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[Senator Jim Death]

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.

Yep, runs without a problem now. Thanks for the quick fix.

[The Cheshire Cat]

So this is going to be a weird question coming from me, given that I'm the one that made the thing, but are interrogations too easy? It's been this constant thing that's been nagging me this whole time - I seem to be able to flip people a LOT easier than I remember being able to in the curses version, but I copied the code from that version pretty much directly so I can't figure out if it's just a perception thing or if I made a typo somewhere. Are people supposed to turn really easily if you have a Liberal interrogating them with moderate persuasion skill, barely any psychology skill, and you just talk to them and let their rapport build up?

[Jgray]

So this is going to be a weird question coming from me, given that I'm the one that made the thing, but are interrogations too easy? It's been this constant thing that's been nagging me this whole time - I seem to be able to flip people a LOT easier than I remember being able to in the curses version, but I copied the code from that version pretty much directly so I can't figure out if it's just a perception thing or if I made a typo somewhere. Are people supposed to turn really easily if you have a Liberal interrogating them with moderate persuasion skill, barely any psychology skill, and you just talk to them and let their rapport build up?

In my experience that would not be the case but I am not a high level player so I could be wrong.

[The Cheshire Cat]

Of course the minute I post this I find the typo that's been eluding me for months. I was ADDING the target's wisdom to the attack roll instead of subtracting it. So basically the more Conservative someone was, the easier they were to convert.

[Senator Jim Death]

Bug report: I lost a game by having my leader be killed. I immediately started a new game and skipped the chargen questions. Now, the bug: my old game's apartment safehouse (Clark) is still listed in my safehouses list, with the items from my last game in it, and my new game's initial apartment safehouse (McLaughlin) doesn't show in the safehouses list. I can mark items to transfer from Clark to McLaughlin, and liberals are hiding out in McLaughlin as shown by their individual character details, but I can't otherwise manage McLaughlin since it doesn't show in the safehouse list.

Far as that goes, I've got Homeless Shelter listed twice in my list of properties when I'm transferring stuff. I also cancelled my McLaughlin apartment and rented one in the projects, and the Manage Safehouses interface doesn't show the new apartment. I guess I'll restart this playthrough since it seems pretty badly messed up at this point.

[The Cheshire Cat]

Yeah I've been trying to work out that bug for a while - it happens because at some point some data from the previous game is for some reason being retained by the UI. A lot of that stuff was built a while ago and is very hacky so I need to go back and redo it. To avoid that happening you can just quit and restart - that will clear out the UI state and you should see everything go back to normal without needing to restart your playthrough.

*edit* I've posted an update with that bug fix, as well as a few others I've been poking at for the last couple of days.

[Megaman_zx]

How easy is this to mod? Is it similar to normal LCS, easier, harder?
If it is really different, can you post a modding guide?

[tykavanaugh]

How easy is this to mod? Is it similar to normal LCS, easier, harder?
If it is really different, can you post a modding guide?

It's a unity engine game, totally different under the hood, though it plays almost identically to the old LCS.

[The Cheshire Cat]

How easy is this to mod? Is it similar to normal LCS, easier, harder?
If it is really different, can you post a modding guide?

Depends what you're trying to mod. You can add new items, creatures, locations etc. just by editing xml files. The directions for these are inside the files themselves. Adding new functionality is a bit trickier since you need to import the project into Unity to build it, and the general design of the code is much different than the original game so you'd need to kind of re-learn how things are put together. At some point I am planning to post an explanation of how the code is structured but it'll probably take a while to write up.

[Megaman_zx]

I'm curious if there is a way to import custom faces, based on gender and profession.

I'm not an artist, but I remember using baldur's gate facepacks to add 150+ new character faces to the game. I wonder if there is a way to set up something like that so we can import custom images, or mod the texture packs for different vibes.

[The Cheshire Cat]

Fully drawn custom faces like the old face packs for Baldur's Gate are only possible by species (you could put in custom icons for the HUMAN species and it would pick randomly between them, but there's no gender/profession breakdown), but putting in custom face elements (Like new noses or eyes or whatever) is the intended way to edit human faces in the game, and you can do it without editing any code or needing to rebuild the game in Unity.

The main file you want to look at is LCS_Data/StreamingAssets/XML/PortraitDefs.xml. In there is a brief explanation of how to add new face parts to the game. It's a pretty flexible system, allowing you to restrict parts to certain genders or political alignments, and also allowing you to define custom tags which can be used to restrict parts to only appear on certain creature types (or NOT to appear). The file LCS_Data/StreamingAssets/XML/CreatureDefs.xml, which is where creatures are defined, explains how to use those custom tags to make the association between parts/professions. There's already a few of these in use so you can see examples of how you might implement it but it's very freeform so you can pretty much do what you want.

In the LCS_Data/StreamingAssets/Graphics folder is a file "PortrtaitExample.png" which shows you how each particular facial feature will be placed in-game (there's a bit of variation because some parts will also have an x or y axis offset randomly applied; the example image shows the base location before offsets), and the LCS_Data/StreamingAssets/Graphics/Portraits folder is where all the facial graphics actually sit so you can see examples of how the ones I've already made are done.

If you wanted to do a full graphical swap, you could do it by just swapping out the PortraitDefs.xml with a different one that had its own graphical references and definitions, and the game would be fine with it (although doing so midgame might break your save, since the saved character portraits will be using references to the id names from the old xml file. If the new file uses the same id names though, it will swap in with no issues). A "portrait pack" could be set up pretty easily by just zipping up a bunch of face part png files and the PortraitDef.xml that uses them.

Currently some aspects of the facial generation system are still hard-coded - skin-colour is a set 5 tone palette, natural hair colours and dyed hair colours are also defined in the engine rather than external file, so editing any of these requires doing so in Unity and rebuilding the game. I may externalize these at some point but for now they're still essentially fixed values.

[Azerty]

How easy is this to mod? Is it similar to normal LCS, easier, harder?
If it is really different, can you post a modding guide?

Depends what you're trying to mod. You can add new items, creatures, locations etc. just by editing xml files. The directions for these are inside the files themselves. Adding new functionality is a bit trickier since you need to import the project into Unity to build it, and the general design of the code is much different than the original game so you'd need to kind of re-learn how things are put together. At some point I am planning to post an explanation of how the code is structured but it'll probably take a while to write up.

One thing we can be sure is that object-oriented programming will be more proeminent than in the original code, thereby ensuring things will be more easily added or modified.

[Megaman_zx]

Thanks for the info, that's really cool. I'll take a look.

[The Cheshire Cat]

How easy is this to mod? Is it similar to normal LCS, easier, harder?
If it is really different, can you post a modding guide?

Depends what you're trying to mod. You can add new items, creatures, locations etc. just by editing xml files. The directions for these are inside the files themselves. Adding new functionality is a bit trickier since you need to import the project into Unity to build it, and the general design of the code is much different than the original game so you'd need to kind of re-learn how things are put together. At some point I am planning to post an explanation of how the code is structured but it'll probably take a while to write up.

One thing we can be sure is that object-oriented programming will be more proeminent than in the original code, thereby ensuring things will be more easily added or modified.

Well, for the most part yes, but bear in mind that I'm not really a better programmer than anyone else who worked on the original and a lot of this was learning as I went, so it's not really "well designed" even if it is more OO than the original. Like, you won't really deal with as much "spending 10 minutes to try to figure out where this variable is actually set/used" as you would in the old LCS code, but I haven't really broken up my classes as much as they could be and there's a lot of weird stuff I do that I don't think is very good C# practice.

I would like to do a bunch of refactoring to try to improve the usability of the code overall and to break up some of the "superclasses", but it's not as high a priority for me as just generally fixing bugs and making the player experience roughly match the original game.

[moderate guardian]

Great job Cheshire Cat!
Request: Please add an OS X build for us Mac people.