Weekly News #177

Version 0.973a is already available for download for subscribers of the Super Best Friend tier ($25). To view the post with this version, follow this link: https://www.patreon.com/posts/released-0-973a-147438698

So, a week and a half has passed since the last full version release—it's time for our weekly news. This time, it fell during the New Year holidays, so we congratulate you all—we hope you had a good time. Despite the current circumstances, we've done a great job. We've made important and necessary steps to improve the game, but first things first.

First, the game engine version has been updated from 8.2.1 to 8.4.1. This has improved game performance due to the transition from Python 3.9 to 3.12, and the game is now available on Windows 11, as well as on Mac devices without Rosetta. Furthermore, game stability, interface performance, and many other aspects have improved—the game now runs better than before. This is an important change that was long overdue, but proved difficult to implement. Everything is now working as intended, and we'll be monitoring the improvements in game stability and performance before making further improvements in these areas.

In addition, a button to disable/enable RNPC caching from RAM to ROM is now available in the game settings, as this could cause annoying crashes and errors on some devices. In this case, you can decide for yourself whether you need it or not.

We've also refactored the code to make the performance improvements more noticeable and enjoyable for players. These are important changes that many players have been asking for, and we've done some work in this area, the results of which can be seen right now in version 973a.

Secondly, randomized NPCs. A new full-fledged scene with animations has been added to the game—the shower scene. It plays when your female character takes a shower, or when your male character goes to the women's locker room in the Academy's "Swimming Pool" sublocation. It looks like this:https://x.com/kaitosi11/status/1996531150924439837.

Third, the story NPCs. This one is simple: we're finishing up the storylines with Meiko Tsukasa and Yuki Oota, and we're currently ready to present a new scene with Yuki Oota, which you can see on our Twitter:https://x.com/kaitosi11/status/2007767641927336178. Unfortunately, we cannot tell you anything else at this stage, but active work is currently underway.

Fourth, system changes. In addition to the optimizations mentioned in the first point, we also made some significant changes that required our attention. For example, the existing difficulty settings might not be suitable for those who prefer to avoid unnecessary clicks, as well as for hardcore players. Specifically for this, we introduced the ability to customize the difficulty settings – make life as difficult or easy as you like – the game allows you to do so.

In addition to the basic energy/satiety settings, there are also options for rent payment, limb durability modifier settings, and other settings important for creating a favorable playing environment.

Another thing is the current leveling system being updated. In simpler and more concrete terms, the perk/skill leveling system has been updated. More options have been added for sorting all the game's skills in the list, and the interface's performance and stability have been improved. In addition, the interface has been updated overall.

And the most significant change in this version, besides the upgrade to the new engine version, is the mood system. Your character has a mood parameter that changes based on every interaction with the world/other NPCs/food quality/sleep, and many other events. This parameter itself affects everything in the game: from how quickly your character loses energy and satiety from actions to the success of interactions with NPCs/the world/sleep quality. If you're depressed or negative, everything will fall apart, while if you're positive, the effectiveness of any action will improve dramatically.

What changes mood: nutrition, items and their use in the inventory, whether or not there is a cigarette addiction, sleep quality, interaction with the NPC, physical activity, attribute/level booster, number of days/hours without sleep, watching movies in the cinema, playing PC games, purchasing items in the online store has a certain chance.

What mood affects: debuffs/buffs to your character's attributes, energy drain per action, success of interactions with the NPC, success in fights/physical activity, success of any in-game attribute booster checks, and the speed of attribute/level booster.

Fifth, bugs and errors have been fixed, as well as code refactoring. Here, we'll limit ourselves to a simple changelog for this version, where you can see the full scope of the changes:

New content:

The game engine version has been updated from 8.2.1 to 8.4.1. This has improved game performance due to the upgrade from Python 3.9 to 3.12, and the game is now available on Windows 11 and Mac devices without Rosetta. Furthermore, game stability, interface performance, and many other aspects have been improved – the game now runs better than before.

A new, fully animated scene has been added to the game – the shower scene. It appears when your female character takes a shower, or when your male character enters the women's locker room in the Academy's "Swimming Pool" sublocation.

A new global system has been added to the game: the mood system. Your character has a mood stat that changes based on every interaction with the world, other NPCs, food quality, sleep, and many other events. This parameter itself affects everything in the game: from how quickly your character loses energy and hunger from actions to the success of interactions with the NPC/world/sleep quality. When depressed or negative, everything will fall apart, while when positive, the effectiveness of any action improves exponentially.

The leveling interface, as well as the in-game skill purchase interface, has been completely redesigned. More options for sorting all skills in the game have been added, and the interface's performance and stability have been improved. In addition, the interface has been updated overall.

A custom difficulty level has been added to the game: it can be adjusted to a dozen different parameters, from a basic modifier for limb durability loss to a base energy level. Customize your game's difficulty to suit you—it can now be even easier than on Easy.

Effects applied to your character, such as buffs from watching movies in the cinema, taking a shower, and others, are now displayed not only in the character equip menu but also on the main game screen.

The game diary/city map interface has been slightly updated, with changes to details, backgrounds, and interface backgrounds.

A button to enable/disable caching of randomized NPCs from RAM to ROM has been added to the game settings.

The Chinese translation has been updated: more text has been translated, and some existing translations have been corrected.

Caching has been added to several game scripts, improving performance and making the game even better: more stable gameplay, fewer crashes, etc.

The game script responsible for connecting to game servers has been slightly improved, significantly improving loading speed and overall stability. Among other things, an issue was fixed where a player would enter a cheat code, make a mistake with one character, and the game would attempt to connect to the servers, causing any subsequent attempts to enter cheat codes to fail.

Some recalculation of interaction success for the RNPC was performed to bring the simulation closer to a more realistic form: more factors, statistics, and attributes now influence success, and even the memory of RNPC events can impact interaction success.

Minor refactoring of the club system and related components was performed: inaccurate calculations in statistics were corrected, the code itself was improved, which now places less load on the system, and overall, everything became much more stable.

The conditions for RNPC event drops have been improved: they take into account more personal qualities and influence statistics, are less problematic than before, and this also fixes bugs where the wrong RNPC was present in the event (of a different gender, attributes, etc.).

A minor refactoring of the systems responsible for generating RNPC within a game session was performed. While previously RNPC could have certain reasons for "breaking" and "being broken," this entire system now operates more efficiently and creates more unique RNPC, making each game session more unique.

The caching system has been slightly modified, allowing it to operate more reliably and avoid data loss when unloading RNPC to ROM and back to RAM. This overall improvement and refactoring also allowed the system to operate more efficiently and prevent micro-freezes/stutters during a game session in some particularly busy moments and locations.

Fixed bugs:

Fixed a bug that caused the game to throw exceptions if the player didn't have the necessary framework for mods to work. Instead of throwing exceptions, the game now simply warns the player about this without breaking the game.

Fixed a bug where, after selecting a scene for a randomized female NPC to display, the appropriate interactions with them could occasionally trigger exceptions throughout the game.

Fixed a bug where the game could throw exceptions when attempting to open the PC interface in rare instances when a non-existent background was selected for the in-game PC.

Fixed a bug where entering the modifications menu could throw exceptions in certain rare gameplay situations on Android devices.

Fixed a bug where your character could sleep significantly longer if there was no alarm set, and sleeping would reset the time of day. He slept 4 hours more, and sometimes 8 hours more, which is why many mechanics did not work as they should have.

Fixed a bug where, in some rare cases, the game could display Russian text during story events when playing in English.

Fixed a bug where the game could throw exceptions when attempting to delete a favorited save in some rare gameplay situations.

Fixed a bug where the game could throw exceptions when attempting to display a swimsuit-wearing NPC in non-Mature scenes in some rare gameplay situations when swimsuits were not loaded properly in the data.

Fixed a bug where the game could open the apartment payment interface, but only once. After that, it was impossible to open this interface again or pay for the apartment.

Fixed a bug where the game could throw exceptions when attempting to enter non-Mature scenes with randomized female NPCs when the game did not have time to load your character's body type. Fixed a bug that could cause the game to throw exceptions when trying to determine whether the NPC was currently in group or local activity. This was rare, but could still be present and disrupt gameplay.

Fixed a bug that could cause the game to throw exceptions when trying to change the emote of randomized NPCs from events involving them in certain rare gameplay situations.

Fixed a bug where the NPC thumbnails could be off-screen instead of on-screen in the full hairstyle/clothing interface, which could ultimately make the interface unusable. Now everything, even the thumbnail frame, works differently, bringing the sprite closer to the screen.

Fixed a bug where the 5th hand position was positioned "behind" the NPC instead of in front of it, as intended. This caused the entire hand position to simply not work – it looked as if the hands were behind the clothing, not in front of it.

Fixed a bug where, when attempting to customize a piercing for a female RNPC, it was impossible to exit to other appearance settings, leaving you stuck in that menu. Additionally, a new "Reset All Piercings" button has been added to the same menu to simplify interaction with this interface.

Fixed an issue where the appearance customization interface had more buttons than the list itself supported when customizing the appearance of female NPCs. Next and Previous buttons have now been added to make it work more smoothly.

Fixed a bug where the diary interface could have unnecessary backgrounds on the diary itself, obscuring part of the inventory, making it look worse than intended.

Fixed a bug where sleeping could not properly restore energy/satiety, making it useless to sleep and use this mechanic.

Fixed a bug where the game could throw exceptions during sleep attempts in some rare gameplay situations where the game could not calculate the available NPCs.

Fixed a bug where the sprite of the story character Yuki Oota could remain on the screen during her 18+ character event, interfering with the scene itself.

Fixed a bug that could prevent your character from skipping a turn during fights with randomized NPCs if your character attacked with any weapon, potentially causing the player to become permanently stuck in this state.

Fixed several connection issues with game servers that could cause the game to assign the wrong role/privilege based on a Patreon/Boost subscription in some rare gameplay situations.

Fixed a bug that could interrupt mod downloads without any apparent reason if the download itself was performed through our game servers.

Fixed a bug that could cause the game to throw exceptions when attempting to connect to game servers during certain rare gameplay moments.

Fixed a bug that could cause the game to throw exceptions when attempting to open your character's PC during certain rare gameplay moments.

Fixed a bug that caused an exception to occur when attempting to communicate with a randomized female NPC after opening a scene with them.

Fixed a bug where purchasing certain perks/skills from the relevant menu could result in exceptions and bugs.

Fixed a bug where some perks/skills might not function properly—instead, they would be completely useless, making their purchase a waste of money.

Fixed a bug where the game could display incorrect attribute values ​​for your character, ignoring certain effects that influence them.

Fixed a bug that could cause the game to freeze when opening interfaces with a large number of elements, such as the save/load menu.

Fixed a bug where the game would not launch at all on Windows 11 and MAC devices.

Fixed a bug that could cause the game to throw an exception when attempting to open the call/message menu with randomized NPCs through the corresponding interface.

Fixed a bug that could cause some events with randomized NPCs to incorrectly account for your character's location.

Fixed a bug that could cause some display issues with male NPCs/your character's clothing in scenes with non-R-M-O characters.

Fixed a bug that could cause some graphical artifacts near a randomized male NPC's sprite if they had the third basic body type, or if they had casual clothing.

Fixed a bug that could cause an exception when attempting to calculate and initialize the appearance of a randomized female NPC in some very rare cases, and in situations where they had any tattoos or piercings.

Fixed a bug where the game could throw exceptions when attempting to open any scenes with randomized female NPCs with tattoos.

Fixed a bug where, when playing in English, the biographies of randomized NPCs simply wouldn't display in any way through the corresponding menus, either in the NPC editor or in the corresponding biographies menu.

Fixed an issue that could cause the game to handle translations of the game, such as Chinese and English, incorrectly, resulting in rare exceptions due to font errors.

Fixed a fundamental bug that could cause exceptions during the game's tutorial.

Fixed an issue where artificial intelligence calculations could cause long loading times due to unnecessary internal loops. While uncommon, this could lead to crashes and other issues in the main game script itself.

Fixed a bug that could cause exceptions when attempting to talk to NPCs in very rare situations.

Fixed a bug that could suddenly crash in the NPC/character editor due to some incorrect sprite construction within the systems.

Fixed an issue where the drop rate for certain events could be too high, while others were too low. Now everything is more or less consistent and clear.

Fixed a bug where the activity calculation systems could report group activity for a randomized NPC as NoNo.

Fixed an issue where randomized NPCs could be found in closed locations.

Fixed an issue with some incorrect text display in story events with Suzuki Matsui in very rare cases and gameplay situations, in the new story with Orel.

Fixed a bug where the game would throw exceptions when attempting to generate NPCs at the very beginning of a game session if there were too many NPCs.

Fixed a bug that could cause the game to throw exceptions when opening the full list of hairstyles/exporting/importing RNPC from the RNPC editing interface.

Fixed a bug that caused the game's translation to not always display when playing in Chinese, displaying Russian or simply a blank line.

Fixed a bug that could cause the game to throw exceptions when rewinding time by 60/120 minutes in rare gameplay situations.

Fixed a bug that caused the game to throw exceptions when opening the diary interface in rare gameplay situations.

Fixed a bug that could cause the game to throw exceptions when attempting to open the modifications menu on Android devices.

Fixed a bug that could cause the game to throw exceptions when attempting to create NPCs in the character library from the NPC editing interface.

Fixed a bug that could cause the game to throw exceptions when attempting to load a character from the character library in certain rare gameplay situations.

Fixed a bug that could cause the game to throw exceptions when using items from your character's inventory.

Fixed a bug that could cause the game to freeze when opening the Occult Club management interface in rare gameplay situations.

As you can see, we've done a significant amount of work on the game's content and stability—we've done everything we can to make the game more engaging and playable thanks to stability and performance improvements. Over the next 10 days, we'll be working on a few other areas to make the game even better, and you'll be able to find out the latest news and results on January 15th.