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[Jonathan S. Fox]

Oh, attack articles and arguments make a difference, but the news stories do nothing right now (there are three types of articles, and one of them does nothing). If you want to make a serious dent in the polls, try really smashing up the Cable News and AM Radio. Between the two of them, they're probably overwhelming the effects of your sleepers and the Liberal Guardian. Well, plus, it will help if you get a printing press.

You're right, I technically *could* add more lines, but it would either do a funky resize on that screen, or stretch all of the screens, and I consider both of those to be extremely ugly solutions to the problem, because the whole game is designed around a specific window size, and I don't want to go change that just to add issues.

For now, I'll do as you suggest and take away the blank line under the heading.

I've just changed the code so that it saves to the normal save file every day. Autosaves don't seem very useful if nobody knows how to use them! Hopefully that will help with future crashes.

Edit: Plus it will prevent that overwriting problem you just found!

[ June 09, 2007: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]

[Xavior]

Awesomesauce!

Something possibily easy you could do for the liberal guardian articles is for every "real" news item that reaches the press, a corresponding Liberal Guardian article needs to be written, with Proper Liberal Spin put on it  

"Several Conservative items were appropriated from the Cable News Station a few days ago by the Liberal Crime Squad, preventing several minds from being corrupted and kept from realizing their True Liberal Nature.

A special report aired by the squad before being forced off the scene indicates that Cable TV corrupts the minds of the public and leads to dangerous extremes of political thinking.

Conservatives at the station openned fire on the Liberal Heroes, forcing them to kill 2 Conservative Villains. Local News Anchor Ronald Hutchingson was not on the scene, and is not in fact being held captive by the Liberal Crime Squad."

There could be a backlog of situational articles that come up when the next (qualified?) person finishes writing, with opinion pieces being thrown in if none of the articles match.

And now I am going to rid myself of Conservative exhaustion through Liberal sleep!!

[ June 09, 2007: Message edited by: Xavior ]

[Xavior]

Idea for Tax Law

At Elite Conservative status, all taxes are a flat amount(like industrial fines to prevent small businesses from competing), it hereby becomes illegal to be poor. Anyone with less than (x) amount per year/month gets robbed*cough*repossessed, of all their goods and property, as well as any money they do happen to have. Then maybe they get arreseted and thrown in jail. But probably starve.

At Elite Liberal Status, there are no taxes for anyone who makes less than 2000-5000$ a month(24,000-60,000 a year?) Anything above 100,000$ a year is cut down by at least 50%, no exceptions. If you don't make at least 100-1000$ a month per member, it will be handed to you.

And I think a press any key delay for encounters would actually be pretty effective. Think about how likely you are to miss your squad bleeding all over the floor.(It shouldn't be as annoying as that if it's not EVERY square and not several button presses) The reason I mention it is because while you may not always be looking to recruit, you likely are always looking for an advantage, if you happen to be wandering around looking for things to steal and destroy and just *happen* to come across some famous conservative radio personality and you *happen* to have a gun you might *happen* to have them join you for tea back at the homeless shelter.

It would also prevent you from walking right up to someone's tv and grabbing it without realizing there were FOUR people standing right next to it o_O They shot me in the lung.

[ June 10, 2007: Message edited by: Xavior ]

[Jonathan S. Fox]

Well, I might try having a press any key. I'm still skeptical, but we'll see.  

That's about what I think would be the ideal for the Liberal Guardian, to have a newspaper pop-up system like the one that currently exists. It wouldn't be all the articles, but just major news stories. The problem is that I don't know how the images for LCS work, so I can't make a custom LCS newspaper like the Globe.

The way you described is about the way Tax Law is presented in the game now -- at Elite Conservative, it's worse than a "flat tax", and at Elite Liberal there is a much flatter income distribution due to how steep taxation is at the top. But none of this actually has much of an effect on gameplay. It doesn't impact the LCS in any meaningful way one way or another. If you let both Nuclear Power and Pollution go Arch-Conservative, for example, you can start to see certain effects if you look in the right places... if labor standards are changed, you'll see shifts in the types of people walking around factories. On the other hand, issues like taxation and gay rights have no real effect at all.

[Xavior]

Could the LCS have taxes imposed on it? That would give you a personal incentive to make tax laws better.(So you don't have to keep killing those damned IRS Agents)

And I think gay rights would easily be more of an issue if people WERE ACTUALLY MALE OR FEMALE. Gay rights not being acceptable would make it more dangerous to seduce random people.

Speaking of which, I'd like to be able to tell more of what the hell is happening when I'm out Fighting Evil. I have no information about anyone until they've been recruited, locked up, or sexed into submission. Although I suppose that is somewhat reasonable in alot of cases(People don't go around telling their names to people who bother them on the street with issues they don't care about ;P) But it would be kind of nice to know what I'm risking my freedom to steal before picking it up. But regardless of all that, if you implemented different sexes for people and the gay rights issues, you would have to be able to tell whether the person you're about to chat up is male or female ;P

Also, I think I came across that getting arrested bug. It corrupted my savefile and made the game segfault if it tried to load it o_O

My games keep ending to Conservative Errors  

Images...that reminds me, the images don't seem to work on my system either ;(

[ June 10, 2007: Message edited by: Xavior ]

[Grundee]

Hi everyone. I have been playing LCS for a while now, and it is about time I started posting on the forums.

I really think that it would be a good idea to have some kind of pause or break for encounters. I always pass by people I want to recruit or kidnap.

Maybe the "press any key" feature could be toggled while in game. That would work for people who are recruiting or looking for people. and it would work for people who just want to run through.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

*whistles*

New LCS version:
http://www.jonathansfox.com/LCS/lcs_win32_310a5.zip

New LCS source code:
http://www.jonathansfox.com/LCS/game10a5.zip

Features:

- A pause before you get into encounters
- Stuff appears in restricted squares
- New law: Gun control
- Pawn shop now sells more guns, but only if they're legal
- You can now cause alarm by the weapon you're carrying
- You can now cause instant alarm as soon as anybody sees you if your weapon is totally illegal, like walking into the police station with an AK-47 and a clown suit
- You can get thrown in jail for openly carrying an illegal weapon in public
- You can disguise yourself and get away with holding an illegal weapon
- "Massive Conservative Response Imminent"

[ June 10, 2007: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]

[Jonathan S. Fox]

Welcome Grundee!

The current build now has a pause before all encounters, except siege-type encounters, but you're not going to miss those. It doesn't bother me as much I thought it might, but it's still easy to miss if you're going too fast. Just have to be careful to be stead.

I think the LCS is probably the type of organization that is too under the radar to be paying taxes.   Else they'll just claim to be a non-profit political group and be automatically tax-exempt.

I was thinking more along the lines of having noticeably more poor people in the streets, and have the homeless shelter be crammed when it's Arch-Conservative, or having few if any rich people when it's Elite Liberal.

As far as gay rights is concerned... I think that's a good idea. For where to display gender (or any other information that it is fit to add), we could do it on the screen where you confirm what to say to them. Yeah, I think that's the best way of involving gay rights in a real way. If it's elite liberal, nobody looks twice, if it's Arch-Conservative, it causes alarm if there are other Conservatives present! Also impacts the chance of success. I'll have to think about adding that later.

[Xavior]

Yay!!! <3!

I've just discovered the wonders of an everpresent squad of steadily improving hippies ) but, when the date was over, my squad was still full and they appeared to still be there. Did it just add a kidnapping charge against him or what?

In lieu of a better organization for the viewing of all active Liberals, would it be easier to add the ability to change the order manually? (a la squad reorganization) I'd also like the ability to delete objects(mainly low quality armor from my sweatsho..I mean, Liberal Tailors)

Though I'm tempted to ask for the ability to abandon my Liberal Comrades, any time I think I want to, it would almost always be better served by better organization, and if I had the ability to abandon people I might not have realized the inherent usefulness everyone really has. (True Liberal Spirit

[Jonathan S. Fox]

I've just confirmed that the date arrest bug is now fixed for the next release.

[ghor]

Hooray, just a few days ago I was wondering whether someone's picked up the source code and done anything with it yet or not. Good work, I think all the changes you've made are good ones.

I have a suggestion/request/plea for the next version:

Tone down the police snipers!

I had forgotten how annoying I used to find them! I've played 3.10a5 a few times now, been sieged twice after having fortified for a siege, and both times my squad leader was sniped on the first day! Sheez, you'd think he'd have the brains to stay away from the windows!

[Jonathan S. Fox]

I do think the threshold for police snipers is pretty high. While I'm at it, I'll probably make the founder immune to snipers. Snipers went in before it was the case that killing the founder ended the whole game in a single stroke.

[Grundee]

I get about 300 warnings when compiling with GCC. It does not like the for loops that compare ints with unsigned ints (such as loop.size()). I am going through the code right now and changing all of those ints to unsigned ints (and making sure they were not supposed to be signed).

When I am done, could I send you a patch? I am thinking of doing a lot of other maintenance work to make this code look a bit better. (The reason I am working with the code in the first place is to hunt down a couple crashes I was getting. One while running from mercs chasing me in cars, another while hacking.)

EDIT: Wow, this is crazy. game.cpp is too big and half the time my IDE (Code::Blocks) runs extremely slowly. That file needs to be split up.

EDIT2: I have started to split up game.cpp into different files. If you want to use the split up version, I uploaded it to http://www.rotbgame.com/downloads/lcs_src_310a5-grundee.zip

[ June 11, 2007: Message edited by: Grundee ]

[Jonathan S. Fox]

The code absolutely needs it, and I'm too lazy to do it, so you're completely welcome to do what's needed to split it up and clean it up. However, that's such a big task that it would require freezing development for awhile to get it done.

What I would suggest is that you do it as a branch at version 3.10a5, and then when you're finished, you or I or someone else can diff whatever the latest version is at that point with the original (unsplit) 3.10a5, and then use the output as a guide to manually bring the branch you're working on up to the latest version.

That's the best solution I can think of short of going ahead with some sort of version control.

[Grundee]

Some kind of version control would probably be best in this situation. When you have an open source project and multiple developers interested in working on it, version control is the only way to go.

If you checked out that archive I linked to, the way it is set up there would allow all of the old code to stay in place, but we could selectively move things to other files. Really all you would have to do at that point is copy the body of the function from game.cpp to another file (like building.cpp or loot.cpp, some name so we can group like things together). I am sure that you have some functions you modified while I made those split up files. All you will need to do is copy your new functions over those old ones, in whatever file they are in.

I started changing some ints to unsigned ints to get rid of those warnings, but there are far too many, so people using GCC will need to just deal with it for now. I also think I accidentally changed one of those ints to unsigned int which caused the voting thing to  skip to the end when a button is pressed (this actually works nice, but I think we need an actual button to do this, and we need to change that int back as I don't know what other things this changed), and also disbanding seems to immediately close the game.

It would probably be best for you to get a Subversion or CVS server set up. It would probably be a great idea to register the project on sourceforge.net. They will give you a free SVN and/or CVS server, a web page with 100MB of space, a nice release system for releases, and bug/request trackers. I think you should register the project on SourceForge, and then let other interested developers join the project. (You should upload your code, not the code I made. I can just split it up again and get the changes to unsigned int right this time.)

[ June 11, 2007: Message edited by: Grundee ]