Bay 12 Games Forum

You know what's fun? A jailbreak... with a vehicle and chain! Works in the movies, doesn't it? Create a new handy dandy entry/exit point with the help of some major leverage.
Probably best applied to police or court jails.

It's been done, hence reinforced modern walls that can withstand such an easy breakout.

It could be done with building site vehicles perhaps, which, due to their slowness, would have to be abandoned after a quick assault on the prison wall, since they are too slow for escape.  They would also have to be "liberated" first, in another moment of police risk, which might be reduced with forged paperwork in addition to an appropriate disguise?

As I am Dutch, and we historically made a living in trade, understanding foreign languages (and cultures) was always lucrative, and consequentially the languages of our neighbors are mandatory up to a point in highschool.  So I know enough French and German to get by day to day if dropped without preparation in the middle of it.  I had a special affection for English, so I elected that one to graduate in. I also enjoyed two years of Latin and 6 years of classical Greek back then, but my knowledge of those two has sunk to a level of recognizing commonly used wordparts in Greco-Latin fancy words.

Dutch, a germanic language closely related to Low-German, also has three genders, masculin, feminine and neuter.  In German the prepositions for those are, respectively: Der, Die, Das.

I sit¹ corrected.

And I was lied to in French in highschool, where I was taught that neutral words (in my native Dutch, which has male,  female and neuter as word genders) always got the male pronoun in French.  But as you´ve just expostulated, that is not completely right.

¹ As I'm nor standing (lame joke).

I wonder why Hairstylists have no more than normal influence when advocating: lets say they see some 4 customers a day on average for at lest one hour, and these people have their hair cut once every single(?)/two(?)/three(?) months, that would give you on average about 88 per month is some 180 customers they (regularly) chat with.  Now I´m not saying they will go into politics with each and every one, but a Liberal Advocate would be sure to undermine any (Arch-) Conservative views.being bandied about.  Not by direct confrontation, most likely, but by planting seeds of doubt and pointing out contradictions, pleasantly.  Unless of course a customer demands a kaukasian stylist, in which case they are hurled arse over tits onto the pavement.

(Exmple: "All those immigrants are too fscking lazy to do honest work for honest pay, they just come here and expect hand-outs." (Minute later) "And those immigrants, working day and night, 7 days a week, it's not natural!")

Quote from: Mazur on August 19, 2013, 04:58:53 am

Ah, that simple.  If this avatar is somehow unacceptable or too annoying in some way, please tell me, and I shall use the other one.

Thanks a bundle.

[Edit: Bugger that, it was annoying me.]

Mazur

I'm not a moderator of these forums or anything like that, I don't have any authority here. So you don't need to ask me for permission to do anything on these forums, I'm just a regular user on these forums like you.

I found out about the https:// thing not working for avatar links because I recently changed my avatar and was trying to change it to an https:// link and had the exact same problem until I figured out that changing it to an http:// link got it working as an avatar on these forums. That's all.

Oh yeah, and I don't quite follow your feature request, could you try and explain it in more detail, it's a bit confusing. You want some new thing added to the user interface to set the default action for each member of the LCS, so that after getting back from a raid, they do their default activity, or you can have them temporarily do something else like an interrogation, but then go back to their default activity. And the default activity would be customizable by some kinda option. Is that what you're requesting?

Sort of: the actual default action would be just what you have just set through the normal interface, then when you get back to the activate screen that lists the squad, you'd press [X] to toggle the "Set default activity" mode, then you press the letters for those persons whose current activity you want to be their default, until you've done all those you want to, press [X] again and you're back to normal "Assign activity" mode of the game as it is now.
Nyx has been playing with something along those lines, I think, but that version used separate screens for setting default activities, which I think requires copying all the "Assign activity" code, since "Making clothes" was not yet implemented; the way I just described is much simpler and requires only someplace to store the default activities and a function to copy the current activity to that, beside the minor interface addiction of X and Y.

Then if you come back from all the raids you just press [A], then [Y], and everyone who was had theirs defined are assigned their default activity.
That way you only set them for the raiders, for instance, and not for "office staff" like programmers, who'll keep laying low or hacking as you have them with regard to their current heat. And, as I said, I'd exclude changing those "Tending to injuries" as well.

Hm, since that is an activity you only need when there are wounded, and that's automatically set when you get home, one could use "Tending to injuries" to mean "No defailt activity set" if defining a separate pseudo-activity would not be preferred.

Oh and being able to press Escape to get out of setting the slogan or to cancel other things would be a good idea, yes. I'm not exactly sure how to implement that, though. For instance, I think that when you do the thing to enter the slogan, the program calls a function for entering in a line of text, which probably has exclusive access to the keyboard, and I think it might be part of some standard C++ library and not really be customizable, so adding the feature of being able to press Escape to cancel, well there are key codes and such and it's rather complicated figuring out how all that stuff works.

Yes, that might be tricky, but I can't help thinking that it must be possible somehow.  I'll look into it myself, maybe it's already possible, if I only find out how.  ;-)

To be honest, I mostly focus my programming efforts on the parts of the code I am able to understand really well, where I can spot bugs and make improvements. But the areas you're talking about aren't exactly my area of expertise in C++ programming. I mostly focus on how the game processes data, its algorithms, which functions call which other functions, what the variables do, the logic of the code. But input and output, I don't understand that as well. It's different in every programming language, after all. I have actually done more Java than C++ programming. Luckily the syntax of both languages is very very very similar. The main difference is how you declare a class and create objects of that class, the Object-Oriented part of the language. Java is quite more sophisticated when it comes to Object-Oriented stuff like classes. However, the downside is that Java programs are much slower than C++ programs, and require you to have Java runtime installed to run them, plus Java doesn't do as good a job as C++ at integrating with the operating system's APIs. C++ by its nature is prone to programs that have memory leaks, null pointer exceptions, etc. Java does not have these problems, but it is slower and its garbage collector, which takes care of all that stuff, takes up huge amounts of overhead, and you especially notice this in launch times, how soon after you click on a program's icon is the program up and running. Much faster with C++.

My own area of expertise used to be plain old K&R C, though most of my experience actually lies in shell scripts and basic Perl.  I was a systems programmer in a previous life, until they did not want me anymore.  I stupidly neglected to learn OO programming when I was much younger, at its beginning.

I've seen setting default assignments being bandied about, and I was wondering what the status of that potential option is.

On the assign activities sceen I'd add two more keys: X - Set Default mode (toggle0  and Y - Activate default assigments
If you press X once, any character letter would toggle setting that characters default activity to whatever they have now: a second time it would reset that to a special activity NO_DEFAULT_ASSIGNMENT, which would make it insensitive to the Y key.

Pressing X a second time would return to normal activity assignment.

Pressing Y would assign all characters that do NOT have NO_DEFAULT_ASSIGNMENT or are  tending to injuries their default activity.

I'd make some indication with the listed assignments to indicate  the status of a characters deafult assignment, if their currnet assigment is their default assignment, print in yellow, if their current ass. isn't print in orange.  If they don;t have a default, the current colour.

[Edit 20-08: Forget about the colour comment, that'd break the current colouring system, it's have to be some kind of (D) added, IF you wanted to make it being set visible.]

I think this would be the easiest to implement, and I'd do it myself today if I knew OO programming.


A second idea: make the Escape key break off and return to the previous page from whereever tyou ended up:
I am not a good typist, and my finger macros regularly go awry, so i keep getting into the set slogan thingy unintentionally,  and then I can't back out of it.


And now a question: I've been trying to set an avatar in my profile, with this image:
But each time I press Save, the page returns reporting having succesfully saved my profile, but reset to No Avatar.  Any idea what might go wrong?  And how I can fix it?

Once more: thanks for a brilliant game, everyone.

Mazur.

I wrote "avoid violence", but sometimes you have to crack a hard egg to let some light in, you know?   
So I won't be dropping agility, especially since sneaking past an armed conservative after the alarm can be harmful to ones health.

More importantly, beteen the time I created this thread and this post I have been finding errors in my script with respect to  assinging points by creating new characters along the formulas people's reactions inspired me to.  Those are now fixed.

So anyone who dowdloaded the script before now, do so again before you rely on it.

Mazur

A point of note - it is usually better to have one skill at eight and another at ten than two at nine. Your maximum effective skill is 1.5 multiplied by the base stat (i.e. no juice) rounded down, so making your base stats even numbers is highly recommended.

My problem, as a novice, is that I don't know yet the relative importance of heart, intelligence and charisma.  I know intelligence is the basis for the majority of skills, but from reading around I guess that charisma is the basis for some key skills , used when brainwashing conservatives.  The best attrinute scores are along the lines of:
HRT: 10   INT: 8   WIS: 1   CHA: 9   STR: 5   AGI: 8   HTH: 9   and
HRT: 10   INT: 9   WIS: 1   CHA: 8   STR: 5   AGI: 8   HTH: 9

You can get int to 10 with the basic three close together, but that costs a point in agility. which I'm as yet loathe to do.

I suppose apart from an initial point for Security to avoid needing lessons to start picking locks all skills are trainable in one way or another, so choosing which to start with is purely a matter of taste?  And some teaching is handy, for transferring obtained skills to recruits.

Mazur