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[Jonathan S. Fox]

quote:Originally posted by Skeeblix:
<STRONG>Another bug. went to the pawn shop and bought a gun, left the pawn shop. The screen went entirely black until a key was pressed.

EDIT: Alright, it's happening after every Go Forth action. I'm going to try disabling everything else my men are doing and going on a site alone to see if it continues.

[ February 10, 2008: Message edited by: Skeeblix ]</STRONG>

This is now fixed.   It was asking "Is there a location in memory set aside for messages to display about hacking?" when I wanted it to ask "Is there a message to display about hacking?" Subtle, but important difference.   :roll: Of course, when it goes to display this non-existant message, you just get a blank screen (or if you didn't go forth, a nonresponse).

[Torak]

quote:Originally posted by Jonathan S. Fox:
<STRONG>Torak -- I think the teacher needs at least 2 levels of skill above the student... but it doesn't say that anywhere, does it?   </STRONG>

My people arent actually learning anything, they just get the teaching skill extremely fast (maybe +1 or +2 a day) and then nothing else from a trainer. On any setting.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

quote:Originally posted by Torak:
<STRONG>

My people arent actually learning anything, they just get the teaching skill extremely fast (maybe +1 or +2 a day) and then nothing else from a trainer. On any setting.</STRONG>

Ergh, that is not what is supposed to be happening, on so many different levels... can you send me your save at floppysocks@hevanet.com?

Edit: I'm testing and I'm still not getting this. How exactly do you have the training set up? Like how many people are there, how much money do you have, what are the skill levels of the participants? Or you can just send me your save and I'll look at it.

[ February 10, 2008: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]

[Mover#005]

You just have to add the appropriate files to the makefile.am... tried to commit myself but then I had to dig for my sourceforge password and then I had to look how you actually commit under linux (I'm new to this also) and then you comitted already.  

[BishopX]

I just got a crash, went to the apartments, picked a door lock, then rented a room. I also have hackers out, murals and recruits being eased in. I got the blank hacker screen, the mural screen, and then a crash. I reloaded, and didn't pick the door and got no crash.

EDIT: I got a 2nd crash, apparently related to taking two buying and selling at pawnshop

[ February 10, 2008: Message edited by: BishopX ]

[ February 10, 2008: Message edited by: BishopX ]

[Jonathan S. Fox]

quote:Originally posted by BishopX:
<STRONG>I just got a crash, went to the apartments, picked a door lock, then rented a room. I also have hackers out, murals and recruits being eased in. I got the blank hacker screen, the mural screen, and then a crash. I reloaded, and didn't pick the door and got no crash.

EDIT: I got a 2nd crash, apparently related to taking two buying and selling at pawnshop

[ February 10, 2008: Message edited by: BishopX ]

[ February 10, 2008: Message edited by: BishopX ]</STRONG>

I can't think of any obvious explanation that would allow me to fix these, and I can't reproduce these myself.  

[beorn080]

Just a small suggestion while I'm busy beta-testing. With the new poll page maybe you could add in random things like 82% of dwarf fortress players prefer ascii.

Edit: Could you add a hang out option to the assign tasks in bulk.  I end up using check web polls to quickly get everyone to stop selling stuff to learn. Also teaching goes up way to fast.  When I taught my 600 non garment makers politics my main char got to like 26 teaching in under a week. Also the recruit limit looks like a very good idea. This was a very rambling edit wasn't it.

Edit2: Alright teaching combined with no recruit caps is UNGODLY powerful.  Right now I have about 700+ libs with 50+ total skill 10 persuasion, 10 garment making, 6 driving, 5 pistol, 3 writing, 2 law. This past month I spent 500k and was still in the green. So yeah.  Only reason my fighting skills aren't higher is the Intel HQ is high security and I am having trouble recruiting agents.
[ February 10, 2008: Message edited by: beorn080 ]

[ February 10, 2008: Message edited by: beorn080 ]

[Torak]

quote:Originally posted by Jonathan S. Fox:
<STRONG>Edit: I'm testing and I'm still not getting this. How exactly do you have the training set up? Like how many people are there, how much money do you have, what are the skill levels of the participants? Or you can just send me your save and I'll look at it.

[ February 10, 2008: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]</STRONG>

I no longer have the save, but it went something like this: A Skill 6 Teacher was set onto teaching Covert Ops, every day my people would gain about 1 or 2 teaching skill, and cap out at 6, with no further increase in anything, no matter how long I waited.

There's also an issue that if you run out of money with a Teaching job on, it never gets canceled , and you cant seem to re-start it, as far as I can tell (even if you change the job and wait a while), because whenever I tried to start it again, nothing happened , even with enough money.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

quote:Originally posted by beorn080:
<STRONG>Just a small suggestion while I'm busy beta-testing. With the new poll page maybe you could add in random things like 82% of dwarf fortress players prefer ascii.</STRONG>

Sounds like a good idea.

quote:Originally posted by beorn080:
<STRONG>Edit: Could you add a hang out option to the assign tasks in bulk.  I end up using check web polls to quickly get everyone to stop selling stuff to learn. Also teaching goes up way to fast.  When I taught my 600 non garment makers politics my main char got to like 26 teaching in under a week. Also the recruit limit looks like a very good idea. This was a very rambling edit wasn't it.</STRONG>

Adding a hang out is a good idea. For training, I actually don't force you to not be doing anything -- in fact, I think you can even send a squad out, and they'll take the class when they get back.

Teachers get 1exp per person per skill they train, and it takes about 100exp to gain a level, so yeah, it'll be craaazy with those numbers of people. I actually changed this on my computer already to be a maximum of 10exp a day.

quote:Originally posted by beorn080:
<STRONG>Edit2: Alright teaching combined with no recruit caps is UNGODLY powerful.  Right now I have about 700+ libs with 50+ total skill 10 persuasion, 10 garment making, 6 driving, 5 pistol, 3 writing, 2 law. This past month I spent 500k and was still in the green. So yeah.  Only reason my fighting skills aren't higher is the Intel HQ is high security and I am having trouble recruiting agents.</STRONG>

Two possible solutions jump to mind:

1) Wait for recruitment caps.
2) Revise the $500 cap on daily expenses.

At the moment it costs $50 per person per skill trained, up to a maximum of $500. So if you run a small class with a limited number of skills to teach, it comes at a discount. I could change it to just a per person expense -- $50-100 per person, if they train at least one skill -- and then remove the cap of $500. So if you want to train 60 people, you can, if you have $30,000 a day to pass out. Or $300,000 a day for 600 people, if it comes to that.

quote:Originally posted by Torak:
<STRONG>I no longer have the save, but it went something like this: A Skill 6 Teacher was set onto teaching Covert Ops, every day my people would gain about 1 or 2 teaching skill, and cap out at 6, with no further increase in anything, no matter how long I waited.</STRONG>

That's really strange. I haven't seen anything in the code that jumps out as being something that could cause this sort of anomaly. I'll keep an eye out for it, and let me know if this happens again.

quote:Originally posted by Torak:
<STRONG>There's also an issue that if you run out of money with a Teaching job on, it never gets canceled , and you cant seem to re-start it, as far as I can tell (even if you change the job and wait a while), because whenever I tried to start it again, nothing happened , even with enough money.</STRONG>

Teaching job is actually very casual and well-behaved with the way it handles your money. Every day, if you have the money, it spends it. If you have partial money, it spends partial money and does a partial job. If you have no money, it doesn't do anything that day.

Additionally, if it has nothing to do on a given day, eg, nobody to train, it is smart enough not to waste you money. You don't have to micromanage it. If it has very little to do/a small class, it will make a partial charge (less than $500 for that day).

It is completely ignorant of whether you had money yesterday or whether it trained anyone yesterday. It doesn't have any "on/off" switch that it flips when you run out of money -- when it runs its code to give people experience in skills, it checks if it can charge for that skill, sees it can't, and silently declines to give the experience. The next day it'll check again.

So, this is probably working as intended. You ran out of money, and it quietly stopped training. Once you had money back, it discovered that there wasn't anyone present who needed training, so it didn't spend the money you had available. You tried changing the job and waiting awhile, then switching back to training, and again, it said "Nope, still no experience to award, so I'm still not going to charge money."

Try recruiting somebody fresh and sending them there, and you should see it "turn on" again.

Note that if you get skills that seem to stop early (agility 2 person only gets 4 pistols when teacher has 12 pistols), they may have hit their skill cap. Alternatively, you may have hit the limit of the teacher's ability -- if the teacher only has teaching 1, they won't be able to train people past pistols 3, for example. Or if they have pistols 5, you won't be able to train past pistols 4.

[flap]

I haven't tried that version. However : "So, this is probably working as intended. You ran out of money, and it quietly stopped training."

If there aren't any, it should say that teaching has been cancelled.
Also, a teacher should have its skill decreased by the number of students he has. (full with 1, -1 with 2 to 5, -2 with 6 to 15... and so on).

I don't know if squad should be able to receive teaching...

[Jonathan S. Fox]

quote:Originally posted by flap:
<STRONG>I haven't tried that version. However : "So, this is probably working as intended. You ran out of money, and it quietly stopped training."

If there aren't any, it should say that teaching has been cancelled.
Also, a teacher should have its skill decreased by the number of students he has. (full with 1, -1 with 2 to 5, -2 with 6 to 15... and so on).

I don't know if squad should be able to receive teaching...</STRONG>

Reducing the effective skill of the teacher (at least as far as speed of teaching goes) would be more practical if you could select certain students to learn and certain ones not to. I decided against this to remove levels of micromanagement, and to keep the complexity of the code down. If you start assigning students, it gets complicated -- do you have to be specifically a student, or can you be just hanging around idly? What if you want idlers who aren't loading down the class or generating expenses? What if you have two teachers in one building? Can a person attend both? What if you want them to attend one, but not the other?

Right now, it just assumes that the classes are held in the evening, after everyone gets back from their assigned daily tasks. The guys who shot up the police station at about noon come back, drop off their gear, and still have time for an evening class on law from the Liberal Judge the LCS happens to have seduced. Even people who might not otherwise need it will be curious and pop in for some lessons, if they're being run there. After all, it wouldn't be very Liberal of the LCS to limit access to education and shut people out of classes if they're right there in the same building.  

One side effect of all this is that a lot of the heat of criminals in the building rubs off on the person giving classes -- if the guys who knew exactly what to do to shut down the nuclear power plant last week are getting their science lessons from a girl at the homeless shelter, the police are going to be pretty anxious to find her, too. (She'll get the same racketeering charge for teaching criminals that you get for recruiting criminals -- it wouldn't be worth even that, but her association with the LCS gives them an argument that she's enabling them as part of the criminal machine. It's only one count, no matter how much she does though, so it's not -too- hard to beat.)

[beorn080]

I think Torak's problem is that he is using Teachers to teach. He has to use people skilled in that skill to teach others.  For instance to train pistols you need someone with at least a 3 in pistols. Other then that the recruitment caps should fix the power of teaching so I don't think a change is necessary.  Well your doing great work. I seem to have lost skill in post writing.

[Little]

Dying after being seen attempting to steal a car, and if you die in the resulting chase. your game CTD....

[Earthquake Damage]

While I dislike any teaching fee, I'll live with a per-person teaching fee (capped or otherwise).  A per-person per-skill fee, however, becomes far too expensive for teaching to be worthwhile.  If training one squad were to cost $10,000 each day, why the hell are you even training them?  If a game feature is prohibitively expensive, don't have that feature.

Also, teachers should only acquire heat from their students if those students commit crimes while they're attending classes, if at all.  It's ridiculous for the teacher to get implicated for something their students did half a year before they ever attended classes.  The type of crime and lesson should also factor into it, since there's no real or imagined crime in teaching law and business courses to someone who stole a TV from the local 711.

Also, reducing the effective skill of the teacher is a ridiculous idea for the reason you said:  It'd require excessive micromanagement.  While some people may not mind making fine adjustments to 50+ characters every day, most of us find it tedious.

Ah.  Overlooked that "with respect to speed of teaching" remark.  I don't mind reducing teaching speed so long as the reduction scales reasonably.  Spending five years to teach pistols 3 to 20 fresh recruits is retarded.  I do mind skill reduction w.r.t. how high a skill level the students can learn.

[ February 11, 2008: Message edited by: Earthquake Damage ]

[Jonathan S. Fox]

quote:Originally posted by Earthquake Damage:
<STRONG>While I dislike any teaching fee, I'll live with a per-person teaching fee (capped or otherwise).  A per-person per-skill fee, however, becomes far too expensive for teaching to be worthwhile.  If training one squad were to cost $10,000 each day, why the hell are you even training them?  If a game feature is prohibitively expensive, don't have that feature.</STRONG>

It's currently per-person per-skill for the sole purpose of giving you a discount for small classes or cases when you're only teaching one skill to a group of people. So training a squad of six pistols 3 would cost $300 a day, if they are only picking up pistols, while without the per-person per-skill, it would be set at a flat $500 a day. I wouldn't want to do per-person per-skill without the cap.

quote:Originally posted by Earthquake Damage:
<STRONG>Also, teachers should only acquire heat from their students if those students commit crimes while they're attending classes, if at all.  It's ridiculous for the teacher to get implicated for something their students did half a year before they ever attended classes.  The type of crime and lesson should also factor into it, since there's no real or imagined crime in teaching law and business courses to someone who stole a TV from the local 711.</STRONG>

About half the crimes in the game don't have any heat signature at all; so technically, you wouldn't get heat for teaching the guy who stole a TV from the 711, because stealing TVs doesn't trigger raids. You would get heat for teaching the guy who killed three people at the 711, because murder does have a heat rating. On the other hand, you're probably right about it taking into account what course you're teaching.

I do feel that it's right that there be some consequences for an LCS assault rifle instructor who trains the guy who was shooting up the Police Station with an M16 last week. There's no inherent crime in teaching him the skills, but the guy is a wanted criminal and the instructor is not some neutral university professor, it's a fellow member of the organized crime ring that made that attack.

"Oh, there's no crime in teaching these guys to sneak around, pick locks, and use guns." Perhaps not inherently, but the cops aren't stupid. They have a job to clean up the LCS, and they'll find some excuse to arrest the person who is training people to commit crimes.

Like I said though, I hear you, if they're just teaching law and business, it doesn't really make sense. Will probably make Fighting and Killing and Covert Ops the only heat building ones -- Political Leadership, General Education, and even Street Survival are fairly innocent.

quote:Originally posted by Earthquake Damage:
<STRONG>Also, reducing the effective skill of the teacher is a ridiculous idea for the reason you said:  It'd require excessive micromanagement.  While some people may not mind making fine adjustments to 50+ characters every day, most of us find it tedious.

Ah.  Overlooked that "with respect to speed of teaching" remark.  I don't mind reducing teaching speed so long as the reduction scales reasonably.  Spending five years to teach pistols 3 to 20 fresh recruits is retarded.  I do mind skill reduction w.r.t. how high a skill level the students can learn.

[ February 11, 2008: Message edited by: Earthquake Damage ]</STRONG>

I would strongly mind a reduction in skill that the students would learn, I think it would be a huge mistake. Slowing it down for lots of students is not so troublesome, but even so, there may be a time when you want your infiltrator to learn ASAP so you can get them into the prison with enough skill to break out your person on death row, and it may be unpleasant to have to micromanage the number of people in class by giving them a private safehouse (which, granted, you might want to do anyway if you want to run the class on the cheap), or worse, not realize it's a factor. I'm not strongly against it, but I'm not convinced.

quote:Originally posted by Little:
<STRONG>Dying after being seen attempting to steal a car, and if you die in the resulting chase. your game CTD....</STRONG>

I'll look into it when I get the chance (too busy to code right now). Man, I am so tired of stolen car crashes... it used to be much worse.