Clothes Make the Man

[Woeful Wombat]

I have no intention of sounding whiny or demanding. After following this project for a couple years, I'm still a little puzzled by the relative scarcity of equipment options. Be it upgrades, sidegrades or hell, even just cosmetic variations. There isn't a lot to choose from, even when not minmaxing. Which I find strange, considering a large part of the game is about looking however you like, but that currently does not extend to your choice of equipment. Well it definitely has been getting better as the game expanded, but I still feel like selection is lacking.
CoC had a similar issue, where the endgame was offering less than a handful of viable armours and even less weapons.

But what gives? Am I completely underestimating the time and effort it takes to write up and code a bunch of new weapons, armour, underwear or variants of existing equipment? I'm not talking about stuff that has more attached to it à la Goo Armour or Omnisuit, just basic items that are nothing more than their stats and descriptions.

 

[Woider]

Well, there's over 100 pieces of armour, clothing and undergarments, so I wouldn't say there's a scarcity, whereas I think CoC had around 30 (and that game is finished).

And is there any particular piece of clothing or armour you feel is missing from the game?

 

[Thebiologist]

Well it does take time, it took me about over a month to write and code 130 weapons. Granted I usually work on the project about 1-2 hours every few days, but still. On top of that, scenes and NPCs are a priority, which makes sense, and few people want to write items, it's a tedious copy-paste job.

You can always write them yourself, this game is mainly community driven, people write and the devs code and they have a ton of content waiting to be coded. If you write and they fit the game, i.e: they're not ridiculously overpowered, I'll code them for you.

 

[Woeful Wombat]

I'm a huge sucker for medieval stuff, so I'd love variants on plate armour, gambesons, longswords, greatswords, halberds, glaives, battleaxes et cetera. And since my main is a kitsune, I'm lamenting the lack of any East Asian apparel. A nice kimono that was somehow protective cause nanomachines would be the dream.
Ranged weapons lack a flame thrower, but I hear that's being worked on. Water guns, acid throwers, javelins, miniguns, to name a couple more.
Underwear could do with some finer variations of panties, or stuff like pantihoses and garters.

Not sure about any futuristic stuff, my imagination is terrible when it comes to sci-fi.

it took me about over a month to write and code 130 weapons.

Interesting. Do you include the time it takes to think up new weapons in there as well or just the writing/coding part?

 

[Thebiologist]

I'm a huge sucker for medieval stuff, so I'd love variants on plate armour, gambesons, longswords, greatswords, halberds, glaives, battleaxes et cetera. And since my main is a kitsune, I'm lamenting the lack of any East Asian apparel. A nice kimono that was somehow protective cause nanomachines would be the dream.
Ranged weapons lack a flame thrower, but I hear that's being worked on. Water guns, acid throwers, javelins, miniguns, to name a couple more.
Underwear could do with some finer variations of panties, or stuff like pantihoses and garters.

Not sure about any futuristic stuff, my imagination is terrible when it comes to sci-fi.


Interesting. Do you include the time it takes to think up new weapons in there as well or just the writing/coding part?

Writing is fairly simple, and so is coding, once you have the text and the stats it should take about 5 minutes per weapon.

Making up the name, text, role and the stats it's what takes time, you don't want to be repetitive and you want each weapon to be slightly unique and of course you have to make stats fit the same parameters so you don't get several weapons that are basically the same.

I would say that stat balancing is what took most of the time, I finished the writing in 5 days and all weapon descriptions take 17 pages of text, that's more than some simple NPCs we have in game. The code it's nearly 200 pages worth of text.

 

[Woeful Wombat]

I wouldn't necessarily say that having two different weapon that do the exact same would be a bad thing. It becomes a question of aesthetics at that point. As a roguish character, I might want throwable exploding shurikens, but as a brawler, I'd like the dragon shotgun instead, even if their stats are the exact same.

Two questions still:
Do you need the vendor author's permission to add something to their stock or how is that handled?
And in code, is it necessary to type out "this.[...] = x;", even if x is zero anyway?

 

[Thebiologist]

I wouldn't necessarily say that having two different weapon that do the exact same would be a bad thing. It becomes a question of aesthetics at that point. As a roguish character, I might want throwable exploding shurikens, but as a brawler, I'd like the dragon shotgun instead, even if their stats are the exact same.

Two questions still:
Do you need the vendor author's permission to add something to their stock or how is that handled?
And in code, is it necessary to type out "this.[...] = x;", even if x is zero anyway?

Fen and company will take care of which vendors get which stuff I guess.

As for the code, not really, you don't need to add the line for a value if that value is 0, but since most of the time you'll be copy-pasting the baseline code for an item, taking the time to remove that line is just pointless.

Here is an example of one of my weapon designs:

Spoiler

package classes.Items.Guns
{
import classes.Engine.Combat.DamageTypes.DamageFlag;
import classes.Engine.Combat.DamageTypes.TypeCollection;
import classes.GLOBAL;
import classes.GameData.TooltipManager;
import classes.ItemSlotClass;
import classes.StringUtil;

public class BioplasmaRifle extends ItemSlotClass
{


public function BioplasmaRifle()
{
super();
this._latestVersion = 1;
this.quantity = 1;
this.stackSize = 1;
this.type = GLOBAL.RANGED_WEAPON;
this.shortName = "biopl. r.";
this.longName = "Ozaeni bio-plasma rifle";
TooltipManager.addFullName(this.shortName,StringUtil.toTitleCase(this.longName));
this.description = "a living weapon";
this.tooltip = "Bio-plasma rifles are a family of anti-armor living weapon; the Ozaeni being the standard issue stain of the Cnossian military. Bio-plasma rifles fire a searing hot organic acid; if the armor doesn't melt by the extreme temperatures, the highly corrosive acid will bore through what's left of it.";
this.attackVerb = "shoot";
attackNoun = "bio-plasma";
TooltipManager.addTooltip(this.shortName,this.tooltip);
this.basePrice = 52500;
baseDamage.corrosive.damageValue = 16;
baseDamage.burning.damageValue = 16;
baseDamage.addFlag(DamageFlag.CHANCE_APPLY_BURN);
this.addFlag(GLOBAL.ITEM_FLAG_ENERGY_WEAPON);
this.attack = 5;
this.critBonus = 7;
this.defense = 0;
this.shieldDefense = 0;
this.shields = 0;
this.sexiness = 0;
this.evasion = 0;
this.fortification = -17;
this.version = _latestVersion;
}
}
}

Editing that is fairly simple.

 

[RanmaChan]

I tried my hand at making weapons and was told that they didn't need/want anymore. Clothing is another story I think, especially if it doesn't have any stat changing qualities to it. A lot of the recent clothing submissions were accepted almost right away (hardlight panties, etc).