Bay 12 Games Forum

On the clues, I think the real issue I had was that if I had previously cleared an old super-villain lair that had been re-occupied by a new super-villain, taking out that new super-villain would sometimes give me "new" evidence even though you're meant to clear out a super-villain from each lair. In any case, I could not get the final game-winning mission to trigger despite this, so I suspect that although the evidence variables are working as intended, the way the game checks for what to tell the player after clearing a super-villain lair is somehow wonky.

This is possible - I'm working on it. I believe I have found the minion-crash bug; I am now working on figuring out how to solve it. It has to do with minions spawning that don't have an associated supervillain to template off of (minions are subtly different depending on whether the villain is a crimelord, mad scientist, alien invader, etc.).

On the lairs, it might just be my ignorance showing here--are there only supposed to be 3 lairs per game? For example, in my game, I had found the Cave Complex, Mausoleum, and Secret Laboratory, and couldn't find any more. Only in the Secret Laboratory was I unable to find the supervillain's location in the site. If they are procedurally-generated, is it possible to make it so that when they are "closed down" they can regenerate into a new map? I'm not totally sure if this is already in the game, but I seem to recall that the TV/Radio sites change their layout if they've been shut down for a time.

That's an excellent idea. I'll try to incorporate that!

Also, is there a point to "using" the traps in those lairs? They guarantee an encounter with enemies and obscure the villain's location, so I can understand their purpose on that end, but using the traps would always injure one of my precious liberals, or at least try to. Since you can just abstain from using the trap locations, I didn't understand that purpose. Unless this is already implemented, perhaps using the trap could occasionally net you valuable loot?

It's another bug (which I already found and fixed in the process of tracking down the minion crash bug). Traps are supposed to spring on you the moment you stumble into them.

Finally, perhaps this is my misunderstanding of the general situation in the Terra Vitae world, but fighting the super-villain's minions in his lair will get you a criminal record. This is a debatable point, but I would think that fighting in such a secret lair would prevent evidence from ever reaching society at large. If the current state of affairs is meant to be explained by their control over the government, maybe such activities would only net you a criminal record if the laws are conservative enough?

Nope, this is yet another bug. Thanks for pointing it out!

Thanks for all that you do working on this mod! Sorry about this being lengthy/probably unreadable.

No, you're finding more bugs. You're welcome!

Sometimes my game crashes at the end of the month, it's a little annoying.

I haven't experienced this one for a while and I believe I fixed it. However, rare random crashes are hard to fix because they're difficult to isolate. Moreover, they are avoidable if you just restart. This makes them lower priority than things that really do break the game.

Quote from: Hertz on March 24, 2018, 02:49:58 am

How do i influence movies? The site for films just has the CCS boss and several squares which has the president...

It's a bug. I've been trying to fix it for a while. I will make sure it is fixed in the next release.

Bug fixed. I had forgotten that DAME needs to export its maps before LCS can use them!

This is probably totally unnecessary, but I was curious if you or anyone else was able to replicate these issues, or if you already fixed them:

Not necessary, but still helpful - thanks for collating them all.

--I found Superpowered Minions out and about at various sites, but the game still crashes when trying to fight them off in a siege

I think I fixed this one but am going to check.

--The game crashes when you are caught trying to have multiple dates at once

Bug replicated, working on it.

--Maybe I'm just dense, but I couldn't find the Supervillain in the Secret Laboratory, but I did find them in the other two lairs.

The supervillain lairs are procedurally-generated and randomly-named, just like the warehouses, polluter factories, movie studios, etc. The options are:
1. Underground Mausoleum
2. Spacious Sewer
3. Mysterious Cave Complex
4. Secret Laboratory
5. Ominous Castle
6. Forgotten Temple
7. Space Rift
8. Black Skyscraper

I don't know why one of them would have an unfindable supervillain unlike the others.

--Finally, when trying to obtain clues for the NEC, after obtaining the first clue it said that there was only one clue left.

I have no idea what could be causing this. The code looks absolutely straightforward.

All right, going to solicit suggestions at this point. This is a big enough update that any thoughts/discussion on new features or updates on existing features are welcome.

Here's the general to-do list:

1. VIEW_UNITEDNATIONS and LAW_UNITEDNATIONS
Description: New law and view. Liberals support U.S. involvement in foreign military campaigns if and only if it is done with United Nations approval. If this law is liberal, then the U.S. will be using its military to support U.N. peacekeeping actions; if conservative, the U.S. will disdain the U.N.
Status: done

2. SIEGE_MURDERERS, SIEGE_INTERNATIONAL_CONSERVATIVE, and SIEGE_INTERNATIONAL_STALINIST
Description: Three new factions that can besiege you.
->2a. SIEGE_MURDERERS: consists of otherwise ordinary people who want to murder the LCS. There will be an offended_murderers counter that augments every time you do something that incites a murder. This includes having an affair with somebody's spouse, killing a friend or family member in a site action, having too much money, etc. The more heat reduction your safehouse has, the better-protected you will be, and the more conservative LAW_DEATHPENALTY is, there will be additional protection from them. These murderers will be generally poorly-armed, but there will be occasional well-skilled and prepared enemies in their siege.
-> SIEGE_INTERNATIONAL_CONSERVATIVE: international terrorists of an arch-conservative stripe (i.e. not bred on U.S. soil, not the CCS). If the president of the U.S. is himself C+, these guys will not bother to attack you. If the president is of either the Liberal or Stalinist parties, the military will fight them for you. The more conservative LAW_MILITARY and the more liberal LAW_UNITEDNATIONS are, the better the military will be at fighting these terrorists. If either LAW_MILITARY is C+ or LAW_UNITEDNATIONS is L+, these enemies will generally not be a threat. They also will tend not to notice you if you have heat reduction.
-> SIEGE_INTERNATIONAL_STALINIST: similar to the above, but of a Stalinist stripe. If the president of the U.S. is himself S, these guys will not attack you, and presidents of both the Liberal and Conservative parties will fight them using the military, as above.
Status: not yet implemented.

3. Player-created factions
Description: Players will now be able to define their own factions and add them to the game using a tab-delimited text file, much as they already can with lobbies. These factions will be affected by conditions in the game, and will ultimately be able to besiege the LCS. They can also fight with each-other.
Status: the way that factions are influenced by the world is implemented, but not how factions interact with each-other nor how they are added into the game in the first place.

4. Miscellaneous tweaks
-Re-vamp sexual treason mechanics (either intelligence 10 or health 10 qualifies you, but not both 9 and 9 as it is currently). Not yet implemented.



Discussion points

1. Nerfing violence - there has been a lot of talk about reducing the effectiveness of violence in the game. Although I agree that it would be a good thing to include, there is a problem with it: at present, the LCS cannot defeat the conservatives by pure military force. Instead, the LCS has to liberalize public opinion, swing elections, and then let the newly-elected liberal politicians enact liberal legislation. It seems to me that if we were to severely reduce the ability of the LCS to affect public opinion via violence, then there should need to be some alternative way to overthrow the U.S. government by violence alone. Although this sounds good in principle, I am less sure how to implement it. Suggestions are welcome.

2. Sewing dissent among the conservatives - again, I don't know how to implement this gameplay-wise. The idea is to turn the conservative media establishment against other conservatives. The thought that occurs to me is that perhaps there should be another set of media establishments that are determined by public opinion rather than by doctrinaire politics. Movies already sort of work like this: although there is a conservative influence on all movies and movies also are inspired by different events, movies are also impacted by public opinion. The trouble is that the conservative media, currently cable news and AM radio, need to be there.

3. More founder-creation options - the idea here is to have a founder that has been in the military, and may have been exposed to super-science that gave him or her (limited) super-powers (that can then be trained up). I'd like an entire storyline, like there are for the other five archetypes (master thief, violent gangster, brilliant student, gifted survivor, charismatic leader). I'm not sure what all of the options should be, though.

I would like to work on the next major overhaul, but was hoping to have this save file issue fixed first. Unfortunately I cannot compile IsaacG's code.

Should I just proceed with the feature update? This will make TV even more divergent from vanilla LCS.

Uh-oh, trouble. Looks like I don't have TINYDIR_H0.

Complete error message:

In file included from lcsio.cpp:26:
./tinydir.h:22:9: warning: 'TINYDIR_H' is used as a header guard here, followed
      by #define of a different macro [-Wheader-guard]
#ifndef TINYDIR_H
        ^~~~~~~~~
./tinydir.h:23:9: note: 'TINYDIR_H0' is defined here; did you mean 'TINYDIR_H'?
#define TINYDIR_H0
        ^~~~~~~~~~
        TINYDIR_H
1 warning generated.
mv -f .deps/crimesquad-lcsio.Tpo .deps/crimesquad-lcsio.Po
make: *** No rule to make target `common/commondisplay.cpp', needed by `crimesquad-commondisplay.o'.  Stop.

Great, thanks - although, I am looking through the saveload.cpp file from the first link, but am unable to see how it is different from the version I have. It does not seem to write to a text file. Can you tell me what these changes do?

Thanks!

Make it a new status screen that shows all the details of all the movies. I absolutely hate the fact that it makes me push more buttons to get through long periods of time. Maybe in the main screen, have it list a number of "unread" movies that are given, and when you push the buttont hat moves you to the movies screen, it lists off all the recently made movies along with the date they were amde and the needed details.

Question - if you disband, do you still see movie-related stuff? If yes, then that's a bug and please give me a report of it. If no, then this is what disbanding is supposed to be for...

Hey I thought I'd pop in and say thank you for your hard work in making LCS more moddable. I haven't checked in on LCS for a long, long time but it's amazing to see the things coders are doing with it. Cheers.

I second this!