to loose my enthusiasm when I need to script and debug stuff 

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TLDR: VEE is passable. Ingame 'progression tracker / hint system' is.. inflexible? Lacking progress tracking and logs of previous stuff.
See "iNSight of you" by AdventAnyx for inspiration. His tracker is amazing, a tad too much to ask for here. But a list of targets, their curent state of mind, an image, a hint for the next step in a chain, and possibly the ability to have more than one chain per character. Maybe?

Quote from: TBBle on May 01, 2023, 12:47 PM

Quote from: alphanineteen on May 01, 2023, 11:22 AMThe problem is...

There is sorta only one event chain per character, at a time. It's not totally true (although I'm struggling to think of such a case off-hand), but there's no reason the smartphone can't show you both when it happens.

I don't think the smartphone should be telling you stuff you wouldn't know, like a time limit or upcoming branch. That's more the place of a walkthough or wiki. Time limits known to the MC (like the rooftop meeting, or cheerleader clothing pickups, etc) should be in the smartphone journal but more importantly they should be in the calendar. However, older events may lack one or both of those.

That said, I'm not aware off-hand of any events that actually terminate the chain if you miss something. Maybe the train-based chain does? The ones I can think of either continue anyway, or let you re-request the event, like missed PTA meetings or Peter Hooter's photo requests.

Generally event chains should only be terminated by deliberate player choice, e.g., repeatedly rejecting the start event, or choosing a terminating branch like "Report it to the police". Maybe the latter choices could be clearer that they're ending the quest, but I don't know of any of those anyway.

Quote from: alphanineteen on May 01, 2023, 11:22 AMTLDR...

The quest progress function in the smartphone is simply an event like any other, so the same "it's just work that needs to be done" notes apply to that. Hence it's actually very (completely) flexible; the current smartphone VEE quest-state events are basically big long chains of "If quest state is X, output text Y"; so they can easily provide historical context as long as the quest is setting flags differently for different paths through it (as they generally are).

It might be possible to give it some structure to make writing those easier, but since each chain is free to track its status in its own way, there's only so much that can be done in common right now anyway.

I might not be very concise. English is a second language and concise is not a word I'd use to describe myself even in my native tongue .

Your reply was very good at sheading some light on how the game "engine" actually works.
I hope this reply sharpens the image of the idea I have in mind. An unclear and underdeveloped idea is a poor source of inspiration for a developer.
Personally I would find the request "Better Journal with images and progress bars, plz" sub-par. So I'm being very descriptive because I care about the idea. I'm not requesting a better 'Quest Log', I'm saying I've experienced a Quest Log that was not merely functional, but interesting and made me look forward to the next milestone threshold to see what the developer had implemented for that stage. And I think any Hentai "connoisseur" who dabbles in game design ought to have a look at it, especially if corruption is a theme they enjoy. And hope it will inspire somebody to spend more of their precious time working on this game. 

Journal

Spoiler

I completely agree with the design that the smartphone journal should only show stuff that its reasonable to assume that the player-character knows. And I hope I weren't to unclear when I wrote that I believe most of this is simply on the Content Creation part of the pipeline. Stuff like appending "(This will end the event chain)" to the text of what is put on a button. And adding "I believe this should be done urgently if I want to rescue The Missing Girl before something bad happens to her" to a description on a stage in the appropriate event. I assume this is a part of why much of the old content is "slated" for a rework.

Considering that the game is either considered in perpetual development or currently in an unfinished state (Lets face it, it's not gonna be finished by Christmas XD), does it break immersion that much to include a "You have experienced about X% of the content for this character" to the journal? Every hub for discussing this game is filled with questions regarding content. I made myself of stuff I should go look for when I mapped out the 6.000+ images in the NormalSchool folder, and I've already spent way too much time on this game.  But that's a digression.

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VEE
Reading my previous post again I realize that I come of as a bit harsh on the VEE. "Passable" meant "Probably good enough for the kind of content I've filled page after page in a notebook with ideas fit for the HHS setting. So I want to communicate to the developers that I'd rather see development elsewhere." I did not intend to criticize it. Few "made by a community of the players" games have as many and well developed tools to aid in the development of the game as HHS. It's
a big part of why I've decided that instead of making small mods or extensive image packs for various games I enjoy, this game specifically should have my focus.

Spoiler

I dabbled with both the VEE and manually tweaking events to add a branch and an additional event to a teacher back in.. November 'ish. However I approached it I always ended up with duplications of the Character in the phone menu when I added a second parallel event modeled on the first, with new variable names, text, and images. I could find no statement in the xml or scripts that were a part of my "mod" which added stuff to the phone. I'm fairly confident that I left no code in the mod that I didn't comprehend. So I assumed that it's the way the game populates the phone list which saw the extra event and made the duplicate. That said, I found that I dislike writing code when I studied Computer Science, and the best instructions I found was still something to the effect of "base stuff of an existing event at first". I might simply not be cut out for actually implementing my 'lofty ideas' when simply mirroring stuff already present is a serious obstacle, especially with regards to draining my energy devoted to the project.

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Rephrasing my wish
My real point and wish for a feature is a progress tracker that is as much content as the actual content. It Kind of blew my mind how AdventAnyx handled it in iNSight of you. When I first saw that my mind immediately thought of HHS+ and other games that have a lengthy playtime. I guess people play games very differently but I assume that most people who play HHS don't sit down for a weekend session like they might do for The Witcher 3 or something. So a reminder of what you have achieved along with an accessible list of progress towards goals becomes a necessity, IMO.

I'm merely a dabbler of game design, but most people in the industry, I assume, will say that clear goals are a must for player retention. Some games like Skyrim take that to meaning "Point the player to the quest objective, even in something which pretends to be a mystery." whilst other games take a more subtle approach. iNSight of you takes an interesting approach kind of making your current progress like a trophy shelf, with various images of your target showing the effects of stats and milestone progress to the player in an attractive and interesting manner.
HHS has a lot of fetishes and goals but corruption is the main theme and gameplay. Of the 6000 images in the game about 2.200 of them are generic "Students are now this corrupted, aroused, inhibited, or PTA ruled" indicators somewhere on school grounds. A centralized location to show the player how far they have taken things, and possibly a promise that there is still more content (if there actually is), is at the heart of this wish of mine.

Last rant
Hopefully 
I couln't fit this into the above without becoming excessively incoherent.

Spoiler

The game is dedicating 1/3rd of its Images as a status indicator on school corruption. As events. I like that the game has stayed fairly immersive in writing style and the way it tells players various things. Using Skyrim in my previous example was a slight stab at Bethesda and the state of modern gamedesign. And the smut is kinda why we are here in the first place.
However a fair portion of the discussion between developers that I've found refenced here regards to the amount of randomness to progression and stuff like the "Wait 1 minute" being needed to fish for events. (Also keeping an eye on mods, that one was a popular request following Lexville.) There ain't however much accessible material on the overall design of the game. Which is encouraging me to be a little excessive with my wording as to attract more answers from developers and people more familiar with the vision, progress, priorities and hurdles of the project.

Just a quick example to emphasize that I see a lot of answers to requests and suggestions not necessarily counter with immersion as a reason for the current state of things or rejection of an idea, but definitely also include the potential concerns for immersion.
A new "journal" would not need to sacrifice immersion by pulling its data from the stats of characters and students directly, but from flags set by events triggered by those stats. That is already how it currently works, right? "I successfully manipulated the PTA to changing the dress code. I should see how the students react by patrolling the hallways in the breaks between classes." As a journal entry for lowering the inhibition of students. Followed by a new entry once the player has observed X number of students commenting on the new uniform.

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Quote from: TBBle on May 02, 2023, 11:07 AM

Quote from: alphanineteen on May 01, 2023, 04:00 PMX%

Given that characters can be involved in multiple quest lines (sequentially or parallel), and there's no "seen scene" gallery or similar "Collect all the Power Orbs" mechanic, I'm not sure what this percentage would be measuring. Does a quest chain with two exclusive paths means you never pass 80%? What percentage of Claire Fuzushi's content is the one-scene cameo in Sayako's chain? Since that cameo currently is the only way to get her PTA vote, maybe it's actually 100%, since that's the only "goal" for her quest chain?

Do pictures that are sometimes Claire Fuzushi count? Only when they're used for Claire specifically, or also when the same image is used for any teacher? Or any purple-haired teacher.

There's a lot of content you'll never see, due to the combination of personal fetish choices, PC gender choices, the variety of ways to achieve certain goals, and in fact the openness of the game goals.

So mechanically tracking this percentage would be impossible, and even trying to track in a per-VEE-event count would be problematic given that many VEE events in event chains are re-entrant at different stages, sometimes not even contiguously. (SPE Club from memory is structured this way, and maybe PSE enablement too.)

Basically, the game is neither designed nor implemented in a way that "80% of Claire's content seen" is going to be tracked, or even consistently defined.

Late edit: I also think that percentage trackers suggest that there's a "optimally-correct" way to play the game. You can easily choose to not have Claire join the Cosplay club (or not even open the Cosplay club) and still play a satisfying, successful game, and yet lock out maybe 40% of Claire-specific image content. Heck, you can enjoy the game fully without ever doing a PTA vote, depending on what you actually want to do to the world; the "Futa revolution" personal goal and "good education" school goal would both be achievable with the starting policies plus the chem lab

Spoiler

(or blackmailing it out of Karin)

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, if the goals were actually checked at any point.

Quote from: alphanineteen on May 01, 2023, 04:00 PMAnd I hope...

I was thinking about something like this, and I think it would break immersion quite a lot, for the current sandbox-discovery gameplay we have.

It sounds like you want a more guided experience, and I recall Insight of You (and most Ren'Py games) being that way, particularly at the early stages, although I haven't played Insight of You since it was abandoned and unabandoned a year or two ago.

I was thinking about this yesterday, and perhaps there's an opportunity to provide some level of in-game guidance, controlled with a single global variable. When enabled, "Ends the quest"-type paths could be made visible, stronger advice towards choices like "which outfit will not destroy my reputation", notes like "wait a couple of weeks", "I'll miss my chance to rescue her in a month, but they will strike again" etc. could be introduced. However, that would still require per-event changes, and either very intrusive changes, or some kind of VEE-underlying system (ala a {hint} variable which could be always populated, but only output in text and choices based on this setting).

For illustration, I'm picturing something that looks like the 'Walkthrough mods' people write for Ren'Py games, which annotate particular choices with "Bonus scene" or "Harem path".

All this is of course more work which I'm not able to volunteer for, and honestly, feature-creep is historically of the biggest risks to existing "needs rework" not happening. (I recognise that the team has been much better about this in the last few years, and has even disappeared so-incomplete-as-to-be-useless quest-lines).

Right now, the game is much more about the sandbox, and discovering the systems, so the smartphone is intended to hint you in the right directions, rather than providing a continuous collection of prompts to explore every system.

For example, right now, the only hints you have about "How uninhibitedly can I dress" is to actually do it, and see how people react. A prompt like "This outfit will destroy your reputation" would run counter to my observation of the current game design.

As the author advice goes, "Show, don't tell". In this case it's "Do the thing to learn the effect of the thing".

The game doesn't tell you "Rescue the girl by date X", it tells you when you're too late and what the consequences are, i.e. the change in the world that happened. It's a learning for either your next run, or for if you keep playing, the next kidnapping. (MissingGirl is an example of a quest chain that doesn't end with failure, you can just try again next time. Unless you Game Over in it, of course.)

I'm not sure I'd want to see HHS+ pushed from "a sandbox with some quest chains" into "a collection of character quest-chains played in a sandbox", ala Glassix. I think the latter style is the one where it makes sense to have a multi-playthrough gallery, a percentage-complete tracker, and "a walkthrough".

There's definitely some room for better-signalling why an action or event failed: I'm not sure for example if it's ever explained in-game how strongly grime affects interactions, nor do I recall you getting a "You need a shower" event like you get the "You're super aroused and people are noticing" event.

Quote from: alphanineteen on May 01, 2023, 04:00 PMA new "journal"...

There's an event that does exactly this, for various school uniforms, including hinting whether you've gone further than the student's current inhibition levels will accept.

I generally think it's better to reserve journal quest guides for the actual questlines, rather than the sandbox gameplay, but that's just my opinion.

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Quote from: alphanineteen on May 01, 2023, 04:00 PMI dabbled with...

Better to be further discussed in the development forum, but briefly, I'm pretty sure (without looking) that there's a VEE event for the Smartphone (in the Function Library) which scans a directory in the Extension Library for events to show in the "Main quests" list. The name is probably populated from the VEE metadata (F4 in VEE), so I expect if you just copied an existing quest's file, you didn't update the metadata to have a different name.

This is a pretty common idiom in the code-base, and is the basis for the Extension Library and the simplest path for mods to add new content. There's specific VEE nodes for "Iterate even event in this directory".

Quote from: barteke22As mentioned, these are completely different games being compared.  HSS+ is meant to be a sandbox where people discover things for themselves without direct spoilers.  Most of the content is entirely optional, and as such it doesn't make sense to have a tracker for 'overall progress'.