AI

I'm on the march towards adding employees/spouses to Fucked Up Burger Shack. The road is long, hot, and sticky towards the tip, but it's the path that I chose. Seriously though I've gotten a little closer towards having the kind of AI that I want for NPCs in FUBS. The core of it is my interpretation of how Sims think, but I'm sure I'm missing quite a bit there.

I'm going for a system where NPCs act autonomously based on needs and wants, rules of behavior encouraged by the player, and the reality of what's going on in the moment. Once an NPC decides on an action to take they are put in place to do it. That's when time stops so that the player can act. They could throw a wrench into things by joining or interrupting in some way, or just ignore NPCs entirely since ideally the AI will continue ~doing what's best~ indefinitely. So managing the rules of behavior and interacting directly are going to be the primary things happening all the time.

There are a lot of details in a system like this and I think there are lots of opportunities for things to get good. The interesting bits for me are figuring out all the little questions like: How will NPC personality traits affect the actions they take? What happens when an NPC disobeys the rules the player has set? How will NPCs react to interruptions by the player? As you might imagine each of the NPC actions can turn into random events, as do player interactions like joining or interrupting.

I released version 5.13 on Patreon with the bare bones skeleton of the AI system in place. I'm just play testing like crazy to make sure that this system is as fun as I imagine before I get too invested in it. The plan is to make the next release along with a public release of version 4-12 around Christmas time.

Been codin'

I've been tackling performance issues with my codin' cap on and came out only partially bruised. Check out this gif of the Debug screen for testing RandoEngine output.

What's happening there is I'm spamming the regenerate option using a keyboard shortcut. Each Rando is being generated using a 'crap ton' of rules that define all kind of stuff about them, from hair length to, foot size, to anal affinity. After that the Rando is copied over to a partner. A list of descriptions of the partner are shown when the page loads by checking another 'crap ton' of rules that blend words with properties in a (hopefully) sensible way.

Or in other words I've boosted performance for FUBS by a 'shit ton' and now what were the most taxing bits of the game are buttery smooth (literally in some cases).

I was really concerned that I'd reached the end of the line as far as optimization, but it turns out I just had to try some stuff out that I'd been thinking about for months. Unfortunately the changes that I've made have completely destroyed all of my unit tests for the compiler. Truth is I've had to rewrite those tests across so many iterations on the underlying system that I'm not even bothered about it at this point. Okay maybe a little bothered T_T

What's more important though is I'm planning on putting up another build with this new goodness this weekend. I'm working out some story events that are long overdue. I'm going to avoid biting off more than I can chew, and I'm hoping to have a first version of a new house mechanic inspired by the Sims. I'm just having issues stopping the AI from taking a shit constantly, but that's to be expected.

Fucked Up Burger Shack 4.12

I haven't been blogging as much recently, so here's one. A few days ago I put out version 4.12 of FUBS on Patreon. Yeah it has more sex scenes and some new features, but what really matters is I was able to include references to Pokémon and Trump in a single scene. In a nutshell it includes: a new chikan encounter, can save Randos as contacts and have booty calls with a new experimental sex mechanic, game now has text color and a new font, Randos have more dick, breast, and other less important sizes, Lots of details for clothes, some other stuff.

Fucked Up Burger Shack 4.12 Changelog:

• Added ability to furnish apartment (currently just tv and couch)
• Added ability to purchase more stap-ons and stock replenishes weekly
• Added ability to save Randos met in positive encounters as contacts (currently 5 contacts can be added)
• Added basis of doll generation
• Added Booty Calls
• Added indefinite article generation
• Added many new clothing properties for Rando clothes
• Added more Rando depth: cock sizes, breast sizes, hair lengths, etc.
• Added RANDO 05
• Added text colors for Gae, business results, warnings, etc.
• Changed default Unity game quality setting
• Changed effectiveness of resting on couch/watching television
• Changed effectiveness of work actions with passive prep bonuses
• Changed in game font
• Changed Rando descriptions heavily
• Changed Rando gender weights
• Changed saves to no longer capture undo steps. This reduces file sizes and makes more sense since a save is essentially an undo step.
• Changed Unity version to 5.4.3f1
• Fixed a bunch of typos and oddities throughout the game.

The release got delayed due to a bunghole of issues that I ran into, so now the public/Patreon release schedule is all messed up and stuff. I think I'm going to go back to more frequent releases because they keep me focused on one thing at a time rather than going nuts on everything.

I've been working on optimization for the past few days because the more content I've been adding, the slower the game is getting. I actually wrote some multiple partner stuff that should have been in 4.12 but adding all the rules necessary for multiple partners basically fried performance. FUBS 4.13 will be built with Unity 5.5 which incidentally includes some performance improvements in the Unity player that ~should~ help out the little guys like me too.