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[The Cheshire Cat]

I've posted about this in another thread but I'm gearing up to the point where I'm ready to call it "feature complete" so I figured it was time to post in a thread of it's own.

https://the-cheshire-cat.itch.io/lcs



(Screenshots are from the current update-in-progress - I'm doing a big graphical push)

This is a project I've been working on for the better part of a year at this point - it's a full re-implementation of Liberal Crime Squad (based on the source code when I started which was version 4.07.3 I think). It's not quite at feature parity yet but it's pretty close. I've been building the whole thing in Unity and once I reach the point where it's roughly equivalent to the original version I'm planning to upload the project/source files to the itch.io page in case anyone is interested in modding it.

My goals for this project were to try to make it easier to mod the game by externalizing a lot of data - even without source access you can easily add new creatures, items, and locations to the game by editing a few xml files. It's not as extensive as I'd like it to be, but it's relatively easy to understand so adding stuff can be done by anyone with a basic text editor. I also wanted to redesign the interface, not just to make it mouse-driven, but also to reduce the amount of screen-swapping needed to manage your Liberals - one of my biggest annoyances with the original game is how things like assigning activities, equipping liberals, creating squads, moving bases, etc. are all done on separate screens. Now basically everything related to managing a Liberal is done in one place, and a similar logic applies to managing bases.

Updates to this project will be posted on the itch page every so often - I don't have a set schedule but it's usually been once every week or two depending on how big the thing I'm working on is (the current update might take a bit longer since I'm not an artist so doing graphics is slow). The current version is playable, but there are still some bugs in the current release that may cause issues in certain cases. Let me know if you encounter any bugs and if possible include pastebin link to the output_log.txt Unity generates (you'll see a little notification in the lower left corner when an exception happens - that's why the game is still in "Development Build" mode).

[Jonathan S. Fox]

This is really exciting. I saw screenshots before, but after playing with it I'm even more impressed. You've put a lot of thought into reworking the UI, and it shows; especially the overcomplicated "base mode" screen and its various sub-screens.

I really like the investigation board and the way it replaces several screens at once. I'm also a big fan of how you attached congresspeople to individual States.

I'm looking forward to seeing the source code!

[SlatersQuest]

This is awesome! I can't wait to update Terra Vitae onto this! I plan to do that as soon as my current vacation is over (and the bugs mentioned in the TV thread are found, those that can be found).

[Megaman_zx]

Thanks for the update on this project. Really exciting stuff to see people still improving this game.

[The Cheshire Cat]

Just posted an update to the itch page - I finally got most of the item graphics done so it should be a lot more visually interesting now. News stories still have blank pictures, mainly because I haven't completely figured out how I want to handle those yet.

All that's really left to be done now is the "Disband and Wait" option, and some text/visual differences for news stories published by the Liberal Guardian instead of the mainstream paper. Both of those will likely be the next update, so at that point I'm also going to post the project files on the itch page.

[nenjin]

This is very incredibly liberal of you.

Tempted to fire it up but I think I'd like to wait until you're calling it feature complete before I dive in.

Great work.

[The Cheshire Cat]

I've just done an update now, putting in some of the final missing features, so at this point it's basically feature complete. There's still a few omissions (The Bank location hasn't been added yet, and there's no news story variations for the Liberal Guardian), but for the most part it's done. So that being said, I decided it was time to upload the project files to the itch page along with the first non-development build.

The code is probably a bit hard to follow since I sort of learned how to do things as I was writing it, but I can try to answer any questions anyone might have about it.

[SlatersQuest]

Whoo boy! New programming language!

First off, Cheshire Cat, thank you very much for doing this!

So, starting questions: what kind of compiler do I need to compile this? I use a Mac, but I have WINE-using applications that can run Windows software. I can also try to compile it for a Unix system (Mac presently is Unix, but the language obviously isn't C).

Second, when I start modding this, I'm going to need to ask you where the code for various things are. I hope you're okay with that. 

[IsaacG]

Huzzah!  Well done Cheshire Cat.

I'm going to spend the next few weeks days going over this.

[The Cheshire Cat]

So, starting questions: what kind of compiler do I need to compile this? I use a Mac, but I have WINE-using applications that can run Windows software. I can also try to compile it for a Unix system (Mac presently is Unix, but the language obviously isn't C).

The language is actually C# but it's built in Unity so it required loading in the whole project to actually build. I built it on Windows but there is a Unity version available for Mac too, and the code should be cross-platform so there's no extra steps needed there. If you're familiar with C++ then you shouldn't really have much trouble with C# - a lot of the syntax is the same and C# is if anything, LESS complex than C++. It's very similar to Java if you have any experience with that.

You can download Unity here: https://unity3d.com/get-unity/download/archive I used 2017.1.1 to build this so that's the version I'd recommend. It takes a bit of getting used to since it's not working with pure code - although most of the functional stuff is basically pure code anyway, UI stuff like adding new buttons requires interfacing with the Unity framework. I didn't do anything particularly fancy with it but it's still something that needs getting used to if you're coming from a pure code background.

At some point in the near future I will try to type up some basic documentation for how I arranged all my code so that it at least seems like it makes sense - there's honestly a lot of complexity in there that doesn't need to be, but a lot of that was based on mistakes I made in the design early on that by the time they started to become annoying I'd built too much off of it to change anything.

[tykavanaugh]

Holy shit this is the only recent LCS build I can get to run on my mac. Awesome!

Any way we can help? I'm interested in learning some about Unity.

[The Cheshire Cat]

Honestly at this point it's basically done so there's not really a need for any help on the building/design front. At this point I'm just playing with details - the last few days I've added in a bunch of face accessories and tweaked how they get used so portrait generation is spitting out some interesting results:

[Senator Jim Death]

I'm getting one of those Unity "failed to load mono" problems when I run the exe. I unzipped the LCS.zip standalone to a directory and ran it from that directory. OS is Win 7.

[The Cheshire Cat]

I looked at it and I think I uploaded the zip with the wrong data folder (it was the Linux build). I've re-uploaded the Windows LCS.zip and it should run correctly now.

[SlatersQuest]

I'm getting ready for this, but I'm busy and planning a mod, just not ready yet.