itch.io

So... the fuel recycler outfit exists and was added by Bobbens more than a year ago (all according to the git repository), it was last edited a years ago but possibly just because Bobbens was updating every file that contained a reference to something being updated.

It is not lists in the file containing all outfits in use... which is a bad sign. Neither is it contained in any of the subset files that are normally used for planet shops, neither is it obviously used in any of the ship configuration files that might contain the outfit (AI ships don't tend to have things they don't need so military ships are very unlikely to have this equipped... in fact I'd have guessed only cargo or mining ships since most other ships have little use for it and none of the standard ones have it.

That leaves only quest specific ships that have one-off designs and... that's it. I can't login right now so I can't search the git codebase for Naev but I would suspect very strongly that this was an outfit created to serve a purpose that never materialised or is still planned but yet to be implemented (if it is not in git it won't even be in the nightlies). I have to admit I only checked main so you might find something in one of the branches but unless it is in is main then it won't ever be released... some branches will make it but others (currently) look like they never will being mostly abandoned or so out of lockstep with main that it would take more effort to update them than to start from scratch.

Since Naev is an evolving game you will always find stubs in there that represent new, abandoned, outdated, deprecated or forgotten about things, if only because the original dev left it behind and no-one made use of it or took it on. I've done a bit in my time but because I'm short on time I generally work on things that are already there and sharpen them up or shift old code towards new standards and replacing deprecated code (with a byline in proofreading that comes from reading through the files) - there's always something to do besides taking on a new project that never gets finished because the codebase moves on before I find the time to finish it (though others have adopted some of my ideas from discussions and small hints I've added here and there :) - every little does indeed appear to help! :)

So, if you have a desire to use this outfit then code it into a few places where it would fit - out of the way mining areas, maybe associated with the Mining Vrata, would be something that makes sense since it'd help miners from running out of fuel while hinting the good stuff out at the edge of known space. You might prefer to code it into a unique ship or create a new AI ship (a mining one maybe) that uses this outfit making it possible to beg, borrow or steal! :) :D

Edit: I tried re-installing it but same thing, no joy. Maybe I have a corrupted save?

I tried again with nothing at all running and I still get a window with a black background and then it just hangs... it has to be killed by Windows... it doesn't seem to be trying to do anything either. *shrug*

I'm running Windows 10 up to the 22H patches (I think) if that's any help. (Windows 11 shenanigans preclude me from going further than that but this is the main Windows 10 branch for those not able to upgrade to Windows 11 because MS says so - this laptop is better than my wife's but hers is on the upgrade path and mine isn't... *shrug*

I was confused as to what your post meant; are you recommending a mod? an outfit? questioning it's existence? ...

I don't know if there was another update but for some unidentified reason this game just hangs now... it's been a month so I'm not sure what changed... I've had M$Windows 10 updates, maybe a graphics driver update and maybe you updated the game since I last played?

I'll keep you posted if I discover anything.

Touche, dear Sir... do I also detect a little animosity? Would you like a wafer thin mint to go with that?

Using the itch app I get a message "Can not create sub-directory in temporary directory"... guessing this is due to the itch app but maybe it's always a problem? Might explain the lack of engagement here!

It's a start but can I suggest that the UI needs some work... binding one function the mouse but not using the mouse for anything else... bad move. Binding person sideways movement to A/D but menu vertical movement to UpArrow/DownArrow.. definintely a choice (and not a good one) and then person interact button is E but menu interact key is spacebar!?! Them's a whole lot of choices... I would suggest that this is a near critical issue if you want anyone to keep playing your game.

Good otherwise...

Will probably need to be rewritten some after 0.11.0 comes out... have you seen the changes! :D

?

There's bugs and there are bugs... pretty sure it's not meant to soft-lock... also... can't you read tongue-in-cheek? Shame, the internet must really frustrate you...

I just ran across a bug... if two words are anagrams of each other and both are given as options then you can (I did) pick the "wrong" one... I realise the chances are small but they might well be larger due to the way you pick the words and it happened to me (though the RNGod doesn't like me especially so...)

It's worth seeing even if you know... and I noticed a few other bits I missed the first time around when I watched it played again :)

Well I fixed the drivre issue but since that information seems to be one time (I even tried a reinstall) I can't now ever see it again... that _is_ something you can fix... no??

Something that might take a little more time to fix is that if all you do from the start is read the history book in the bedroom is that some of the text doesn't make any sense because things are assumed to have happened that haven't...

Hope this helps and keep up the good work :)

Apologies, I hadn't realised that the Game Jam was still in progress! I hope you do well with it and good fortune in the future, either way I'm sure this was a good learning experience (hopefully in a positive way! :)

Could do with a quit button and also why does eating not improve health? Or maybe improve it over time? Or reduce your food collection bar as healing happens over time? (It just seems a bit odd that the only way to heal is to evolve, which also stops you being able to heal once you reach peak evolution).

It might be nice to be able to improve your damage output or to change shape or to rotate... these could all be evolutions ;)

Either way though, great game :) - Keep up the good work :)

Heh, isn't it always the way - you try and get a quick job done in five minutes and an hour later you finally finish it! :D

I've a few mod fixes remaining that look like five minutes jobs but I've been bitten by that one too often to fall for it, I'm blocking out as much time as it'd take to redo the whole thing from scratch before I try and get it done! :D - maybe paranoid but then again it gives me extra time on the end to clean things up and do anything extra that I might needing to be done! :)

And, as you say, a change is as good as a rest! Also no need to worry about time sinks for Idle games, most people getting into them are very good as multitasking them and know what they are getting themselves into... I'm still catching up with one that'll take at least another year to complete! :D

Ah, gotcha... my mistake! :D ;)

Nice game prrototype... clean, smoth, concise, clear ... but rather lacking in content and the scaling of the number leaves a little to be desired... too fast which reduces the players opportunities for interaction extremely quickly... there's a reason most of these games scale so quickly but it are not dull... their bonuses scale at an almost even amount and there is too great a difference in this game - primarily caused, I think, by the "Skill" scaling... collecting them is too slow compared to the rest of the resources, of course all this would likely change with more content so *shrug* work out a better balancing algorythm ;)

Keep up the good work :)

Confirmed.

If I adjust to fullscreen the game just centres itself and retains the juddering behavious of the text... it is caused by the skill counter rolling over each whole number since the ".0" is not displayed...

Edit: It stops happening once you have more than one thousand skill points because the number of decimal places means updates arn't happening so often.

How do I quit?? Yes, but Alt+F4 activates the cheatmode...

Bugged... semi-soft lock if you trap yourself in a door - reset level (reset might not be possible on the last door since you can't reset the ending room but I don't know if getting just to the corridor is enough to trip the end dialogue...)

The pop-up that happens one after install needs to have it's information somewhere else since I can no longer ever see it again due to a graphics driver problem... and now I've no idea how to play... *shrug*

Yeah, my AV quarantines files rather than deleting so I can tell it not to... also Micro$oft's form for submitting false positives (ie telling them their AV screwed up) is currently completely broken so without the dev trying to get in contact with them or hacking their file it won't get fixed... bad for everyone involved but M$, big surprise there *sigh* Monopolies get you bad software, big surprise.

Sometimes you can tell your AV to quaratine instead, or not to check certain directories... that could help but sometimes they also check at time of execution which means that they'll try and stop it when the file is run when you start the game and delete it then... at least this means you have a copy of the file you can copy back but it doesn't help running the game.

Okay, I've been fiddling with the Javascript and I can now get bedrooms (unreliably), I just wasn't getting them and then I changed the counter that was adding them (_g) from 1 to 0 so there was an extra one added and now I regularly get one... but only one!

I also tried to add tiny and huge buildings by adding them (almost) everywhere a search found the word "large" (it found a function "*enlarge" which was clearly not relevant) but it hangs for some reason, I can't find anywhere where the number of possibilities is only allowed to be three and I made sure to fix the bits in the grammar.json so the naming was not messed up but no joy... other minor tweeks seem to have worked in the naming and it seems like that would get entirely run through every time the program runs so it seems sound, it is just the runs that include a "tiny" or "huge" tag or randomly include one (one in nine times for each - I changed the frequency to 1,2,3,2,1 to reduce the number of extreme buildings).

Any thoughts?

Love the game, the last two levels, though, basically do the format to death. The one ship starts make the beginning very slow and the need to slowly wittle down the enemy planets with you darkening the skies of you enemy (who uses the same lame lines twice!) at the end is dull (can I suggest that once you surround all six tiles of an enemy planet it surrenders to you with one bar of health left? That would speed things up in the end game but make little to no difference to any midgame tactics... as for the start, starting with a planet and fleet rather than just a fleet would go a long way...)

I feel like there is an even better game hiding inside the lacklustre level design. The last two levels are good for training the player to wait or pile in headlong so I'd say these levels may serve as a good tutorial (but that they are a little longwinded, as noted above). If the game wants to really shine it should make use of level design that is unbalanced but also favours neither side (check out all of the FPS games out there that achieve this, that leads to a much more interesting puzzle for the strategists to work out since you already have the tacticians covered with the rock, paper, scissors combat mechanic.)

I'd be happy to provide advice but I'm a bit busy to contribute or do it myself... it's why I do what I can to help others - then I / we get to play the work of others in my "copious" spare time! :D

Thank you for all your efforts ;)

Great game with an impressive eye to writing some great Death Machine stories... loved every play through of the few dozen I tried! :)

I think I found only one "good" ending but also only found one "fated" / "bad" ending along with a number of mediocre endings which seemed easier to get but then that's life, isn't it? :D

Hmmm... I find it odd that it doesn't assign the bedrooms then... maybe the problem was the rooms weren't rectangular... in which case it needs to create less "wiggly" hallway rooms and more rectangular rooms (which would seem to make more sense anyway as human houses (at least) tend to be dominated by rectangular rooms... even hallways often are! :)

Edit: Just want to add that I agree with your strategy, I can't think of a better way to organise it without changing the result entirely and creating a cave / underground habitat / hobbithole generator where I would expect round rooms and twisty passages and so I'd probably decide the rooms, place them in proximity and then add linking passageways... so kinda the reverse of this house generator! :D

I got a small 2 story "Noble's House" which had two bathrooms and no bedrooms... in fact I'm finding bedrooms to be very rare but most plans have unmarked rooms so I'll use those as bedrooms I guess?

Even a large three story slab with a spiral staircase (confining all the stairs to one corner of the building) and a basement had space for only one bedroom!?! (I got an armoury, gallery, kitchen, two bathrooms and a lounge...)

There seems to be a bug in this version... I pressed pause and when I returned pressing "Resume" did not resume... the button "clicked" but I was not returned to the game and was left stuck on the Pause screen.

Ships move in the order that you order them but all attacks are carried out first but if you attack the same ship that attacks you in the same ordering then you both attack each other (potentially killing you both - this is the only exception to the "alternating fashion"). Base building and repair are all done after movement.

TLDR: Attacks carried out alternating, in order (except when attacking your attacker at the same time) then Movements are carried out alternating, in order then Base building, Ship and Base Repair are carried out alternating, in order.

TLDR; Great game, I've got suggestions and also how I "cheat" the game in case you want to make it harder! :D

I mostly looked at this to see if it was something that could help teach spelling to young children (especially given the icon) but the words I was getting (in terms of length) were rather intimidating even for me - although once I worked out how to game (see below) it longer words were easier!

For kids it would be great if you could limit the length of words (say have an option to limit words to a certain number of characters, say three, four, five or six for English... maybe four, five, six or seven for French, ditto Spanish and I'd guess four, six or eight for German - in order of how well I know those languages!)

For multilingual kids being able to pick multiple languages at once would be nice (and give larger word lists for when limiting word length).

And for Japanese kids (*wink*) Japanese would be nice! (I'm assuming you're using standard word / dictionary lists and I know those exist for Japanese, both all three "alphabets" and in just Hiragana (the primary phonetic Japanese alphabet that kids learn everything in first) so if that is true the only problem might be the font used but Hiragana is included in Unicode so if the font you're using is fully Unicode then no problem :) - oh, and, just to be difficult, Japanese word character limits would probably have to be two and three, maybe four but that includes a good chunk of all words! - Hiragana has characters for each consonant + vowel pair and so a single character codes for two letters in the English alphabet (Japanese call it Romaji), it's also why there are forty-eight (ish, long story) characters in the alphabet, many more than English, but only forty-eight sounds, many fewer than in English by a massive margin! :D

Cheating is achieved by; looking for letters above and below the "line" - b, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, p, q, y - and matching the number between the anagram and possible solutions, if that doesn't produce a solution then look for other easily identifiable letters, e.g. i, o, and count their instances. Better to do it this way around since the high and low letters are rare and so more than one is almost always unique and combinations frequently so but the letters that are easy to recognise are often common and therefore require a full count so already eliminating some options reduces scan time... Why yes, I do enjoy theoretical optimisation ;) :D

Thank you for your time and effort, I look forward to playing more of your games! :D - Keep up the good work :)

Wow, thank you so much for the really speedy reply and a potential fix no less!!

I'll try it out and cross my fingers, I know memory bugs and hangs can be really hard to track down but if it turns out to be leaky objects then you both never really know if you got them all but they are about the easiest thing to fix, so there's that! Ah, the joy of being a dev... definitely more of an art than a science! :D

I had the game hang while carrying one honey, one apple, twenty five carrots and two pumpkins, the crash happened when I transitioned from the second up area on the left to the third upper area on the left, the area loaded the graphics but every thing was frozen and I had to stop the program using Windows, even the window buttons didn't respond.

I had access to six areas, the starting area, one up and left (bunny), two up and left (apple),  one up and right (bees), one right (frog) and two up and right (Tree). I had purchased one seed with honey and was going to purchase the seed for the berries before buying the seed with the berries.

I think I had bought everything else. I did this all in one session.

I'm going to try and replicate the hang now...

Edit: Reloading the game put me in the doorway just before the transition that caused the hang... I went through again there was no hang *shrug* If there's anything you'd like me to try I'm happy to help :)

Edit Edit: Just had another hang, again just after a transition, this time from bees to tree (see above). This was after I had gotten a golden carrot and planted a third flower for the bees... I had also explored every (7) area and spent a couple of times enjoying the sound... I'm wondering if it is a memory leak, buffer overflow - are the areas getting reloaded without being unloaded?

Might be worth checking the package to see if the savecore file is definitely in it... I just had a thought... maybe itch.io checks packages?

I'd hope that VisuStella might have fixed it though, it's often just a bad string of characters that happens to crossover with a known virus.

I just checked the files again: Magisit 1.12 WIN/js/plugins/*

There is no VisuMZ_1_savecore.js but there is an AltSaveScreen.js and I wonder if there is a mistaken reference to the wrong file somewhere? I also wonder if I can find this file elsewhere since it looks to be a file common to the environment rather than yours?

Edit: Found a version from VisuStella MZ's Sample Game Project but it has a version mismatch, by fourteen days!! (So close!) - EditToo: No wait, that's my install date, note the version date, ack! 

Edit Three: do you have a previous package of your game that might have the correct file?

Edit Four: Can I check something please? I have been searching for  other games that contain this file and version 1.09 is too old but no version exists beyond that in the download of packages for games  I can find... actually it exists but has been deleted by our virus checkers according to devs but at least one include a null .js file with the same name so it looks like it may be the _devs_ anti-virus that is deleting the file on packaging the build and then shipping a build without the file or with a truncated file... the only sources of the correct version of this file I have found are behind other games' paywalls where it has been posted for their own users.

Unfortunately it seems much more likely that the virus checkers of a few devs are at fault rather than the virus checkers of hundreds of users (from what I could tell of the number of complaints that this file was breaking builds), on top of this the real fault lies with the dev of the plugin, but I don't even know if they know this is happening... maybe you know who it is and can contact them or at least pass the message down the chain? If you pay for it you probably have more sway than us *shrug*

If I find a source for the file I will post it assuming it is legit and not illegal to do so (since it may breach the original devs conditions... who I presume is (as listed in the file itself) VisuStella MZ?? But if they are not the sellers then ?)

EditFive: Version 1.09 dates from Feb 2021 I think? So the new version dates from after that but we need a version from before Jan 2023 and it appears to update between months and years apart... the 1.09 version is still used in the VisuStella MZ Game Sample from Sep 2022 but then again another game is still using it in Aug 2023 so it seems that at least one dev might have found a solution (use an old version of the plugins!) but I couldn't find anything after Sep 2022 but before Jan 2023 that still exists.

You mean M$ Defender? If so how does that make sense? Every installation of MS Windows has it so surely the problem would be widespread... though maybe not if people don't allow Windows updates... I do though  (does that make me weird!?! It would explain why so many machines aare easy to hack if everyone purposefully gimps their updates but I'm not convinced most people have that technical knowledge (however little that might be that is needed).)

True but the five tetrominoes are _the_ free polyminos with four unit squares... they are a mathematical fact, other four unit square shapes are all derivatives and since in this game you can rotate them a number of those derivatives are even included. But I suppose you could go for the five unit square polyminos, but there are a lot more of those and therefore are harder for the player to remember how they would like to deal with each and the three unit square polyminos are just too few and compact.

That would be difficult in my case what with not having any...