Tinon
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1.0.2 Prepatch is now LIVE!
🕑 Added 2023-12-23 23:16:49 +0000 UTCHi everyone!
The latest update is now LIVE and it's a big one, as one would expect after approx. half a year of development! Underneath you'll find the update notes.
Graceful reconnection, -server restart, and session affinity
Graceful reconnection allows it to handle most interruptions in connection without having an impact on players, and it is very good at keeping the client and server synchronized between connections. This should prove a huge quality-of-life improvement for players on mobile devices that disconnect the client from the game when they change tabs or apps. Players are now routed to the same game server when they connect and when a player reconnects it will attempt to restore the previous session instead of creating a new one, which is substantially faster and has halved the time it takes for the server to handle player relogs in most cases, making reconnects even more seamless. When players use external endpoints, such as accessing profiles, they will also connect with the same server each time, which means the data is much more likely to be readily available, reducing response time for these operations as well. Graceful server restarts means when a server is about to shut down, it will start a new server and transfer all players to that server before doing so, resulting in zero downtime and only a brief connection disruption for active players that were moved. Coupled with graceful reconnection, players will then be able to continue playing as though nothing happened! No more daily downtime and shutdown warnings!
UI Upgrades
The game has received significant UI improvements. Action tokens that were previously shown in the top-right corner are now displayed next to your health bars. The new display for action tokens also allows you to see how close you are to a whole action or spell action, and it also allows you to see how many fractions you have beyond your max action. You can control the amount of details you want to see for your actions from the game's settings. Inspecting players has also been improved, and you can now see a full stat overview without having to hover over every single stat to get the details. Profiles have also been updated to show character information similar to how it is displayed in-game, and when we get to dynamic avatars in the future, these will also be visible in profiles.
Special Actions
Special actions now make use of a layout similar to other spells, with a list that has details and tooltip information. Whenever an action is available to you, it will also give you hints as to what conditions made it available. The new layout also allows for many more actions to be displayed at the same time, and this has allowed me to separate inanimate special actions into more specific outcomes that give the player more control. Furthermore, all forms are now prerolled and displayed to the caster so they can see the exact outcome of a particular action for that specific encounter. Sex acts have also been changed to take many more conditions into account, such as whether someone might be in chastity or might be wearing a gag or plug, which could make certain sex acts unavailable. For this reason, players are now able to undress defeated players, so they can remove clothes that might be in the way of whatever act they have in mind. This will also allow the player to remove hexed items that are otherwise impossible to remove, in which case the hexed item will snap back into place whenever the encounter ends.
Character & Equipment
The brunt of this update has been to prepare the game for dynamic avatars and the upcoming PvE overhaul, and how character and equipment data is stored, handled, and displayed has received an overhaul.
Bra & Gloves Equipment Slots
The two generic accessory slots have been replaced by slots for a bra and gloves, which can still be used for accessories like before, just like any other equipment slot. There are two reasons for this; so bras and gloves, if worn, are always located in a particular part of the equipment window, but more importantly, because all equipment slots now also reflect a part of your character's body. Equipment slots have also been reorganized so shirt and undershirt; pants and underpants; and gloves and shoes align, as you can see below. These changes have also been made in preparation for absorption-themed content where players can become body parts, which will also make use of these compound slots, so you'll be able to have someone as a pair of breasts and also wear a bra in the same slot.
Left column:
Bra -- Breasts
Undershirt -- Chest
Underpants -- Genitalia
Gloves -- Arms, Hands
Right column:
Head -- Head, Horns, Halo
Shirt -- Body, Physique, Height, Wings, Udder
Pants -- Butt, Hips, Tail
Shoes -- Legs, Feet
Physique Triangle
The old concept of gender has been replaced by a physiques triangle that tracks gender appearance separate from genitalia, which will also be reflected by the dynamic avatar, and the new physiques system supports androgynous appearances and muscular women. The nature of the game and how fluid gender can be makes pronouns particularly difficult to implement, so I have done away with using he/she for player characters, and will instead use they/them in all cases.
Traits
The old concept of abstract traits as images in the myself/inspect menu has been replaced by predefined traits that will be reflected by the dynamic avatars, and status effect for anything else. Until the dynamic avatars are fully released, the game will continue to display most of the old trait images next to the body slot that best represents it. You can also disable these images from the game's settings. Another result of this change is that traits can no longer be discovered and is not displayed in your collection. The old traits had ids that could be used to track them, and these ids were then added to a character to determine active traits. The new traits, however, work nothing like that. They are determined by the value of a predefined property, say the stored number for your character's height, breast size, milk production, etc. Instead of having one id for one breast size stage, and another id for another breast size stage, the new system uses normalized values where possible so it can support gradual changes between different stages, which means effects in the future can also cause fractions of a change for very slow acting transformations.
Status Effects
While traits represent details about your character's appearance, status effects represent anything affecting your character that cannot be seen or impact combat. Status effects are displayed similarly to buffs and debuffs and help you and others get an immediate impression of the things, good or bad, affecting your character. There are already 38 images for status effects with distinct motives to help group effects that a similar with unique details to set them apart.
Speech Impediments
Speech impediments are now shown as status effects that will reflect the specific speech impediment you are affected by, and any mental speech impediment will stay hidden until you actually perform an action that reveals the effects. Say, speaking with your mouth gagged is not enough to reveal if you are suffering from sounding like a Bimbo. Speech impediments have also received additional ranks, and it's easier to give someone a speech impediment without causing a severe impediment that makes them unintelligible.
Restrained
Restrained is a new effect caused by having your ability to use your arms and hands limited. Quadruped and being a Blow Up Doll causes your character to become restrained.
Hindered
Hindered is a new effect caused by having your ability to use your legs limited. Hindered can be caused by having your legs cuffed or being a Blow Up Doll.
'Recently' Effects
Recently defeated and transformed are now tracked as status effects so players can track how much time has passed since they were last defeated or transformed.
Hucow
The Hucow virus is now treated as a disease, an ailment that triggers whenever you spend an action. The hucow effect uses a class card that will cause you to turn more and more into a hucow until you have filled out the card, at which point, you will become immune to the disease. While you still suffer from becoming a hucow, the disease can spread to other players, but it won't become active until the encounter they contracted the disease from ends.
Spell Changes
All spells are now account-wide, meaning players will no longer have to relearn spells on new characters and once you learn a spell, it will be available to all characters with the proper skill. Instead, some spells will be directly linked to a particular skill or skill level, such as Polymorph, which is learned from Transfiguration. The whole spell pipeline has been largely removed. Previously, spells, effects, and event messages were interchained, meaning in order to change a character, it would have to use a spell, and the spell would then write an appropriate message to the combat log depending on the outcome. Spells, effects, and event messages have been separated into different systems. Spells can still be used to cause effects, but effects and changes to a character no longer have to go through a spell, and event messages are caused by tracked character changes instead of spell outcomes.
Class Cards
Class cards are a new system used to define a group of possible changes that can be inflicted on a character. They are designed in such a way that it's easy to expand the game with new cards instead of having complex spells for handling sets of changes, which the Polymorph spell used to be. The polymorph spell now instead uses a different class card for each animal form, like a punch card for possible traits to inflict on the character, where it will go with the first valid trait to punch. A class card is also used for the hucow virus, and they will play a big role in the PvE overhaul, where the game will keep track of punched cards between encounters and use it to make NPCs more likely to work together in a shared goal to make the player spiral towards a particular outcome instead of causing random effects that might even negate one another. The concept of class cards will make expanding the game with new spells and effects much easier than it was in the past, while also making it easy for NPCs to understand how best to change a player with the powers available to them.
New Spell: Change Height
In preparation for dynamic avatars, the game now supports custom heights for your character that will be reflected by dynamic avatars. Until then, you can still see your character's height from the tooltip of your shirt equipment slot, and a new spell has been introduced that allows players to change the height of themselves and others in more subtle ways than the old Enlarge and Shrink spells. Enlarge and Shrink have also been updated, and now change a character's size by multitudes with each stage. Enlarge increases your size by increments of 100% (200%, 300%, 400%), and Shrink halves your size each time (50%, 25%, 12.5%), based on your height. When you cast the change height spell, the floating input field used for unstacking and setting prices will appear with a special layout that allows you to set a height using a slider or centimeters or feet and inches. The game will attempt to guess which unit you prefer based on your location, but you can also set which unit system you want to use for lengths from the game's settings.
New Spell: Magic Bolt
Magic Bolt is a new spell that deals damage without causing any effects. It's a useful spell for when you just want to deal extra damage, but its introduction has a higher purpose. Spells will no longer spend actions or deal damage before it is successful, so if you attempt to change someone in a way that fails, you will be able to choose another spell to try or use Magic Bolt just to deal the damage, giving you more control over how you want to spend your spell actions with less risk of wasting actions on a spell that didn't do what you wanted.
Change Name
The Give Name spell has been renamed to Change Name to better match other spells that change basic information about a character. The floating input field is now used for this spell as well, and will validate names before you submit them to the server and tell you what is wrong with an invalid name.
Scenes
The game has suffered from how difficult and time-consuming it has been to write for the game and expand it with new logic. Another big change with this update has been to prepare the content pipeline for the PvE overhaul and make sure writing for the game can be done efficiently. The scene interpreter script has been my Elephant Graveyard (you must never go there, Simba) for a really long time, because of how intricate and easily breakable it has been, but with this update, I finally faced it down and did some massive refactoring on the code to make it much easier to read and expand without the risk of breaking it. It's a lot more powerful and useful than it was before, and I even have plans on adding Twine support so it can turn scenes written in Twine into scenes in the game. Among other things, authors are now able to use and test spells and class cards, which means instead of checking numerous traits and effects on a character, they can simply say what they want to do and the game will tell them whether it would be successful and what the outcome would be. They can then use that outcome to write the scene before applying the spell or class card to the character.
Sex Acts Temporarily Disabled
Due to the changes to the scene interpreter, I've had to remove or disable some outcomes for the time being. Sex acts have been temporarily disabled and I will release the previous sex acts and more as I have time to go them through and update them to use the new syntax and commands. The gardener encounter and some class punishments have also been disabled. These were planned to be rewritten for the PvE overhaul, regardless, so I didn't want to go through with rewriting them for this update, just to do it over with the next. So I have decided to remove those for now so I can focus on writing some even better content for the next update instead.
All Active Scenes Aborted
The changes to scenes have also meant many active scenes don't actually work anymore, so to avoid any issues with deprecated scenes and wasting a lot of time, I have decided to simply abort all active scenes.
Recovery During Scenes
When quitting the game while a scene is playing, the game will now remember your character's body, mind, and spells when the scene resumes. This is to prevent players from recovering during a scene and is done in preparation for the PvE overhaul. Actions are unaffected and will continue to recover during a scene. Similarly, most effects with a timer also won't progress during a scene, such as your breasts deflating. If you enter a scene with inflated breasts, it will stay that way for the course of the scene unless the scene explicitly does something to change it. This is to make sure nothing changes during a scene without the author knowing.
Sex Toys
Sex toys have been added to the game, introducing a means for players to reduce their lust between encounters and allowing for several new exciting forms to inflict on other players for those who enjoy inanimate-themed content. Hilda now has a new tab for sex toys that players can buy. Almost 200 scenes have been written for using these toys in different ways and under different conditions that should help keep things fresh. Sex toys are also the first items that have actions that become available based on conditions, and have different states that can affect how it looks and can be used.
Webshop
The game now has a webshop where players can support the game through one-time purchases of in-game items. These items will be purchasable through Steam once the Steam version is released, where I hope they will help the game to be favored by the Steam algorithm, and I've decided to release the online webshop in advance to avoid a situation where I have to juggle a simultaneous webshop and Steam release, or where players using the web version are forced to use the Steam version to access items in the shop. All items in the shop are food-themed and can be traded with other players or eaten to gain their benefit. The food item represents your receipt, and you don't have to worry about losing the item, say by dropping it or withdrawing a character. As long as you have an unused receipt, you can reclaim the item from the shop. When an item bought in the shop is traded or sold between players on the market, the receipt will be transferred with the item, which allows free-to-play players to acquire these benefits from another player. There are currently three items that can be bought from the shop, and from today and for the rest of December and January, backers on Patreon will receive a permanent extra stash tab on their linked game account, and in March backers will receive an extra character slot.
Other Changes
Added a coin toss action to crowns.
Discovered locations and spells are now account-wide.
Plugs can no longer be inserted or removed while your ass is in chastity.
Now that players can use a Bento Box to change their username, I don't like the idea of players spending a Bento Box just to change the capitalization, so players are now able to change the capitalization of their username from account settings.
Added dictionary support for the website, client, and game servers, which is used for storing player-facing text outside of the game's code. This makes it much easier to have an editor work on the game and also adds a foundation for translation support.
Dialog text and tooltips can now scale down to make sure they fit within their containers and avoid text overflow.
Improved word-wrapping and text alignment for tooltip, so single-lines are properly centered while multi-lines are left-aligned.
Started using Map objects to optimize some client and server operations.
NPC services, such as Hilda restoring your character, no longer consume materials before the service has succeeded. When a character turns back, the game no longer looks through all items on all servers for an inanimate representation. Instead, servers keep a much shorter and search-optimized list of items that represent an inanimate character to look through.
Large data packages that are moved between game servers are now compressed to improve transfer speed.
Adjusted matchmaking.
All uses of the word elvish have been replaced by the word elven.
The website now shares more stylesheets with the game, to make things like character profiles, items, and tooltips appear similarly in-game and other places.
The website and client now use custom style sheet properties for colors and GUI scaling.
Added fetch and promise polyfill for website code to make game and website scripts more coherent and allow modern browsers to benefit from optimized processes while older browsers still function.
Added many more uses for cached data on the server to optimize frequent operations.
All over-time character changes, such as breasts deflating and anal training are now committed at once on a collective server-wide timer. Previously, all such changes were committed separately on individual timers, which caused unnecessary strain on the database.
Improved client error handling. The client is now much more likely to provide useful error messages and debug information.
Improved server error handling, in particular, errors related to spells and log-in.
Improved location synchronization between client and server.
Improved value hashing and lookup keys.
Numerous other improvements to the game stability, performance, and scalability.
ERROR FIXES
Fixed an issue where the game would display the player's own profile when trying to access another player's profile.
Fixed an issue where items bought on the market would be placed in a stash tab based on the order of creation instead of going by displayed order from left to right.
Fixed an issue where the local chat would not be hidden properly when trading with a vendor, potentially obscuring items behind the chat window.
Fixed an issue where the local chat would sometimes not scroll properly on some browsers and devices.
Fixed an issue where linking a Patreon account to a game account would fail when the Patreon account was already linked to another account, instead of replacing the old link.
Fixed an issue with the website not running properly on some older browsers it should support, due to using too modern code syntax for some operations.
Fixed an issue with the conjuration and enchantment tutorials, where the menus would stick around after the tutorial bit of the scene had ended.
Fixed an issue where scenes were sometimes not resumed properly, causing the scene to play from a different point than expected.
Fixed an issue with an incorrect character limit sometimes being shown to players
Fixed an issue where the message for being able to turn back would be shown to players who had given in since the timer started.
Fixed an issue with item conjuration not working on an item slot with a similar item already equipped, if the item wasn't also worn.
Fixed an issue that sometimes prevented the hucow virus from spreading properly
Fixed an issue with characters not starting with fractions of action and spell actions recovered when entering the game. Say, if your character had 3.3 max actions, the character would start with 3 actions instead of the appropriate 3.3 actions
Phew, that was a long update post! I've already been fixing numerous errors caused by the update and will continue to do so whenever I can find the time over the next few days. But it's in a pretty good state now and I'm going to take most of the next few days off to spend time with my family.
One Christmas Day, or First Yule Day as we call it in Denmark, I will post another message where I will tell you a little more about the permanent stash tab given to backers, but you should already have received the reward on your linked account!
Thank you so much for supporting me through this update and I will continue to work hard to bring more updates to the game, hopefully with a much smaller wait next time! ❤️
Cheers,
Tinon
