@HornHeadFan Ah I see. Yeah it could cause an error unless you define it, you could do something like *if (variable <= 0) That would catch values below 0 as well. And of course it could bug out if you used a percent display on the stats screen but I’m guessing you won’t be doing that now.
That makes a lot of sense, in fairmath you’re not very likely to go above 80% depending on the size of the increments, so yeah good point. Although in the end it would depend on the author in either way, you could potentially make interactions available at 81% and 82% after all. In Heroes Choice, I think I got up to about 97% or so with Jenny. But it is ultimately just a design choice, colorful bars vs plain text. Anything could be achieved using either so it’s just a matter of preference.
Moving into negative numbers won’t cause an error; you just can’t differentiate easily between negative numbers in a conditional statement. So *if dg < -3 won’t work (ChoiceScript isn’t built for the minus-sign to mean “negative number” in that context), but *if dg < 0 will work just fine.
And CS will keep track of how far below 0 you are (you can display a score just fine by ${dg} even when dg has sunk below 0) – so if you keep on pissing people off once you’ve crossed the hate threshold of 0, it will take longer to rebuild the relationship. You don’t need to limit yourself to five negative bumps.
If there are cases where the reason for relationship increase/decline is important, then yeah, you’re probably looking at separate variables like “perv” and “heatupdancefloor” to trigger contextualized text – but you shouldn’t need those for all of the relationship bumps.
Don’t use fairmath for relationships. You’re right, it produces schizoid shifts in how people feel about you, and it’s impossible to link with specific events.
Do you need to display the relationship using a number? I’d think it would be more effective to have verbal descriptions which change when you cross a certain threshold.
@MutonElite, yeah you could set special choices/dialogue at 80%, but you might still want to know the choices the MC could have made to get there. I reeelly appreciate you talking this out with me. You’re very insightful. The only plus to fairmath I see is that it gives you the chance to use colorful bars in stats screen, thus beaking up all the text.
@Havenstone, I’m just going to adopt everything you suggested. It all makes sense! It will make things a lot easier now knowing CS allows for negative numbers. That was my big concern about changing my approach away from fairmath.
Given the choice, would you rather CCH archtypes be…
brawler, stinger, and tactician (basically brawn, speed, or smarts so this gives readers a clear understanding of the character types)
OR
detective, bullet, sharpshooter (new name for sniper, which I think sounds too villainy)
(The pro here is that everyone has some inherent offense, and the more cerebral choices…Hmmm using the environment to your advantage and analyzing people and Shhh sneaking and surprising people are split up between two archtypes)
Please vote! I’m really torn about which 3 but I do want to reduce the number of archtypes to 3 to make future releases more doable.
@HornHeadFan Well you don’t even need to use fairmath to use the colorful bars, you can just use normal math as well, the problem is that without fairmath, you need gosubs or some form of code to check so it doesn’t go under 0 or above 100 as that is all the percent and opposed_pair bars can display without going all wonky sadly. No problemo, spreading the love around. Thank you for the compliments.
If those are the only choices then 2 I suppose. I immidiately find myself pondering how one could go about implementing a custom class though. Picking two strengths and one weakness and then the offered equipment and upgrades could be based off of the chosen stats…*mumble mumble* :-?
@Havenstone, could I use a combination of the relationship score and a romance variable to determine the relationship text in the stats screen? For example, could I do *if ((dg > 30) and (dg_status = “dating”)). *set dg_rel “she loves you!! muah muah muah”…or *if ((tress < 5) and (tress_status = “ex”)) *set tress_rel “she’s still bitter, you know!”
@MutonElite, if you can think of a way to allow for all 6 archtypes or even a “free form” creation that is doable…keyword doable…over the course of 3 stories and probably over 450k words, post here or PM and I would seriously consider it.
I’ve thought about it over and over, and it just seems like coding combat scenes where the MC could be using any one of 20 different combinations of skills and equipment (and that’s just for one level before upgrades! and then it goes to 40 different combos after the upgrade …and to 60 possible combos after the next upgrade opportunity and so on and so on) = impossible and a horrible use of my time.
Hell even just the 6 combos are scaring me off. I figured readers could live with just 3 archtypes if it meant they’d get 4 to 6 chances to upgrade their character over the course of the entire story.
@HornHeadFan Oh I don’t do doable, I only do possible and then I find out later it was too much work and have to start all over again.
But it seems like for instance the upgrades, does that really count up? It seems like it ought to stay constant, like for instance if you have gun 1 and then it upgrades to gun 2, then from that checkpoint going forward you wouldn’t need to worry about checking for gun 1 again? But even if that was so, you could always do *if (gun >= 1) and presto, it checks for gun 1 and beyond. So as far as the upgrades goes, you wouldn’t need to implement a possibillity for each possible level of the skill, unless you want something to really require a higher level, in which case you would then implement both. Same thing for the skills.
I can’t really offer any solutions, only ideas and harebrained schemes is what I’m saying.
For comparison I might mention that I haven’t gotten very far in my own game, mostly because I tend to build wide rather than far, but I’ve so far got;
5 Stats
4 Opposing Stats (so 8 more Stats, total of 13 not even mentioning the many many relationship stats)
And 96! Skill levels. So yeah, I’m not the one to talk about doable, we’ll see if I have gotten anywhere in a couple of years. I dream big and crash hard. But at least I’m having fun I guess… For the most part anyways. #:-S
Yep, absolutely – but unless you plan to use the descriptions frequently outside the stats screen, I wouldn’t create a variable just to hold the text. I’d have the text show in the stat screen directly using code like:
*if ((dg > 30) and (dg_status = "dating"))
She loves you!! muah muah muah
In Heroes Choice, I think I got up to about 97% or so with Jenny. But it is ultimately just a design choice, colorful bars vs plain text. Anything could be achieved using either so it’s just a matter of preference.
