I am absolutely melting, so it’s gonna be another short one for a blog toast today.

Couple of very productive discussions have happened over the last week that I’ll summarize as quick as I can:

We’re changing speech formatting to be similar to CoC2; that is we’re going to move from disabling italics for emphasis to bolding the emphasised words.

I’m gonna spend some time figuring out how to best get some animations we’ve collected over the years into the game and as part of the image pack.

We figured out what we want to do finally when it comes to displaying embedded images, mostly as a consequence of really needing to do something about it for the animations.

Feedback about Jasvalla has kind of crystallized into a few points that I’ve made with the rest of the team and I think I have a really solid way to explain it when it comes up; it’s a difficult thing to really pin down and explain in a succinct fashion, but it’s very much a case of “when you see it, you know it” kind of deal. This has already had a few knock-on effects on upcoming content to avoid some of the issues raised.

Ideas™ were shared about how we handle race-determination for the player; the current scoring system has become more unwieldy as it’s had to grow to encompass an ever-expanding list of potentials, and some of the options are now at the level of needing a byzantine level of specificity to get them. I think we have a direction to clean this up finally that will provide greater choice to you as the player though!

I’ve been in the bug-fixing mines most of the week, I think Fen has been clobbing away at the Zika Gangers a bunch, and I know Savin turned in the first of the documents for NextPlanet, Will has been putting the final polish on EvilBun, Adj is still delivering consistent good draws all over workchat on the regular, and Jacques has successfully managed to not drive himself insane continuing to work on the playing card faces, so it really feels like everybody is getting back up to speed post-port.

TiTS 0.9.011:

• Backer: The first part of the Zheng Shi operations deck is now available, featuring a layout for the sprawling quarters belonging to the officers, gang leaders, and other high-ranking criminals running ZS. (Will & Leek)
• Backer: Nonesuch has written a series of orgies for the OpsDeck with a unique character included. (Nonesuch & Leek)
• Public: Narc’s expansion is now available to the public; it’s a new quest that ultimately unlocks the ability to give her a dongle of her very own, and a few new scenes to go along with it. (Fr0sty & Gedan)
• A metric ton of various fixes for Jasvalla have been rolled out, along with a few general nerfs and having an easier time disabling her via Penny. (Leek, DrunkZombie & Gedan)
• A bunch of fixes have been made to the inventory and shop displays to better handle selling ship weapons, interacting with a few items, and ensuring weird things don’t happen when you hit the escape key. (Gedan)
• Inessa’s belt is properly shown. (Gedan)
• A few blackjack win/loss state disagreements have been cleaned up, and the ability to bet custom values has been re-added, although its implementation is not ideal. (Gedan)
• Penny’s crew menus should work again properly.
• A few more changes have been made to save-loading to handle saves in weird states, and there’s a new request for your browser to allow “persistent data”, which should help with instances of your browser just deciding to clean out your save slots. (Gedan)
• Eitan sparring should work as expected. (Gedan)
• There’s been a few minor changes to how race scores are calculated. We’ve discussed a larger overhaul that may make it in over the following weeks. (lowercase_donkey)
• A few more creatures have had their utility methods glommed together into their creature object. (lowercase_donkey)
• Mitch has had a few more content tweaks and issue clean-ups. (lowercase_donkey)
• Dizzy will no longer annihilate your ship crew menu. (Gedan)
• Chased down a long-lingering “ballFullness is NaN” issue. (Gedan)
• Some missing breedwell functions have been returned. (DrunkZombie)
• Cum-bubbles should be throwable at enemies again. (DrunkZombie)
• Charged Shields should work correctly. (DrunkZombie)
• The start of a system to be able to embed images in mails is coming along; a discussion happened around embedding images in general so there should be updates to that effect soon. (Gedan)
• And a bunch of other little bits and pieces all over the game.

Didn’t get as much done on the things I intended this week, I took a dive into the bug forum and just started chopping through some of the longest standing bug-bears that have been sat around for a while and just going at them to get them done and out of the way finally. A few of these have turned into extremely spooky and cursed delves into the code to figure them out which always ends up sapping a lot of hours – but they’re done, and they’re fixed and now I can close the door on that code and pretend like I haven’t just seen the horrors that I have.

Back into the code mines I go!

TiTS 0.9.010:

• Backer: Jasvalla has been added to the game, a Dzaan Alpha stalker seeking to make the player her beta. The player can submit outright, make her earn the right to collar them, or have her dealt with by the proper authorities. If the player chooses to submit to her, they will be invited to her home to undergo repeatable training events and eventually a Bad End. You can kick things off by bumping into her in the Tavros elevator, after visiting Mhen’ga at least once. (Nonesuch & Leek)
• Public: Now available to the public, Bizzy’s mom, Deziere, has been added to the Paragon Playground brothel on Dhaal, as well as a substantial recruitment pack that will allow the player to reunite mother and daughter and put them to work together in the player’s porn studio. (Nonesuch & Leek)
• Fixed the piercing equip menu so that it can actually support more than 14 concurrent options. Also fixed a few crashes around the process not directly related to the menu. (Gedan)
• Cleaned up more Verusha things, including some errant broken tags and time-access issues. (Leek & Gedan)
• GooArmor now properly modifies player ass/vag during penetration. (Gedan)
• More bust tweaks and fixes across the game. (Gedan)
• A lot of internal character data setup got cleaned up as part of further standardization of character data that will allow us to better handle menus in various parts of the game. (lowercase_donkey)
• Reworked some portions of the inventory ui to avoid a few issues cropping up as part of the system calculating open/free slots. (Gedan)
• Made some changes to how lipMod works to better support the ability for lipMod to potentially completely override lipRating as that value is entirely derived from femininity, this avoiding the fixModSize handler from firing. (Gedan)
• Mitch tweaks and fixes. (lowercase_donkey & Leek)
• Equipping weapons in combat should now work. (Gedan)
• Playing cards got some more updates. (Jacques)
• Rare Drops have been reworked somewhat to reduce the effect of having a stuffed potential loot list reducing the drop chance of certain items. (Fenoxo)
• Fixed some keybinding issues relating to opening and closing the inventory. This should allow the inventory to be closed using the keybind whilst in combat, without escaping combat. (Gedan)
• Lots of other assorted fixes around content all across the game. (Leek, lowecase_donkey & Gedan).

Hotfix builds #2245 and up:

• Properly renamed the new piercing equipment menu generation function.

After the last couple of weeks cranking on things as hard as possible, I’ve mostly just had a bit of a slower week to recover. Chip away at a few bugs and try and polish up a few things but nothing really huge – and made myself a couple lists of things that bug me around the game to get on fixing and cleaning up in the near future. Nothing really huge, just bits and pieces of inconsistency that now that I’ve seen them I can’t unsee and it’s going to bug the ever loving shit out of me until they’re handled.

Aside from that, I think this week I’m gonna spend a bit more time in the bug mines and then get back onto the PWA thing. When I left it to handle the Electron image pack stuff, it was right on the cusp of working at a base level, close enough to feel like it was actually going to work for what we want it to do. It even has a pretty strong effect just for regular online play by increasing how much data we can cache, and thus, makes repeated loads of the game feel way, way snappier.

TiTS 0.9.009:

• BACKER: Edan pregnancy is now available for backers. I don’t think I need to explain any more than that! (Skom & DrunkZombie)
• BACKER: The Pudding Panic Porno codex is available. (Frogapus (maybe, didn’t put a name in the source document so who knows!) & Leek)
• BACKER: A bevy of scenes from Will, spread around the game. Something for Shekka, Able and Anyxine. (William & Leek)
• PUBLIC: Mitch is now available for public consumption. Check ’em out on Canadia Station. (Mitch & Lowercase_Donkey)
• Verusha has had a bunch of bugs fixed. She should no longer appear in Anon’s bar before she should, multiple sequence breaks in the process have been closed up. There may still be a few lingering issues because the process is complicated behind the scenes, but it should be much more correct. (Gedan)
• The Zil Village on Mhen’ga has had a few tweaks to block access to scene-only rooms. (Gedan)
• The Omnisuit should no longer duplicate itself when resetting it through the Interact interface. (Gedan)
• Using a Taxi on Uveto should no longer skip proper execution of a Syri scene on arrival, replacing the buttons to continue the interaction with her with one that just dumps you back to gameplay. (Gedan)
• Clobbered a bunch of missing variables in various places in the code. (Gedan)
• Reworked how we handle the active NPCs at a bar so that the active one should serialise appropriately when saving. (Gedan)
• Removed the big warning shown when loading out of date saves; it has served its purpose and now things should be much more stable. The message was only ever intended as a heads up to pay attention to the details because something might be off with the loading process considering how quickly things were being moved around. (Gedan)
• Cleaned up the save version upgraders to handle older saves with much more grace. This should resolve a bunch of undefined/push errors when loading saves. (Gedan)
• “Limber” now counts as part of the isFlexible check. (Lowercase_Donkey)
• Player character names should no longer display with extra spaces at the beginning or end. (Gedan)
• Bunch more busts are fixed. (Lowercase_Donkey)
• The ship inspect interface now lists the available storage spaces and categories of the ship- these might not yet be fully wired up to actually limit the stored items properly, but I don’t think we’ve ever really had any different values so I trust if we do, we’ll find out about it pretty quickly. (Lowercase_Donkey)
• The map now displays tooltips if you hover over a room for a bit to show the name of it- will likely see more tweaking in future. (Lowercase_Donkey)
• Fix hard light items that were in storage rather than just in the players inventory directly when importing a save. (Gedan)
• Fixed a map rendering style issue with rooms flagged as SPIDER_WEB. (Jacques)
• Feian flags have been fixed. (Lowercase_Donkey)
• Fixed a few lingering logic statements that could never trigger. (DrunkZombie)

Spent the week delving into the guts of Electron to do something pretty complicated, all things considered. We had a couple of complaints about the quality of the images in the downloadable build, so I set about building a system to fix it.

One heads up though: as part of working on the downloadable build, I ended up changing some things around internally. If you were using the save slots in the downloadable build, you will need to save those slots to file before you update. This won’t be a problem again, I just thought it was better to fix what I did as early as possible.

The downloadable backer build now has built-in Image Pack support – hit the button on the main menu and the game will download larger resolution versions of the images, and when complete, will install them into the game for you. The way I’ve gone about this will also minimize the amount of stuff that should need to get downloaded in the future too, meaning further updates to the ImagePack will be much smaller over all – when it comes time to update the game, just grab the latest version and it’ll handle whatever updates are needed to the ImagePack before installation for you!

I’m also shoving native Linux builds out of the door as part of this too, so give me a little bit to make sure all the download pages are updated and these builds should start appearing over the next half hour or so. It’s going to take me a little bit to unclog the build pipes because a lot of things have changed behind the scenes so things might be a little weird for a while.

TiTS 0.9.008:

• Backer: Verusha’s lover expansion is now available. I don’t know much about her, but I’m sure somebody will be along before too long to update the post with some better details! (By Doots!)
• Backer: Backer Downloaded builds now have an option for larger resolution images; the main menu will kind of guide you through the process.
• Public: Dating Teyaal’s daughter is now available to the public. Take her out on the town! (Savin & Leek)
• Paige should have better navigation between menus. (Leek)
• SumaCream should work better. (Leek)
• Bust gallery images should no longer be missing/broken in electron builds. (Gedan)
• Fixed a bunch of wetnessRange things. (Leek)
• Piles of little fixes all over the place. (lowercase_donkey)
• Locked rooms now show with a locked connector more generally than a one-way connector. (Fenoxo)

TiTS 0.9.008, builds 2193+:

• Fixed the missing edanPregHandler function reference.

Edit: All the files seem to be up and all the links seem to be functional!

Long couple of days in the code mines for me – I was planning on writing a little bit more about what I’ve been working on the last week, but it turned out there was nothing ready in the merge-pile for fresh content ready to go out with this patch and I decided I had to rectify that. I’ll still touch on it a little, but it’s not going to be a huge Science Time With Geddy post like I was originally planning.

Now that we have Windows downloadable builds, the ask for a similar feature for Android has understandably ramped up. I could just throw down into that, but I wanted to try something a little bit different first. Browsers have a rather underutilized feature to essentially install a version of a webpage; I never saw the point that much in the desktop space, but it makes a lot more sense to be on mobile. Imagine if you could go to the play page on your Android or your iPhone, and there was a button you could tap on that would install the game, and you’d get a fully offline capable version of the game, with a shortcut in your devices apps to launch it, that would work without having an internet connection – but would update itself if you open it whilst you have an internet connection. No APK problems like we’ve had to deal with for years, no needing to root your iPhone (if that’s even an option with current-gen devices!). That’s what I’ve been working on this week. It’s not done yet, the job is turning out to be insanely fiddly, and time consuming, and there’s a lot of learning to be done to get it right – but I’m getting there.

Edit: Hotfix update changes listed below the main changelog!

TiTS 0.9.006:

• Backers: Narc the Nurse-droid has a new quest that ultimately unlocks the ability to give her a dongle of her very own, and a few new scenes to go along with it. (Fr0sty & Gedan)
• Public: Salvaging the Mastodon is now available to the public build. Get real friendly with all the people populating the Crash Landing bar, and two weeks after your most recent visit you’ll be getting a message requesting help…. (Slab, Leek & Fenoxo)
• Electron builds should not immediately whitescreen. This was caused by unzipping the game into a folder structure that contained a # in the folder names somewhere. (Gedan)
• The FZR Fire Suppression System’s mechanics have been tweaked. Previously it would apply a status that caused -50 evade and doubled damage from crushing attacks. On foes with no inherent evasion, this would result in a 4x damage increase. I’ve (Fenoxo) standardized the “Deep Freeze” affect so that triggering the 2x bonus damage consumes the status and reports it in text (and reduced the evasion penalty significantly). I’ve also tweaked a number of cold damage weapons to be able to apply the effect: Cryolizer, Entropy, and the Glacial Auger.
• Frosty the Frostwyrm’s cold resistance has been increased somewhat. (Fenoxo)
• The usual assortment of various bust tweaks and fixes across the game. (lOWERCASE_dONKEY)
• Embedded image displays of very wide images should display better. Additionally images should render the same the first time they are displayed as every subsequent time they are shown. (Leek)
• Busky’s shop interface has been moved to the new system. (Leek)
• Mirrin had a bunch of formatting fixes that didn’t align with the games style standards fixed. (Leek)
• Bizzy hasArmor crash fixed. (lOWERCASE_dONKEY)
• Kiro & Kally doubleteam softlock fixed. (lOWERCASE_dONKEY)
• A pile of dead code that also includes incorrect value assignments and logic tests have been hunted down and removed. This may clean up a lot of as-yet unreported strangeness in various places. (lOWERCASE_dONKEY)
• Dong Designers color selection should work properly. (Leek)
• Lorelei’s grab attack has been fixed. (Leek)
• A bunch of Bothrioc stuff has been cleaned up. (lOWERCASE_dONKEY)
• TechSpecs “Advanced Shielding” got nerfed a bit (From 20% to 10%) (Fenoxo)
• TechSpecs “Charge Weapon” ability had its damage bonus lowered from 100% of intelligence to 66%. (Fenoxo)
• TechSpecs “Rapid Recharge” passive had its shield change reduced from (int / 3) + 3 to (int / 5) + 3 (Fenoxo)
• The code that drives applying damage was overhauled to help the game better track modifiers like “melee” or “explosion” without having it overwritten by display notes like “minimal.” This should make damage more accurate across the board when interacting with perks and abilities that hook into melee or ranged damage. It will also let us do things like making certain classes more resistant to certain types of attacks in the future – like giving Smugglers an evasion-style ability to reduce explosion damage. I had to change thousands of lines of code all across the game to do this. (Fenoxo)
• A bunch of assorted other little one-liner fixes all over the place that I’m not going to catalogue otherwise this post will literally be about 200 lines long. (Leek)

TiTS 0.9.007:

• Fixed the ship blowing up in combat (Fenoxo)
• Mimbranes, ColourfulSucker, and Vanae had some fixe (Lowercase_Donkey)
• Some Narc crashes got fixed (Lowercase_Donkey)

I’ve spent the last week polishing all most of the rough edges off of the first of the downloadable build types for TiTS! Similar to CoC2, this is based on electron and is presently only available for Windows platforms. I want to make sure this goes out and nobody has any problems before I dig into downloadable-build specific features (don’t get ahead of yourselves, it’s nothing crazy!) and turn a few more things on. I’ll spend a day or two keeping on eye on any reported issues or anything major that needs my attention, and then I’ll set into getting some android APKs churned out.

The astute amongst you may have already spotted the links for these available, and serving version 0.9.004 – I want to make sure I had everything tested in-situ for the final part of the process to make sure all of the download locations and services were working appropriately – so for the sake of ensuring everybody is on a real build version, we’re officially skipping over 0.9.004 to 0.9.005.

As a note about our release process:
We’re releasing TiTS for both backers and public at the same time. Backer builds have additional content enabled, and will maintain exclusivity of that content for at least a month before it makes its way over to the public build. The changelog will note new content that is applicable to backer builds and when it becomes available to public builds.

TiTS 0.9.005:

• [Backers] Bizzy’s mom, Deziere, has been added to the Paragon Playground brothel on Dhaal, as well as a substantial recruitment pack that will allow the player to reunite mother and daughter and put them to work together in the player’s porn studio. (Nonesuch & Leek)
• [Public] Ardia’s Wine’n’Dine expansion is now available to public players. Once you’ve visited her folks at least once, the next time you’re warming Ardia’s bed Ardia is warming your bed, you’ll get a little treat and an offer to visit her home again. (Savin & Gedan)
• Windows downloadable builds are now available for both Backer and Public releases. (Gedan)
• Various fixes for Mitch, including crashes and Trust values not being saved have been fixed. (Lowercase_Donkey)
• Avoid crashes in the inventory display when viewing another inventory set and attempting to click on equipped items in the left pane. (Gedan)
• Reworked a lot of the code behind the Nursery. (DrunkZombie)
• Fixed Mioldan Priestess softlock. (DrunkZombie)
• Fixed a crash in the LDC and ShockHopper drainbunnies scene. (DrunkZombie)
• Fixed a crash with Chance and treated Zil Bull encounters. (DrunkZombie)
• Fixed Bothrioc Quadomme spawn resetting. (DrunkZombie)
• A lot of image manifest tweaks for many NPCs. (Lowercase_Donkey)