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Hey guys! Got some sketches for you over here, but I also have something else! Since I tend to post my in-progress projects over here, haha.
It's the Hunter/Smoker ukagaka/ghost! I dusted it off and did some more work on it and thought I might as well put up an early alpha/beta version for you guys to mess with, and also to test if the updating script works.
If you missed me talkin about this before or whatever, an ukagaka/ghost is basically a program that puts two little characters on your desktop. They'll chat with each other or talk to you or do little things like empty your recycle bin or whatever, but mostly they'll just keep you company. As far as I'm aware the program's totally safe and is easily removed if you're tired of it - just delete the folder.
Hunter and Smoker at this point aren't finished, as you can see by their raggedy edges here and lack of shading. That's all stuff I'll do later when I've got all the frames done. Speaking of which, they're also missing some expressions since I'm still working on drawing them, so you might notice in their conversations that they might just go back to their default at odd times. BUT I'll fill in those gaps as I get to them, haha. They DO have a handful of poses and expressions between them though, so they shouldn't be completely boring.
I also left in my "test variable" line on Hunter's menu by accident. That's just a quick throwaway line of script I put in to test certain coding or expressions. I SHOULD'VE TAKEN IT OUT BEFORE ZIPPING IT ALL UP BUT OH WELL i'll take it out next time. It doesn't hurt anything really. You might also find a few messages here and there that address me specifically that I put in as placeholders while I was working on it, haha. DON'T MIND THEM, I'LL CHANGE THEM LATER.
Some bits of dialogue from the base ghost I used as reference are still in place since I haven't decided how or if I should replace them - notably, Hunter's occasional Korean lessons. I MIGHT DROP OR CHANGE IT LATER, WHO KNOWS I guess enjoy them while they're there, haha. There are a few little bits of dialogue like that in there that'll get smoothed out or replaced eventually.
In case people get confused, I also gave Hunter a whole ton of help menus. If you double click on her, you'll get the menu in the first cap. She pretty much explains everything that the ghost can currently do that I'm aware of, so if you get confused or whatever, you can ask Hunter and she'll tell you how it works (like setting up your email with them for example). I thought it'd be handy to have an in-ghost reference in case people don't want to go to a site or entry or whatever.
I also took a million more caps over here.
HOW TO DOWNLOAD!
The preferred method would be to have SSP already installed, then download the zip and install it that way, but whatever, I'm shortcutting for now. SO basically,
Download this zip file (HSClean for now)
Unzip it into a folder.
Run the SSP.exe in it.
If you already have SSP or some other ghost program, just download this nar file and this balloon zip and drag and drop them on your program and they should automatically install.
And that's pretty much it! Hopefully SSP should run without too many problems. However Jockey might be the first one who pops up, she's also included, I forget. If she does, just right click on Jockey to bring up the main menu, then go to "Change Ghost". Hunter and Smoker should be listed, just swap over to them and they should set up for you. IDEALLY they should have an entire intro dialogue when you start them where they ask your name and whatever, but I'm not entirely sure if they'll do that (since testing it sort of requires me triggering that boot myself). IF YOU DO DECIDE TO TEST THEM OUT, LET ME KNOW IF YOU GET AN INTRO basically they'll introduce themselves and ask your name/pronouns and such. If it doesn't happen for some reason, double click Smoker and go to configuration and you can set everything there.
MAKE SURE YOU UPDATE THEM since i've added a bunch of stuff to them in the meantime
You can right click on either Smoker or Hunter to bring up menus, although Smoker's has more options since she's the "main" character technically. You can also double click their bodies to bring up their own specialized menus (this is where Hunter's how to's are, as well as more specific configuration and tasks for Smoker).
NOT ONLY THAT but you can also pet them by moving your mouse back and forth over certain areas! You can pet their heads, stroke their faces, or try to grab their boobs and butt. They do not appreciate the majority of these, as you might expect. You can also hit them by double-clicking on their faces, which they REALLY don't like. But you can do it! If you're mean that way.
They don't have a ton of dialogue right now, but hopefully it's enough to keep you sort of entertained for a bit. Right now I'm more focusing on the expressions/dialogue for their functions and stuff. I've HOPEFULLY figured out how the updating works SO, when I do new stuff, all you have to do is tell them to update, and they'll automatically connect to my server and download the new files they need. You can do it via Smoker's right click menu, Hunter's double click menu, or I think hitting ctrl-U. Hopefully I set it up right. I DUNNO I GUESS WE'LL FIND OUT
But anyway if you do decide to test them out and you find some problems or glitches or weird poses or whatever, let me know and I'll try and fix it!
Update 11/27 - [Spoiler (click to open)]Added some new features! Just tell them to update and it should hopefully go through.
-Hunter has a Rock Paper Scissors game in her menu! Try your luck! It's randomly chosen whether you win or lose, but there are a lot of different messages for each outcome. Turns out Hunter's a bit of a sore loser, haha.
-You can apologize for hitting her! Since some people said they wanted that option, haha. If you do hit her, go to the "Hunter I..." (teehee) option on her menu, and it should have an option to apologize to her. If you haven't hit her though it won't show up. I wouldn't get too crazy hitting her or anything to test this cause...
-I've started putting in the guidelines for a system that'll keep track of how Hunter and Smoker feel about you. It doesn't really do anything yet, but you know, it's in the works. However hitting either of them will drive these variables down and they do stick even if you close them. I'll probably add a "return to neutral" option in a menu somewhere at some point. As a sidenote, they each get more upset at you for hitting their partner than for hitting them personally (Hunter is angrier if you hit Smoker than if you hit her, for example). I was poking at making it so she loses a point when you win at Rock Paper Scissors and gains one if she wins, but I couldn't quite get it to work with how her responses are currently set up. I'll have to look at it more later.
-I got the alarm clock working! It's in Smoker's do things please menu. Feel free to try it out! It was a sort of... what's the word, retro... something? I dunno I built it off existing code from a super complicated ghost and my preliminary testing seemed to show it working alright but maybe you guys can find other mistakes. ONE BIG THING THOUGH is make sure after you set the alarm that the alarm is set to ON in the menu since setting the alarm doesn't automatically change that value because coding yada yada. But it should work! hopefully. There was an option to set your own ringtone for it but I couldn't quite get it to work just yet.
-On someone's suggestion, if you pet Smoker and she holds up her hand to ward you off, you can double click her hand and give her a high five. :B
-Some more random convos. As a side note, if you click on the link for Ray whenever he comes up in a convo, you can see that his explanation convo has a picture of him now! The other anchor links will eventually get their own, he's the only one who has one at the moment. Also did some minor reformatting on the date in Smoker's menu, added a counter in Hunter's for how long they've been open, just little things here and there.
11\28
[Spoiler (click to open)]-More convos! More specifically, convos with options! Occasionally they'll ask you questions and you can answer them. Sometimes your answers will affect how much they like you! This can be tricky when they don't agree on something, so you'll either gain a point for one or lose a point with the other. I FORSEE THIS BEING KINDA INTERESTING IN THE FUTURE either way, learning how to do this is pretty cool.
-Smoker has a reset feelings values thing in her menu I was using for debugging whatevs but if you've jacked up your ratings super high you can use it too, haha. Right now the feelings ratings still don't unlock anything specifically, I'm just working it in.
-More poses for Hunter! A bunch of them actually.
-Figured out the coding for the Rock Paper Scissors game so Hunter will lose/gain a point in her feelings for you depending on if she wins or loses. Yess.
11\30
[Spoiler (click to open)]-Hunter has a bunch more poses more specifically related to talking to you. :B You may see them pop up a lot more in various places.
-Hunter has a "give item?" option in her Hunter I... menu, as well as a quick thing to tell you her stats since I wanted to use test variable for something else so I had to move it. Anyway, you can see the various categories of stuff you can give her. Eventually in the future I want to make a little icon for each item that'll show up when you give it to her, but for now you'll just have to imagine it. :B
-Added how to set an alarm to Hunter's How Do I... menu, I think.
12\4 - [Spoiler (click to open)]Just tell em to update! If it doesn't work LET ME KNOW okay so I can fix it
-More poses for Hunter! I know this seems like a bunch for her but some Smoker ones should be coming up in a bit. Most of them are for talking to Smoker. I also added them into already existing convos, so you may notice her shifting around more often in things you've already heard. :B There are still some blank spots where they'll just be in default despite what they're saying though.
-I got the Weather check working! Or at least, it works for me. It's in Smoker's menu under Do Things Please! Give it a try and tell me if it works. :B I am super excited I got this working, haha. It took forever. The site I used only really has temperature and whether it's snowing/whatevs, but I may add in a second site with more detailed info once I decide on one to use. I expanded it so now it should also give you a four day forecast for your area! :D
-Some more convos of course! I also added the first one that relies on their feelings for you for its outcome. The two of them may get into a fight, and if your rating with both of them is 20 or higher, you can tell them to make up and they'll listen to you. Otherwise, they'll get annoyed you're meddling in their business and lose points for you. You can check Smoker's feelings in the lower right of her main menu since I haven't set up the Smoker I... menu yet, and Hunter's are under Stats in the Hunter I... menu. Raising Smoker's feelings for you is tougher than Hunter since she doesn't have a gift menu yet, but there are a few convos where you can gain a point or two with her. You can also temporarily use Hunter's test variable to raise it because I was using it to test the convo. :B
-I figured out how to call a third character in, so Charger may appear in the future after all! This is just mostly conjecture though since getting her to disappear is a bit trickier, but it's something that I CAN do, so there's that as well, haha.
-I added in a series of time-related convos, which should hopefully trigger at certain times of the day. You may have noticed that depending on when you boot/close them, they tend to say different things. Now they should also have some specialized things for just general chat! From around 8pm to 8am, there's also a chance that Smoker will fall asleep, haha. They both get really sleepy around midnight to 5am. I haven't done extensive testing on this yet but it SHOULD work, I think.
Somewhat related, but they also have some specialized messages for particular days for this month, so if you open them on Christmas or the start of Hannukah or New Years they'll have something to say. :B
12/5 - [Spoiler (click to open)]Just tell em to update!
-More poses for the both of them! Mostly Smoker and mostly angrier poses you'll see when they have that one argument, though there are also some smiley ones you may catch here and there. If she likes you, she may smile when she opens your menu for you now. :B I'm trying to think of a way to have the chances of her refusing to open the menu be higher if she doesn't like you, but I'm not quite sure how to do both things at once, hmm.
-The weather function as mentioned now has the forecast included if you missed it with the last update! I can't stop playing with it, haha. It's so cool! If you get an empty return from them, you might have to put in your location again or use your zip if you didn't use it before. I need to add in a bit for them to tell when the page is empty so that doesn't happen...
-Speaking of functions, Smoker has two games! I lifted them off that one other ghost, haha. The biggest one is Blackjack, which Smoker greatly enjoys as you can guess. Unfortunately the ascii symbols used for the card suits don't show up in every font, so if you aren't seeing them, you may have to change the default font they're using for their ballons. Go to the options/preferences menu, then to the next to last tab on the left, then go to overwrite balloon font. What I've got that works pretty well is Times New Roman 9pt, but you can experiment with other fonts if you think they'd look better. Some of the spacing with like Courier looks nuts though, as a warning.
Anyway it's under Smoker's main menu for now. :B As you can guess it can affect her feelings towards you, but she's not quite as sore a loser as Hunter is with Rock Paper Scissors. She'll usually gain a point if she wins, but she doesn't always lose a point if she loses. If she feels like you won by luck (like hitting 21 exactly/right away) then she may lose a point, but if she feels like you won fair and square she'll take it well. Without abusing Hunter's test variable, it's an easy way to gain points with her until I put in her gift menu.
-The other game is Tic-Tac-Toe! I'm not sure which one of them should get this at the moment, so for now it's in Smoker's menu, though I may move it over to Hunter. I'm not sure which one it fits with more. Anyway it's pretty self-explanatory, though the spacing on the lines may again look a bit odd depending on what font you set. I can't actually beat them at it, I might have to try and figure out where I can put in a randomize function or something...
-Hunter's fortune telling now has fancy looking stars! Yesssss.
12\7 - [Spoiler (click to open)]Just tell em to update!
-Smoker has some new poses, mostly her being tired and her falling asleep. There are also a few minor new ones running around for Hunter, mostly just expressions shifts or whatever, and I edited one of Smoker's that had her eye too far to the right. Mostly the new poses are for Smoker though. You'll see them a lot depending on when you open her, haha. Predictably, she's very tired in the early morning/late night.
-In related news, Smoker now falls asleep for real! She has the greatest chance of doing it from midnight to 5 am, though there's also a chance she'll doze off from 9pm to 12am, as well as 5am to 8am. :B She may also fall asleep if you try to open her menu. Anyway, while she's sleeping you should have the option pop up occasionally to wake her up or let her sleep. If you let her sleep, she'll have little Smoker dreams, haha. Some of them are good, some of them are bad, it varies. If she's having a bad dream (or if you're feeling affectionate I guess) you can pet her while she's sleeping to try and comfort her, though there's a chance she'll wake up if you do. :B REMEMBER petting just involves you moving your cursor back and forth over her, there's no clicking involved. I imagine if you're all :< at her having zombie dreams you don't want to punch her in the face by accident, haha.
It's not a perfect loop, since she'll go back to normal if a regular random conversation triggers (how often they talk depends on what you set their talk frequency to in Smoker's config menu) but it works for the most part! She has a lot of little dreams, haha.
If you don't want to wait until three am or whatever, you can also put her to sleep for now by using Hunter's test variable. :B
12\10 [Spoiler (click to open)]- Just tell em to update!
-More poses for Smoker! Most of them are her facing you and talking to you directly, so they'll mostly pop up when you personally ask her to do things. I think there are also a few loose poses for them floating around as well. I also tweaked Smoker's base a little. She also has a new pose for the weather.
-Reorganized Smoker's menu to be a bit more streamlined, and also added her Smoker, I... menu! So now you can finally apologize to her or give her things, haha. I also did some minor bugchecking and caught one for their first boot dialogue, as well as a few other things I missed here and there.
12\12 [Spoiler (click to open)]- Just tell em to update!
-I got THIS CLOSE to getting a music player working, but they keep freezing whenever I try to play the file. Everything looks fine but there's some kind of problem there, it's so frustrating. There must be something I'm missing. I'll have to look into it, but for now it's there, just dummied out.
-This isn't something you'll notice or anything, but I figured out a WAY easier way to set up surfaces and poses with different expressions than the way I've been doing. IT'S ENTIRELY BACKEND STUFF SO YOU'LL NEVER SEE IT BUT TRUST ME, IT'S PRETTY COOL and future poses will probably be done that way
-ACTUAL UPDATE i went in and added a whole ton of stuff to their touch reactions. Basically now their reaction to you touching them will change depending on your relationship! If your rating with them is above 50, they'll be a little more amenable to you petting them or touching their face, and above 100 even more so. Smoker in general will never be happy with her face being touched, but over 100 she may grudgingly enjoy being petted, things like that. She needs some tsundere type poses for it though, which will come in time, haha.
Along the same lines, if you try to pet them while their scores for you are negative, they'll be much more hostile towards you and actively lose points, so petting them if they're angry won't help you.
You might think that high ratings with them would mean you could grope them and they wouldn't mind, and you would be entirely wrong! In fact, if your rating with them is above 50 and you try to grope them, they are ANGRIER at you than they would be if you were below! Basically since around 50 they think you're a friend of theirs, they feel very betrayed that you'd try to grope them after they thought you were cool. They'll assume you were just playing nice to try and grab some boob and be really hurt and angry. If you try to grope them when they're in the negatives, they'll even just leave for a little while in disgust. BASICALLY DON'T DO IT though i like the idea of someone being caught totally off-guard by them shouting at you for doing it when they like you, haha.
Anyway you can still use Hunter's test variable to raise their ratings to test this if you want, as well as use Smoker's reset to set it back to 0, though it won't be so easy to adjust in the future. :B
12/13[Spoiler (click to open)] - Just tell em to update!
-Woo, this one is pretty big! Or at least, it was VERY complicated to pull off! It might not seem like a lot but trust me, haha. Anyway, if you look under Smoker's Interaction menu, you'll notice there's now a new section for Items! Inside you will find... a hairbrush! Yes, now you can brush their hair! :B Well... sort of.
Basically, I want to set up a variety of objects you can use to interact with them or do certain things (a hypno pendulum to put Smoker to sleep will probably come next, since that's out of the test variable now), but the brush was sort of my test subject. Anyway, you'll notice that at first it's greyed out and unselectable, since it hasn't been unlocked yet, exactly. For now, Hunter's test variable will unlock the brush, at which point you can go into Smoker's menu and select it. Then you can choose if you want to brush Smoker or Hunter's hair. :B
HOWEVER, there are as usual a few caveats. Hunter will be pretty dubious and won't let you do it unless your rating with her is over 75. If it's high enough, she'll let you go for it. It's set up like petting right now where you just move your mouse over the brush and it'll move, although I might change it to double clicking the brush if that would work better.
Smoker, as you might expect, is pretty resistant no matter how much she likes you. However, if your ratings with both of them are over 75, Hunter will step in and offer to brush Smoker's hair instead. :3 You would not BELIEVE how complicated it was setting up the surface for that particular animation too, haha. Notice how Hunter's mouth moves behind her arm even while her arm is still moving! They both independently blink! This was so tricky to set up, haha. Also the eyebrows don't clip out, in the process of doing this I figured out a much cleaner way to set those up, I'll have to go back through a bunch of surfaces.txt and rewrite things bleeh
Anyway, Hunter will brush Smoker's hair for a while, then Smoker will eventually shrug her off and they'll go back to their neutral positions. You can glitch this out in a few ways, like using right click functions with Smoker while Hunter's sprite is gone will have her reappear and you'll have two Hunters, but I think I caught the more obvious ones (I mean with the right click menu there's only so much I can do). If you double click Smoker now the two of them will go back to their defaults, since I wanted to make sure you couldn't just double click her while she was being brushed to open her menu and then end up with a Smoker and no Hunter. I tried to put in a safeguard in the clicking setup but couldn't quite get it to work, but I think this should mostly cover it. They SHOULDN'T be interrupted by random conversations and should complete the whole brushing sequence with the way I set it up, but I might be wrong. I wanted to see if I could close the sleeping loop the same way, but since it has a choice whenever it comes up that makes things a bit trickier. I mean I COULD close it at least one way, but that'd involve her waking up after one sleeping message, and I sort of like being able to tell her to sleep for several messages before she wakes up, haha. But idk, there might be a way around this. I'll have to look into it.
Oh yeah, resetting the feelings counter through Smoker's menu will also grey out the hairbrush again, if you want to mess with that. :B You can also still use Hunter's test variable to raise their ratings for you for easy experimentation. Oh, and occasionally Hunter won't disappear like she should when she goes to brush her hair, I don't know why. If you just reselect the brush again she'll probably disappear the second time. I'm not sure what causes that aside from the program lagging or something or missing its cue, it's kind of annoying but there's not a lot I can do. I set in I think a double check to make sure she's gone (or at least, will disappear when the first brushing convo comes up), but who knows. If she doesn't disappear properly then don't be too alarmed, basically, just try again and it'll probably work the second time.
12/16 - [Spoiler (click to open)]Just tell em to update!
-This one feels fairly small in comparison but I was kinda busy the last couple days. Anyway, I did some minor things here and there, mostly I think making it so most of their interaction convos won't time out, but Hunter has some new poses! Mostly she'll look drowsy or fall asleep. The chance of catching Hunter falling asleep are much rarer. I think there's only a slight chance she'll do it from midnight to 5 am, otherwise she's usually raring to go, haha. I may have to add some other random situations where she'll conk out. In the meantime, I went and added the hypno pendulum to the items! It's modeled after the one in Mother 3, haha. Anyway, you can use it to put Hunter and Smoker to sleep as you will. I had to take out the code that put Hunter back to default when you opened Smoker's menu since that made it impossible to put them both to sleep at the same time. So I guess if you double click Smoker while she's getting her hair brushed Hunter will just disappear for a bit. This is such an annoying tradeoff.
ANYWAY you don't need to meet any qualifications for the pendulum, it'll always work. They'll have little dreams on their own, but if they're both asleep, they'll have dreams about various AUs they've been in and also their other teammates like Jockey or Charger. You won't see the faded out pendulum in the item screen right away, I think because the ghost has to create the variable first to determine whether it's set to 0 or 1 since it hasn't existed until this point, but if you hit Hunter's test variable, it'll create it and that'll turn both the brush and pendulum on. Likewise, resetting their feelings with Smoker will turn them both off. They should always stay in the same order and I believe should be able to have one off or one on without too much trouble, though I don't think there's a way you could test that at the moment. Eh, in the future maybe.
Oh yeah, I also slightly rewrote the updating script so updating them should take less time, hopefully. :B
12/19 - [Spoiler (click to open)]just tell em to update!
-Mostly just poses. :B You may have noticed before that when you put the two of them on top of each other, Smoker would say something and scoot off to one side. Now when you do that, there's a chance that they'll trip and fall over each other, or that Hunter will give Smoker a hug and embarrass her, haha. :B There are a bunch of different messages for overlapping now, although if you put them directly on top of each other the scooting thing might glitch up slightly. Also the balloons seem to overlap weirdly, not sure what to do with that. Anyway, the best way to test it is probably to just have them overlap slightly, that should trigger it without having them loop (which seems to happen every now and then). If Smoker's too close to one side of the screen, she might scoot right off, though Hunter will tell you a way to get her back on if you leave her off for too long, haha.
The joint poses like these are kind of fun but are a super huge pain in the butt to set up/script as you can imagine. I should probably lay off them for a bit.
-Adjusted some other minor things that aren't so noticable. Redid parts of surfaces.txt so more of their poses should have their eyebrows set up not to clip through, and I caught a file that accidentally got deleted via delete.txt, so it should be back. I'm torn between rewriting a whole ton of surfaces in surfaces.txt to be more efficient and take less space or just leaving what I've already done there and doing any new poses the more efficient way. Decisionssss
-Oh yeah, you can pet sleeping Hunter now! For some reason I didn't feel the urge to make her pettable as strongly as I did for sleeping Smoker, haha. But she is pettable now!
12/23 [Spoiler (click to open)]- just tell em to update!
-been pretty busy lately with christmas stuff, so nothing too major. Mostly just a few poses here and there, notably Smoker's yelling back at Hunter pose, so their argument should be more complete now.
-Some new convos here and there, expanded Smoker's roster of musicals she'll reference and added in one for card games as well, so you might see her mention various games every now and then.
-Here's a bit of a planning one, maybe you guys have some thoughts. I want to add in a sort of RPG element where you can run through little quests with them that'll be set up primarily like a choose your own adventure thing, and completing quests will earn you items (like the brush and pendulum) and such. However, while poking around I've seen people setting up code for actual "battles" against enemies where it calculates the ghost's stats to decide how much damage is done/it does, that kind of thing, which is kind of neat. However, to actually add in a real battle thing, I'd have to set up some more stats for Hunter and Smoker aside from their feelings stat, which actually won't be too hard but the thing is, then I need to figure out some ways to increase those stats. While bumping their feelings by talking to them makes sense, that doesn't work so much with other stats. Going on a quest might increase stats in general, but you'd have to sort of complete the quest first, and that could lead to grinding which I want to avoid since that gets tiresome. The other option are stat increasing items, but I'd want to stop people from just spamming the same item over and over to get stats up super high. A money system might help here, although it'd also involve setting up a secondary item screen for usable items... maybe. Could also tie stat increases to how long you have them open, like for every thirty minutes or something they get a few points here and there, or maybe set up some training for stats that you can use only a certain amount of times per day (restricting by day might be harder than I think, I'll have to look into it) but idk. This might be way more work than I should be doing for something kinda goofy anyway, and maybe you guys aren't even interested in something that complex or anything. IDK WHAT DO YOU THINK
12-26 - [Spoiler (click to open)]Just tell em to update!
-Woo, this one is pretty big. I went and looked into the battle coding I mentioned before and found out it's much simpler than I thought and doesn't really need stats as is, so I did some work and migrated it in! So now you can trigger a random battle with a Rabite from Secret of Mana!
The battle option is in Hunter's menu for now, and it'll also pop up after Hunter talks about how there are no zombies around. The Rabite will appear, and you'll have a choice of attacks. Strong attacks can do a lot of damage, but can be more easily countered/blocked, weak attacks do less damage but go through more often, that kind of thing. You can also counter the Rabite's attacks and do damage or block them depending on what the Rabite does. The first one to get their hp knocked down to 0 loses! I also added a Run Away option if you get bored or if things aren't going well, and it'll always work so don't worry too much about that. This SOMETIMES does that thing where a sprite doesn't disappear when I tell it too, but just retrigger the battle and run away again and it should clear the Rabite away. You don't get anything for winning or lose anything for losing/running away right now, it's just for fun.
The Rabite's SORT of a placeholder since it was the first thing to come to mind to test it with, although I do like the idea of battling Rabites, haha. I just like Rabites. :B I feel a little weird using sprite art directly from Secret of Mana though. I may redo it later or something, it doesn't have that many frames. But for now you can enjoy the pixel Rabite, haha. It blinks and hops and will react to what you do (it'll lunge forward to attack and wince when hit). Hunter likewise has a whole new set of poses for battling. You'll notice when she's bouncing that she'll stop when talking then start bouncing again - this was surprisingly tricky to do! But having figured it out it'll be a handy thing to keep in mind in the future.
The way the system is set up is fairly flexible, so I could potentially add special abilities/magic in the future, or add in stats and have them affect the damage you do/take as well, MAYBE add in items, but I guess I'll fiddle with that as it comes. I THINK I have a way worked out to set up other monsters as well, though I'll have to add a new one first to test it. Right now, Smoker's pretty uninvolved and the Rabite will only fight Hunter. I could POTENTIALLY add in a specific monster that Smoker would fight, but it might be a bit complicated. Besides, Hunter seems more like the type to jump a wandering monster than Smoker anyway, haha.
-This is another fairly big achievement on my end, tho I dunno how impressive it'll look to you guys if you don't see the backend coding like I do, haha. But anyway the Rabite HAS ITS OWN SPECIAL BALLOON! Figuring out how to do this is AWESOME because this means I can give Charger her own balloon when she eventually shows up. I felt weird about her potentially inheriting Hunter or Smoker's, so this is great. The Rabite's balloon should also have a different font and color than the others (if you didn't override the balloon font selection in the SSP preferences anyway).
Unfortunately, balloons are sort of separate from ghosts for odd reasons, so I don't think their balloons will update along with their normal network update. So I zipped up the new balloon folder with the Rabite balloon, which you can download here. You can TRY dragging and dropping that zip file onto Hunter and Smoker while they're running and seeing if they'll install the balloon, but it might be a little awkward since they should already have their balloon installed, I dunno how well it handles balloon updates. I'm not sure, I haven't tested this yet. But the more reliable/easy way to do this is just to unzip the hsballoon.zip into the SSP(or HSClean depending on which version you downloaded)/balloon/for_H&S/ folder. Just overwrite everything in the for_H&S folder. If you look in there and see a dwballoon.psd file, then you should be set. Then trigger the battle and see if the Rabite's balloon pops up! It should be a fairly simple black and white pixel thing that vaguely resembles a Dragon Warrior menu, teehee.
I don't anticipate making a lot more balloons, so I'm thinking the next time you'll have to do this will be for Charger's balloon and then that'll be it.
1/9 - [Spoiler (click to open)]Just tell them to update.
A lot of mostly terrible things have happened since the last update, if you've been wondering where I've been. Working on this is sort of comfortingly mind-numbing though... the coding moreso than the images. Anyway... this is a fairly big update, a good chunk of new stuff.
-There are two new items in Smoker's item menu. The first one is a book with an anchor on it. This is a default item that you don't have to find or earn, it'll always be active. You've probably noticed the hyperlinked names in their conversations by now, and how if you click them you'll get an explanation of that person. They're generally referred to as anchors in the coding, thus the anchor on the book. Anyway, the book will keep track of each anchor link you click on. Once you click one, it'll be added and you can retrigger it whenever you want. This is handy to me mostly as an easy way to test anchor links without having to find the right convo (Space Pony's was always tricky since he only gets randomly mentioned as a weird item you can give them) or use Hunter's test variable, but I thought you guys might also find it useful as well. Unfortunately the flags for each anchor haven't existed until now, so you'll have to click each one again to add them to the book. They should be marked with ???? and then fill in with the name when you find it. I also added David as an anchor link, I probably should have done that earlier. I may add more names to the book as they're needed. the anchor book will also come in handy for the second part of this update.
-The second item is a walkie talkie (vaguely modeled after Snake's walkie in Metal Gear 2). The flags that determine whether or not it's on didn't exist until now, so it might not immediately appear in the item menu. The easiest way to fix this is to hit Smoker's feelings reset (this will also reset/create some other new variables, so you should do this anyway). To turn the walkie on so you can use it, use Hunter's test variable. You can use the walkie talkie to...
-call Charger! Yes I added Charger, finally. When she first appears, she may be positioned weirdly or her balloon might be off (more on her balloon in a second), but if you move her to where you want, she'll stay there and always reappear in that same place. There's not much I can do to fix that I think, so you'll just have to adjust her yourself. Anyway, Charger will always appear with the walkie, but there is also a 5% chance she will appear at the end of Smoker's "where's Charger" convo as well. Shoot, I forgot to add the flag for turning the walkie on if that happens. Well I'll fix that in the future. For the moment, she only has the one pose with a few different expressions, though that'll change in the future as I add them.
Once she appears, "chargermode" turns on, which changes several things around. When Charger is on the screen, Hunter and Smoker'll shift over to a specific set of conversations that include her in some way (since I thought it'd be weird to just have Charger standing there all :| while the two of them talk like she's not there). They will ONLY use this Charger set until she leaves. Likewise, some of the anchor links will change when Charger's on the screen - off the top of my head, she'll say something different about David, Jockey, herself, and Mousey. I may add more to the others as I go along. This is another reason why the anchor book is handy.
-Charger has her own double click menu, though it's a little sparse right now since I'm not sure what to give her. You can change her name, which I sort of decided to enable at the spur of the moment, so until you either give her a new name or set her to her default, some of the conversations will look weird probably. I'd recommend doing that first, once you set it the first time it should fix it.
Anyway, you can ask her questions but more notably, you can ask her how she feels about Hunter and Smoker. She'll give her normal :| answers, but things get more interesting if you put Hunter or Smoker to sleep with the hypno pendulum. If one of them is asleep, she'll be a little more forward, but still pretty neutral. However, if BOTH of them are asleep, she'll actually get ~real~ with you and tell you what she really thinks about them. Mostly she wants you to take care of them and be nice because she loves them. :<
Doing this involved setting up some sleeping flags, which I might be able to use later, but the bothsleeping flag is trickier to pull off. Right now it's not exactly perfect... for Charger to register both of them as asleep, you need to put them both to sleep first, then wait for the dialogue box to come up asking if you want them to keep sleeping or wake up. Tell them to keep sleeping, then you can ask Charger about either of them and get her realtalking. I might be able to set up a better check for this in the future, I dunno, but this'll work for now.
Oh, the sleeping flags don't kick in when either of them fall asleep naturally, ie around 1-5 am or when Smoker falls asleep when you open her menu. Unless you wait for the dialogue box to come up, then it'll work. Those are pretty rare anyway, though.
-Charger will stay on screen until you reload the ghost or close them. You'll have to call her again when they boot up. As mentioned they have a pool of Chargerconvos but at the moment it's still fairly small, and also Hunter doesn't have any sprites facing left so unless you shuffle em around she'll always look like she's talking to Smoker. Assuming you have Hunter on the left and Smoker on the right to begin with, I can't stop you from putting them wherever you want on the screen. Anyway I'll expand the options as time goes along. If you get bored, you can tell Charger to leave via her menu, and she SHOULD go. If she doesn't just ask her again, sometimes the sprite disappearing thing doesn't work like it should.
Figuring out how to set the randomconvos to a limited pool of certain responses will be super handy in the future though for various things I have planned.
-Charger has her own feelings counter, although I'm really not sure what to do with it just yet. It's there though, and Hunter's test variable will also increase it by 20 with the others and Smoker's reset will reset it to 0 (this is one reason I wanted you to hit her reset first, otherwise Charger's stats get all screwy). You can give her items like the others too. Like Hunter and Smoker, you can also pet her or try to grope her, and, like them, your feelings rating will change her reaction. She'll never be entirely happy with petting, but over 100 she'll be okay-ish with it. Stroking her face never really goes over well, no matter how high you are, and, like with Hunter and Smoker again, if you try to grope her while your rating with her is over 50, she'll get really upset at you for betraying her trust. If you try groping her while under 0, she'll just leave, and unlike Hunter or Smoker, she'll actually stay gone until you call her with the walkie again. You can check your rating with her via the stats option in her "Charger, I..." menu.
And, just like Hunter and Smoker, you can hit Charger by double clicking her face. Be warned though - doing this makes Hunter and Smoker EXTREMELY angry at you, to the point where they will refuse to open their menus until you apologize to Charger via her Charger I... menu. Once you apologize to Charger, they'll let you use their menus again. However, hitting Charger also makes the two of them take a big hit to their feelings for you, and apologizing to Charger DOESN'T fix that. You'll have to make it up to them in other ways. I meant to shift the random convos so that they'll even refuse to talk at all until you apologize, but I forgot. In the future though.
-Eventually you should be able to use items with Charger like the brush or pendulum, but that'll come along when I do the sprites and such.
-Right, I mentioned Charger's balloon up there. This is a similar situation to the Rabite balloon from the last update. Speaking of which, I hope you did a random battle since then, cause otherwise some of Charger's convos might not work right. Anyway, Charger has her own balloons, but I also did some editing on the spacing with Hunter and Smoker's balloons and fixed some things that were bugging me, so on the whole they should be a bit cleaner looking.
I added the new files and rezipped the balloon here. Just unzip it into your HSClean/balloon directory (or SSP/balloon, or wherever you installed SSP). Basically, you want to overwrite everything in the HSClean\balloon\for_H&S folder with what's in the zip. If you look in there after it all and see ballooncharger.psd, then you should be set. Can also check by seeing if Charger has her own balloon, obviously. You might be able to drag and drop the zip on Hunter and Smoker while they're running to install it/update it, but I haven't tried it myself.
1/12 - [Spoiler (click to open)]Just tell em to update!
-Nothing too major here, just mostly closing some loopholes. Vel helpfully pointed out some potential actions that can cause Hunter to glitch out of her random battle, thus leaving a Rabite to hop around your screen. Now, when Hunter is in battle, you can't access Charger, Smoker, or Hunter's menus until it's done. I also shifted Smoker's base pose so you can't punch her either while it's going on. However, you CAN punch Charger still and knock Hunter out of the battle, but that'll be fixed once I start doing alternate poses for Charger so it's a temporary oversight.
-If you punch Charger, she now won't leave until you apologize to her. Mostly this is because if you punched her and then asked her to go, she would just leave and this would trap Hunter and Smoker in a loop where they'd refuse to open their menus for you until you apologized, but you can't apologize to Charger if she's not there and there'd be no way to call her back unless you had the menus. OOPS. Anyway now Charger will stick around until you apologize to her, and also Hunter and Smoker have a set pool of random convos they'll switch to after you do it as well hinting that you should MAYBE APOLOGIZE MAYBE. You can always just close or reload them if you don't want to apologize/glitched it out some way (tell me how you do this if this is the case) and that'll reset them. Hunter and Smoker take you punching Charger very seriously.
-The Hypno Pendulum now has a better check for their sleep flags so if you do put them both to sleep, Charger should immediately be able to do her realtalking convos instead of you having to wait for the menu to come up. Still haven't figured out an easy way to set the flag for them falling asleep naturally though, so you'll still have to wait for the "let her sleep?" option to come up on those for it to register.
-That stupid problem where sprites sometimes don't disappear properly still plagues me, but it's not a huge problem most of the time, it just looks sort of weird. However the Rabite is different since you can't get rid of it unless you start a new battle, so I put in a check for it if it's on the screen. It won't be immediate, so the Rabite will hop around for a while, but when Hunter and Smoker shift back to their default poses, the Rabite will disappear as well. Or should, anyway. I wish there was a faster/more reliable way to do this check but I guess this'll work.
-Added a bunch of Charger convos, most of them time related, so there are now Charger specific convos relating to January, Winter in general, and the various times of day (early morning, morning, lunch, afternoon, evening, late night, midnight, that sort of thing). There's a whole bunch of these so hopefully you'll see a few of them depending on when you have them open. I've been neglecting Hunter and Smoker's convos lately but since the Charger set is so new and so small, I want to try and shore it up a bit. Possibly some new sprites will come next, who knows.
By the way guys if you do notice bugs or weird behavior let me know - since I'm the one coding them I automatically think about the right way to trigger an action or whatever, but a lot of the time people might do something totally different, haha. But if I know about any bugs I can try to fix them! So let me know if you find something weird (that I didn't already mention, like punching Charger during Hunter's battle).
1-19 - [Spoiler (click to open)]Just tell em to update!
Another big delay but I've been distracted with another thing I want to get done by the end of the month, haha. And this is a small one consequently, but it's something, right?
-Caught a bug where Smoker's charger convo would turn Chargermode on, even if she wasn't actually around.
-Added some convos for January and February, as well as the days of the week, for Hunter and Smoker. It took me forever to get the day ones to pop up, haha. But they're there. They'll only come up if Charger's not around though.
Along the same lines, I also added some boot dialogue for various holidays coming up through January and February up to International Women's Day in March. :B So if you run them on certain days you should get specific messages when they start.
1-29 - [Spoiler (click to open)]Just tell em to update!
A bit more substantial this time. I really don't want this to be one of those projects I lose interest in and abandon (like so many others) after making so much progress on it, I gotta stick with it. But anyway
-Redid a certain pose of Hunter's that I didn't like (surface515.png if you're curious). It was driving me crazy before but I like the new one much better, so you'll probably see it more often from now on.
-Did some facing left poses for Hunter for when she talks to Charger. I can't control how you line them up or where you put them on your comp but if you line em up at the bottom of the screen with Charger on her left she should now look like she's talking to her. :B It's a fairly basic default pose and there aren't any more specific reaction shots like surprise or whatever, but she covers a lot of different expressions so that's something. However at one point I had to redo some of the coding in surfaces.txt because of dumb layering issues I zoned out on and I had to redo all the dialogue tags, and i THINK I caught them but if you notice Hunter with a sort of bizarre expression or something at one point let me know, I might have missed one of them.
I did figure out some coding tricks for surfaces.txt with these poses that definitely condense and simplify dealing with Hunter's ears moving and her eyebrows and whatever. On the technical side this means future poses with Hunter will be much simpler coding wise and take up far less space and be more flexible, but on the user side you probably won't notice much of that. :B It's just a note to myself really.
-Charger has some convos set up for February, for when that rolls around. I also added my name to the link book since they drop it all the time and I thought it might make things a bit easier. The quickest way to add it is to use Hunter's "report a bug" option in her menu, since she says my full name in that one, then you can just click it from there.
-I'm considering putting in an option for the random battles where you can "switch" out Hunter for Smoker (or Charger) if she's around, although it'll require a bit of tricky coding to pull off. I'm not sure what to give Smoker for a weapon though... Hunter just punches, but if I gave Smoker her gun where would she aim it? Straight ahead? For short monsters like the Rabite she's going to look like she's missing and also like she's shooting her friends if they're in the way. Maybe I'll give her her bat, although another problem is figuring out how to align them all properly when the monster appears... you may have to manually realign them. I dunno, maybe it's too much of a hassle, but hmm.
-Oh yeah, I found a minor bug. If Smoker does the first part of her Charger convo, then you call Charger with the walkie talkie before the second part, she'll finish her chain and then Chargermode will be set to off until you send Charger away and call her again. The reason this happens is because of how I fixed the bug last time... basically if the convo calls Charger, chargermode turns on, but if it doesn't it specifically turns it off. If you have Charger present before the second part, it turns chargermode off even though she's there. Maybe I can set a flag for the second part to check if Chargermode is already on or something, that could be workable. I'll probably do that next time.
2-3 - [Spoiler (click to open)]just tell em to update! Pretty big this time around.
-You'll notice that there's now a small heart icon in the bottom corner of all their menus. This heart will dynamically change depending on your relationship with them - it'll fill as they grow fonder of you and lower when they dislike you. You can see it in action by messing with Hunter's test variable (+20 to all feelings) or Smoker's reset feelings (all feelings to 0) one. The lowest it can get is a black heart. You can also click the heart for a quick shortcut to their stat screen to see exactly where you stand with them. Much easier! I still need to fancy up that screen once I figure out how I want it to look...
Likewise, you'll also see a snowflake symbol on the other side, which is just a symbol for winter. :B There's also one for summer, fall, and spring now too, which you'll see during the appropriate seasons.
-I forgot to mention this last time, but I added an item explanation in Hunter's 'I have questions!' menu. I also added an explanation of the feelings system there, which feature a surprise cameo from myself, haha. I manage to cram both an EarthBound ref, Sabrous ref, and a Mother 3 ref into one convo, yesss
I really need to reorganize Hunter's menu already...
-The sleep system! Here's where all the major changes have taken place. You can now put Charger to sleep like the others, and the option will appear/disappear depending on if she's around like you'd expect. However, since Charger is not a hard-coded character like Hunter and Smoker (she appears to be, but ukagaka are supposed to have two characters, 0 and 1, and a lot of functions only work with those two, it's technical), I had to do her sleep cycles a bit differently. When she's asleep, they'll shift over to a pool of sleeping convos and just do those until she wakes up. You can wake Charger up by double clicking her, and there's also one specific convo that will lead to a chain where she'll wake up naturally. You can also pet her while she's asleep if she's having bad dreams. :> Though that also has a chance of waking her up.
In the process I decided, for consistency and to make it a little less pester-y, to shift Hunter and Smoker's sleep convos to a separate pool as well instead of having you have to confirm it each time. So now when you put them to sleep, they'll just naturally cycle through their responses, and like Charger, one will lead to them waking up and you can also wake them up by opening their menus or rarely by petting them.
Their solo sleep convos if Charger's around will mostly be the same, but a few will change. Along the same lines, there are unique convo pools for the various combinations of sleeping characters (Charger and Hunter asleep, Smoker and Charger asleep, all of them asleep). I just realized I forgot Hunter and Smoker asleep while Charger's there, oops. Well I can do that for next time. But basically there's a whole bunch of new convos available depending on who's asleep and who's awake.
3-3 - [Spoiler (click to open)]UGH I CAN'T BELIEVE IT TOOK ME THIS LONG blaaargh I need to get back on the ball. I should get started on the quest system or something. Anyway, just tell em to update!
-Hunter has a new pose that you might catch every now and then, and Smoker has a concerned one and an angry/embarrassed one you might spot here and there. The easiest way to see the embarrassed one is to try and stroke her face when your relationship with her is high, although it sometimes might show up for when you pet her head too when it's high.
-They should now have convos for March and Spring in general, with and without Charger.
-Caught a minor bug with Smoker's wherescharger chain that kept turning Charger mode on even if she wasn't there. That chain I swear to god. You can still glitch it out by calling Charger in the middle of it. I've got to set up a better way to check for that.
-Caught a few minor graphical errors where a random black pixel was appearing on Smoker's face while her mouth was moving. Turns out I just need to make sure the top left pixel in the pna file isn't white, durrr. Well, something to keep in mind for the future.
-Finished all the sleep convo combinations I think. If you put Hunter and Smoker to sleep while Charger’s awake, you might even catch Charger cracking a joke (!!).
-OH YEAH they should have a few (angry) things to say if your relationship with them both is below 0 but I can’t remember if I tested this or not.
5-6 - [Spoiler (click to open)]I'VE BEEN NEGLECTING THEM SOB but anyway just tell them to update!
-This isn't a huge update or anything mostly, but they should have things to say for April (tho you can't see them unless you reset your clock durrr) and May, with or without Charger. I think they also have a few random new convos here and there.
-I reorganized Hunter's menu! So now it is a bit less messy, haha.
-Smoker's reset option now let's you choose if you want to reset their feelings, the items, or both at the same time.
-I've got most of the outline down for the first quest, so presumably if I get it together that should come next.
6-17 - [Spoiler (click to open)]GETTING BACK INTO THIS just tell em to update!
-They should have convos for Summer and June in general, with or without Charger.
-Charger has three new poses - a tired/waking up one, a thoughtful one, and a shocked one. You'll probably see them most often if you play around with the hypno-pendulum and waking her up. This also covers up that hole where you could hit Charger in the middle of a battle with Hunter and break the sequence, so you shouldn't be able to do that anymore! Hurray!
6-19 - [Spoiler (click to open)]Just tell em to update!
-Charger now has convos for the day of the week! A lot of them got longer than I intended, haha. There's one for Tuesday that I particularly like. :B Also added another one to January since I noticed that one only had three (there are usually four convos for each day/week/month/time whatever).
-Charger has a new convo where they'll ask her what she thinks about you. Her response will change depending on your relationship with her, although if she doesn't like you, Hunter and Smoker's relationship with you will also take a hit. They are v protective of her, haha.
-I noticed the feelings reset made the numbers go screwy when it reset to 0, so now it resets to 1 instead, which smoothed things out a bit.
-Did some minor tweaks on a few poses here and there, nothing hugely noticable I think.
-This is kind of frustrating on my end, but most of the work I did was entirely on backend stuff that you'll never see or notice. IT IS INVISIBLE WORK so no one will even know I spent all that time on it. But basically (HERE COMES BORING CODING STUFF) there's surfaces.txt right, which keeps track of all the different poses they have. When I first started with them I didn't really know what I was doing so I coded their poses in this very long and tedious way. Only when Charger came around did I figure out a much quicker and simpler way to set up a pose, but I didn't want to go back and recode all the existing dialogue I've done. On the other hand, finding the specific pose I wanted in a sea of nearly identical duplicates also took forever.
In the end, I went through the file and finally redid a lot of surfaces coding so now there are certain "base" poses I can refer back to, which HOPEFULLY will make it easier for me to set up a pose I want without flipping through dozens of duplicates. I also went through and fixed a dumb coding thing for all the other poses I did before I realized this, so if you noticed on some poses that their eyebrows would disappear when they blinked, that shouldn't happen anymore, haha. It was annoying to have to scroll through the file fixing all these going DARN IT PAST SELF YOU IDIOT WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO FIGURE OUT HOW THIS WORKS ALREADY
Anyway this was a whole ton of work you won't notice or see HURRAY. On the other hand at least it's done, so that's something anyway. This SHOULDN'T have impacted any of their poses but I could have missed something somewhere. If you notice an odd pose let me know and I'll see if I can track it down.
9-7 - [Spoiler (click to open)]Just tell em to update! HUGE GAP I KNOW
-They should have convos for June, July, August, and September with and without Charger, and with Charger they should have a few for Fall in general. This might not seem like a lot (especially since you won't even see most of it unless you set your computer's clock back some months) but writing and coding the dialogue in this thing can be very timeconsuming, haha.
9-27 - [Spoiler (click to open)]Just tell em to update! This one is fairly big, haha. Well, in a way.
-They should have a set of convos for Fall in general by themselves now.
-I added PNA files for everything! What this means is that they're going to look a lot smoother while on your desktop. I don't even know how many people will notice (or have even downloaded them) but it looks nicer to me, so that's what counts I guess. I also went through and did some fiddly minor edits to get rid of some annoying black pixels in places. Mostly, if you ever noticed Hunter or Smoker with an odd black pixel in the white of their eyes, that wasn't intentional! After a bit of experimentation with the PNA files and setting up a one pixel color block in the top left corner, I think I managed to get rid of all of these. I also fixed one annoying thing in one of Smoker's poses where the top left pixel of her mouth would get transparent, but there's another one I noticed after uploading all the files that I'll probably fix next time, bah.
Anyway this is some 250 or so new files so uh ENJOY THE LONG UPDATE
11-9 - Just tell em to update!
-I updated the zip/nar files above, so if you haven't downloaded them before, if you download those they should be up to date. Or if you just wanted to skip all the pna file downloading, haha. Though be warned, installing anew will reset all their relationships and such. But anyway, the zip and the nar are up to date now.
-I lightened Smoker's speech balloon slightly to make it a bit easier to read, so I also updated the balloon zip as well. Just download that and unzip it into the ssp/balloon directory, it should just rewrite a few files in the for_H&S balloon folder.
(If you downloaded the whole zip file above, I also included the balloon fix in that, so you don't have to worry)
-I changed a bit of their update dialogue so it should be a bit faster. Hopefully. I'll have to find a way to test this myself at some point.
-I added a new feature of sorts! You can find it Smoker's menu, under something along the lines of "Can you cheer me up?" Basically, you can ask the two of them to either give you support or motivation. Support is just kind of nice things meant for if you're feeling a bit down, and motivation is to try and get you to finish whatever it is you're working on. I've been meaning to add this feature for like ages but finally got around to doing it just now, haha. It's pretty self-indulgent but hey, maybe you guys'll enjoy messing with it. I'm considering adding some specific ones for Charger if she's around but the way I have it set up right now makes that a bit picky, I dunno. I'll have to look into it.
It's the Hunter/Smoker ukagaka/ghost! I dusted it off and did some more work on it and thought I might as well put up an early alpha/beta version for you guys to mess with, and also to test if the updating script works.
If you missed me talkin about this before or whatever, an ukagaka/ghost is basically a program that puts two little characters on your desktop. They'll chat with each other or talk to you or do little things like empty your recycle bin or whatever, but mostly they'll just keep you company. As far as I'm aware the program's totally safe and is easily removed if you're tired of it - just delete the folder.
Hunter and Smoker at this point aren't finished, as you can see by their raggedy edges here and lack of shading. That's all stuff I'll do later when I've got all the frames done. Speaking of which, they're also missing some expressions since I'm still working on drawing them, so you might notice in their conversations that they might just go back to their default at odd times. BUT I'll fill in those gaps as I get to them, haha. They DO have a handful of poses and expressions between them though, so they shouldn't be completely boring.
I also left in my "test variable" line on Hunter's menu by accident. That's just a quick throwaway line of script I put in to test certain coding or expressions. I SHOULD'VE TAKEN IT OUT BEFORE ZIPPING IT ALL UP BUT OH WELL i'll take it out next time. It doesn't hurt anything really. You might also find a few messages here and there that address me specifically that I put in as placeholders while I was working on it, haha. DON'T MIND THEM, I'LL CHANGE THEM LATER.
Some bits of dialogue from the base ghost I used as reference are still in place since I haven't decided how or if I should replace them - notably, Hunter's occasional Korean lessons. I MIGHT DROP OR CHANGE IT LATER, WHO KNOWS I guess enjoy them while they're there, haha. There are a few little bits of dialogue like that in there that'll get smoothed out or replaced eventually.
In case people get confused, I also gave Hunter a whole ton of help menus. If you double click on her, you'll get the menu in the first cap. She pretty much explains everything that the ghost can currently do that I'm aware of, so if you get confused or whatever, you can ask Hunter and she'll tell you how it works (like setting up your email with them for example). I thought it'd be handy to have an in-ghost reference in case people don't want to go to a site or entry or whatever.
I also took a million more caps over here.
HOW TO DOWNLOAD!
The preferred method would be to have SSP already installed, then download the zip and install it that way, but whatever, I'm shortcutting for now. SO basically,
Download this zip file (HSClean for now)
Unzip it into a folder.
Run the SSP.exe in it.
If you already have SSP or some other ghost program, just download this nar file and this balloon zip and drag and drop them on your program and they should automatically install.
And that's pretty much it! Hopefully SSP should run without too many problems. However Jockey might be the first one who pops up, she's also included, I forget. If she does, just right click on Jockey to bring up the main menu, then go to "Change Ghost". Hunter and Smoker should be listed, just swap over to them and they should set up for you. IDEALLY they should have an entire intro dialogue when you start them where they ask your name and whatever, but I'm not entirely sure if they'll do that (since testing it sort of requires me triggering that boot myself). IF YOU DO DECIDE TO TEST THEM OUT, LET ME KNOW IF YOU GET AN INTRO basically they'll introduce themselves and ask your name/pronouns and such. If it doesn't happen for some reason, double click Smoker and go to configuration and you can set everything there.
MAKE SURE YOU UPDATE THEM since i've added a bunch of stuff to them in the meantime
You can right click on either Smoker or Hunter to bring up menus, although Smoker's has more options since she's the "main" character technically. You can also double click their bodies to bring up their own specialized menus (this is where Hunter's how to's are, as well as more specific configuration and tasks for Smoker).
NOT ONLY THAT but you can also pet them by moving your mouse back and forth over certain areas! You can pet their heads, stroke their faces, or try to grab their boobs and butt. They do not appreciate the majority of these, as you might expect. You can also hit them by double-clicking on their faces, which they REALLY don't like. But you can do it! If you're mean that way.
They don't have a ton of dialogue right now, but hopefully it's enough to keep you sort of entertained for a bit. Right now I'm more focusing on the expressions/dialogue for their functions and stuff. I've HOPEFULLY figured out how the updating works SO, when I do new stuff, all you have to do is tell them to update, and they'll automatically connect to my server and download the new files they need. You can do it via Smoker's right click menu, Hunter's double click menu, or I think hitting ctrl-U. Hopefully I set it up right. I DUNNO I GUESS WE'LL FIND OUT
But anyway if you do decide to test them out and you find some problems or glitches or weird poses or whatever, let me know and I'll try and fix it!
Update 11/27 - [Spoiler (click to open)]Added some new features! Just tell them to update and it should hopefully go through.
-Hunter has a Rock Paper Scissors game in her menu! Try your luck! It's randomly chosen whether you win or lose, but there are a lot of different messages for each outcome. Turns out Hunter's a bit of a sore loser, haha.
-You can apologize for hitting her! Since some people said they wanted that option, haha. If you do hit her, go to the "Hunter I..." (teehee) option on her menu, and it should have an option to apologize to her. If you haven't hit her though it won't show up. I wouldn't get too crazy hitting her or anything to test this cause...
-I've started putting in the guidelines for a system that'll keep track of how Hunter and Smoker feel about you. It doesn't really do anything yet, but you know, it's in the works. However hitting either of them will drive these variables down and they do stick even if you close them. I'll probably add a "return to neutral" option in a menu somewhere at some point. As a sidenote, they each get more upset at you for hitting their partner than for hitting them personally (Hunter is angrier if you hit Smoker than if you hit her, for example). I was poking at making it so she loses a point when you win at Rock Paper Scissors and gains one if she wins, but I couldn't quite get it to work with how her responses are currently set up. I'll have to look at it more later.
-I got the alarm clock working! It's in Smoker's do things please menu. Feel free to try it out! It was a sort of... what's the word, retro... something? I dunno I built it off existing code from a super complicated ghost and my preliminary testing seemed to show it working alright but maybe you guys can find other mistakes. ONE BIG THING THOUGH is make sure after you set the alarm that the alarm is set to ON in the menu since setting the alarm doesn't automatically change that value because coding yada yada. But it should work! hopefully. There was an option to set your own ringtone for it but I couldn't quite get it to work just yet.
-On someone's suggestion, if you pet Smoker and she holds up her hand to ward you off, you can double click her hand and give her a high five. :B
-Some more random convos. As a side note, if you click on the link for Ray whenever he comes up in a convo, you can see that his explanation convo has a picture of him now! The other anchor links will eventually get their own, he's the only one who has one at the moment. Also did some minor reformatting on the date in Smoker's menu, added a counter in Hunter's for how long they've been open, just little things here and there.
11\28
[Spoiler (click to open)]-More convos! More specifically, convos with options! Occasionally they'll ask you questions and you can answer them. Sometimes your answers will affect how much they like you! This can be tricky when they don't agree on something, so you'll either gain a point for one or lose a point with the other. I FORSEE THIS BEING KINDA INTERESTING IN THE FUTURE either way, learning how to do this is pretty cool.
-Smoker has a reset feelings values thing in her menu I was using for debugging whatevs but if you've jacked up your ratings super high you can use it too, haha. Right now the feelings ratings still don't unlock anything specifically, I'm just working it in.
-More poses for Hunter! A bunch of them actually.
-Figured out the coding for the Rock Paper Scissors game so Hunter will lose/gain a point in her feelings for you depending on if she wins or loses. Yess.
11\30
[Spoiler (click to open)]-Hunter has a bunch more poses more specifically related to talking to you. :B You may see them pop up a lot more in various places.
-Hunter has a "give item?" option in her Hunter I... menu, as well as a quick thing to tell you her stats since I wanted to use test variable for something else so I had to move it. Anyway, you can see the various categories of stuff you can give her. Eventually in the future I want to make a little icon for each item that'll show up when you give it to her, but for now you'll just have to imagine it. :B
-Added how to set an alarm to Hunter's How Do I... menu, I think.
12\4 - [Spoiler (click to open)]Just tell em to update! If it doesn't work LET ME KNOW okay so I can fix it
-More poses for Hunter! I know this seems like a bunch for her but some Smoker ones should be coming up in a bit. Most of them are for talking to Smoker. I also added them into already existing convos, so you may notice her shifting around more often in things you've already heard. :B There are still some blank spots where they'll just be in default despite what they're saying though.
-I got the Weather check working! Or at least, it works for me. It's in Smoker's menu under Do Things Please! Give it a try and tell me if it works. :B I am super excited I got this working, haha. It took forever. The site I used only really has temperature and whether it's snowing/whatevs, but I may add in a second site with more detailed info once I decide on one to use. I expanded it so now it should also give you a four day forecast for your area! :D
-Some more convos of course! I also added the first one that relies on their feelings for you for its outcome. The two of them may get into a fight, and if your rating with both of them is 20 or higher, you can tell them to make up and they'll listen to you. Otherwise, they'll get annoyed you're meddling in their business and lose points for you. You can check Smoker's feelings in the lower right of her main menu since I haven't set up the Smoker I... menu yet, and Hunter's are under Stats in the Hunter I... menu. Raising Smoker's feelings for you is tougher than Hunter since she doesn't have a gift menu yet, but there are a few convos where you can gain a point or two with her. You can also temporarily use Hunter's test variable to raise it because I was using it to test the convo. :B
-I figured out how to call a third character in, so Charger may appear in the future after all! This is just mostly conjecture though since getting her to disappear is a bit trickier, but it's something that I CAN do, so there's that as well, haha.
-I added in a series of time-related convos, which should hopefully trigger at certain times of the day. You may have noticed that depending on when you boot/close them, they tend to say different things. Now they should also have some specialized things for just general chat! From around 8pm to 8am, there's also a chance that Smoker will fall asleep, haha. They both get really sleepy around midnight to 5am. I haven't done extensive testing on this yet but it SHOULD work, I think.
Somewhat related, but they also have some specialized messages for particular days for this month, so if you open them on Christmas or the start of Hannukah or New Years they'll have something to say. :B
12/5 - [Spoiler (click to open)]Just tell em to update!
-More poses for the both of them! Mostly Smoker and mostly angrier poses you'll see when they have that one argument, though there are also some smiley ones you may catch here and there. If she likes you, she may smile when she opens your menu for you now. :B I'm trying to think of a way to have the chances of her refusing to open the menu be higher if she doesn't like you, but I'm not quite sure how to do both things at once, hmm.
-The weather function as mentioned now has the forecast included if you missed it with the last update! I can't stop playing with it, haha. It's so cool! If you get an empty return from them, you might have to put in your location again or use your zip if you didn't use it before. I need to add in a bit for them to tell when the page is empty so that doesn't happen...
-Speaking of functions, Smoker has two games! I lifted them off that one other ghost, haha. The biggest one is Blackjack, which Smoker greatly enjoys as you can guess. Unfortunately the ascii symbols used for the card suits don't show up in every font, so if you aren't seeing them, you may have to change the default font they're using for their ballons. Go to the options/preferences menu, then to the next to last tab on the left, then go to overwrite balloon font. What I've got that works pretty well is Times New Roman 9pt, but you can experiment with other fonts if you think they'd look better. Some of the spacing with like Courier looks nuts though, as a warning.
Anyway it's under Smoker's main menu for now. :B As you can guess it can affect her feelings towards you, but she's not quite as sore a loser as Hunter is with Rock Paper Scissors. She'll usually gain a point if she wins, but she doesn't always lose a point if she loses. If she feels like you won by luck (like hitting 21 exactly/right away) then she may lose a point, but if she feels like you won fair and square she'll take it well. Without abusing Hunter's test variable, it's an easy way to gain points with her until I put in her gift menu.
-The other game is Tic-Tac-Toe! I'm not sure which one of them should get this at the moment, so for now it's in Smoker's menu, though I may move it over to Hunter. I'm not sure which one it fits with more. Anyway it's pretty self-explanatory, though the spacing on the lines may again look a bit odd depending on what font you set. I can't actually beat them at it, I might have to try and figure out where I can put in a randomize function or something...
-Hunter's fortune telling now has fancy looking stars! Yesssss.
12\7 - [Spoiler (click to open)]Just tell em to update!
-Smoker has some new poses, mostly her being tired and her falling asleep. There are also a few minor new ones running around for Hunter, mostly just expressions shifts or whatever, and I edited one of Smoker's that had her eye too far to the right. Mostly the new poses are for Smoker though. You'll see them a lot depending on when you open her, haha. Predictably, she's very tired in the early morning/late night.
-In related news, Smoker now falls asleep for real! She has the greatest chance of doing it from midnight to 5 am, though there's also a chance she'll doze off from 9pm to 12am, as well as 5am to 8am. :B She may also fall asleep if you try to open her menu. Anyway, while she's sleeping you should have the option pop up occasionally to wake her up or let her sleep. If you let her sleep, she'll have little Smoker dreams, haha. Some of them are good, some of them are bad, it varies. If she's having a bad dream (or if you're feeling affectionate I guess) you can pet her while she's sleeping to try and comfort her, though there's a chance she'll wake up if you do. :B REMEMBER petting just involves you moving your cursor back and forth over her, there's no clicking involved. I imagine if you're all :< at her having zombie dreams you don't want to punch her in the face by accident, haha.
It's not a perfect loop, since she'll go back to normal if a regular random conversation triggers (how often they talk depends on what you set their talk frequency to in Smoker's config menu) but it works for the most part! She has a lot of little dreams, haha.
If you don't want to wait until three am or whatever, you can also put her to sleep for now by using Hunter's test variable. :B
12\10 [Spoiler (click to open)]- Just tell em to update!
-More poses for Smoker! Most of them are her facing you and talking to you directly, so they'll mostly pop up when you personally ask her to do things. I think there are also a few loose poses for them floating around as well. I also tweaked Smoker's base a little. She also has a new pose for the weather.
-Reorganized Smoker's menu to be a bit more streamlined, and also added her Smoker, I... menu! So now you can finally apologize to her or give her things, haha. I also did some minor bugchecking and caught one for their first boot dialogue, as well as a few other things I missed here and there.
12\12 [Spoiler (click to open)]- Just tell em to update!
-I got THIS CLOSE to getting a music player working, but they keep freezing whenever I try to play the file. Everything looks fine but there's some kind of problem there, it's so frustrating. There must be something I'm missing. I'll have to look into it, but for now it's there, just dummied out.
-This isn't something you'll notice or anything, but I figured out a WAY easier way to set up surfaces and poses with different expressions than the way I've been doing. IT'S ENTIRELY BACKEND STUFF SO YOU'LL NEVER SEE IT BUT TRUST ME, IT'S PRETTY COOL and future poses will probably be done that way
-ACTUAL UPDATE i went in and added a whole ton of stuff to their touch reactions. Basically now their reaction to you touching them will change depending on your relationship! If your rating with them is above 50, they'll be a little more amenable to you petting them or touching their face, and above 100 even more so. Smoker in general will never be happy with her face being touched, but over 100 she may grudgingly enjoy being petted, things like that. She needs some tsundere type poses for it though, which will come in time, haha.
Along the same lines, if you try to pet them while their scores for you are negative, they'll be much more hostile towards you and actively lose points, so petting them if they're angry won't help you.
You might think that high ratings with them would mean you could grope them and they wouldn't mind, and you would be entirely wrong! In fact, if your rating with them is above 50 and you try to grope them, they are ANGRIER at you than they would be if you were below! Basically since around 50 they think you're a friend of theirs, they feel very betrayed that you'd try to grope them after they thought you were cool. They'll assume you were just playing nice to try and grab some boob and be really hurt and angry. If you try to grope them when they're in the negatives, they'll even just leave for a little while in disgust. BASICALLY DON'T DO IT though i like the idea of someone being caught totally off-guard by them shouting at you for doing it when they like you, haha.
Anyway you can still use Hunter's test variable to raise their ratings to test this if you want, as well as use Smoker's reset to set it back to 0, though it won't be so easy to adjust in the future. :B
12/13[Spoiler (click to open)] - Just tell em to update!
-Woo, this one is pretty big! Or at least, it was VERY complicated to pull off! It might not seem like a lot but trust me, haha. Anyway, if you look under Smoker's Interaction menu, you'll notice there's now a new section for Items! Inside you will find... a hairbrush! Yes, now you can brush their hair! :B Well... sort of.
Basically, I want to set up a variety of objects you can use to interact with them or do certain things (a hypno pendulum to put Smoker to sleep will probably come next, since that's out of the test variable now), but the brush was sort of my test subject. Anyway, you'll notice that at first it's greyed out and unselectable, since it hasn't been unlocked yet, exactly. For now, Hunter's test variable will unlock the brush, at which point you can go into Smoker's menu and select it. Then you can choose if you want to brush Smoker or Hunter's hair. :B
HOWEVER, there are as usual a few caveats. Hunter will be pretty dubious and won't let you do it unless your rating with her is over 75. If it's high enough, she'll let you go for it. It's set up like petting right now where you just move your mouse over the brush and it'll move, although I might change it to double clicking the brush if that would work better.
Smoker, as you might expect, is pretty resistant no matter how much she likes you. However, if your ratings with both of them are over 75, Hunter will step in and offer to brush Smoker's hair instead. :3 You would not BELIEVE how complicated it was setting up the surface for that particular animation too, haha. Notice how Hunter's mouth moves behind her arm even while her arm is still moving! They both independently blink! This was so tricky to set up, haha. Also the eyebrows don't clip out, in the process of doing this I figured out a much cleaner way to set those up, I'll have to go back through a bunch of surfaces.txt and rewrite things bleeh
Anyway, Hunter will brush Smoker's hair for a while, then Smoker will eventually shrug her off and they'll go back to their neutral positions. You can glitch this out in a few ways, like using right click functions with Smoker while Hunter's sprite is gone will have her reappear and you'll have two Hunters, but I think I caught the more obvious ones (I mean with the right click menu there's only so much I can do). If you double click Smoker now the two of them will go back to their defaults, since I wanted to make sure you couldn't just double click her while she was being brushed to open her menu and then end up with a Smoker and no Hunter. I tried to put in a safeguard in the clicking setup but couldn't quite get it to work, but I think this should mostly cover it. They SHOULDN'T be interrupted by random conversations and should complete the whole brushing sequence with the way I set it up, but I might be wrong. I wanted to see if I could close the sleeping loop the same way, but since it has a choice whenever it comes up that makes things a bit trickier. I mean I COULD close it at least one way, but that'd involve her waking up after one sleeping message, and I sort of like being able to tell her to sleep for several messages before she wakes up, haha. But idk, there might be a way around this. I'll have to look into it.
Oh yeah, resetting the feelings counter through Smoker's menu will also grey out the hairbrush again, if you want to mess with that. :B You can also still use Hunter's test variable to raise their ratings for you for easy experimentation. Oh, and occasionally Hunter won't disappear like she should when she goes to brush her hair, I don't know why. If you just reselect the brush again she'll probably disappear the second time. I'm not sure what causes that aside from the program lagging or something or missing its cue, it's kind of annoying but there's not a lot I can do. I set in I think a double check to make sure she's gone (or at least, will disappear when the first brushing convo comes up), but who knows. If she doesn't disappear properly then don't be too alarmed, basically, just try again and it'll probably work the second time.
12/16 - [Spoiler (click to open)]Just tell em to update!
-This one feels fairly small in comparison but I was kinda busy the last couple days. Anyway, I did some minor things here and there, mostly I think making it so most of their interaction convos won't time out, but Hunter has some new poses! Mostly she'll look drowsy or fall asleep. The chance of catching Hunter falling asleep are much rarer. I think there's only a slight chance she'll do it from midnight to 5 am, otherwise she's usually raring to go, haha. I may have to add some other random situations where she'll conk out. In the meantime, I went and added the hypno pendulum to the items! It's modeled after the one in Mother 3, haha. Anyway, you can use it to put Hunter and Smoker to sleep as you will. I had to take out the code that put Hunter back to default when you opened Smoker's menu since that made it impossible to put them both to sleep at the same time. So I guess if you double click Smoker while she's getting her hair brushed Hunter will just disappear for a bit. This is such an annoying tradeoff.
ANYWAY you don't need to meet any qualifications for the pendulum, it'll always work. They'll have little dreams on their own, but if they're both asleep, they'll have dreams about various AUs they've been in and also their other teammates like Jockey or Charger. You won't see the faded out pendulum in the item screen right away, I think because the ghost has to create the variable first to determine whether it's set to 0 or 1 since it hasn't existed until this point, but if you hit Hunter's test variable, it'll create it and that'll turn both the brush and pendulum on. Likewise, resetting their feelings with Smoker will turn them both off. They should always stay in the same order and I believe should be able to have one off or one on without too much trouble, though I don't think there's a way you could test that at the moment. Eh, in the future maybe.
Oh yeah, I also slightly rewrote the updating script so updating them should take less time, hopefully. :B
12/19 - [Spoiler (click to open)]just tell em to update!
-Mostly just poses. :B You may have noticed before that when you put the two of them on top of each other, Smoker would say something and scoot off to one side. Now when you do that, there's a chance that they'll trip and fall over each other, or that Hunter will give Smoker a hug and embarrass her, haha. :B There are a bunch of different messages for overlapping now, although if you put them directly on top of each other the scooting thing might glitch up slightly. Also the balloons seem to overlap weirdly, not sure what to do with that. Anyway, the best way to test it is probably to just have them overlap slightly, that should trigger it without having them loop (which seems to happen every now and then). If Smoker's too close to one side of the screen, she might scoot right off, though Hunter will tell you a way to get her back on if you leave her off for too long, haha.
The joint poses like these are kind of fun but are a super huge pain in the butt to set up/script as you can imagine. I should probably lay off them for a bit.
-Adjusted some other minor things that aren't so noticable. Redid parts of surfaces.txt so more of their poses should have their eyebrows set up not to clip through, and I caught a file that accidentally got deleted via delete.txt, so it should be back. I'm torn between rewriting a whole ton of surfaces in surfaces.txt to be more efficient and take less space or just leaving what I've already done there and doing any new poses the more efficient way. Decisionssss
-Oh yeah, you can pet sleeping Hunter now! For some reason I didn't feel the urge to make her pettable as strongly as I did for sleeping Smoker, haha. But she is pettable now!
12/23 [Spoiler (click to open)]- just tell em to update!
-been pretty busy lately with christmas stuff, so nothing too major. Mostly just a few poses here and there, notably Smoker's yelling back at Hunter pose, so their argument should be more complete now.
-Some new convos here and there, expanded Smoker's roster of musicals she'll reference and added in one for card games as well, so you might see her mention various games every now and then.
-Here's a bit of a planning one, maybe you guys have some thoughts. I want to add in a sort of RPG element where you can run through little quests with them that'll be set up primarily like a choose your own adventure thing, and completing quests will earn you items (like the brush and pendulum) and such. However, while poking around I've seen people setting up code for actual "battles" against enemies where it calculates the ghost's stats to decide how much damage is done/it does, that kind of thing, which is kind of neat. However, to actually add in a real battle thing, I'd have to set up some more stats for Hunter and Smoker aside from their feelings stat, which actually won't be too hard but the thing is, then I need to figure out some ways to increase those stats. While bumping their feelings by talking to them makes sense, that doesn't work so much with other stats. Going on a quest might increase stats in general, but you'd have to sort of complete the quest first, and that could lead to grinding which I want to avoid since that gets tiresome. The other option are stat increasing items, but I'd want to stop people from just spamming the same item over and over to get stats up super high. A money system might help here, although it'd also involve setting up a secondary item screen for usable items... maybe. Could also tie stat increases to how long you have them open, like for every thirty minutes or something they get a few points here and there, or maybe set up some training for stats that you can use only a certain amount of times per day (restricting by day might be harder than I think, I'll have to look into it) but idk. This might be way more work than I should be doing for something kinda goofy anyway, and maybe you guys aren't even interested in something that complex or anything. IDK WHAT DO YOU THINK
12-26 - [Spoiler (click to open)]Just tell em to update!
-Woo, this one is pretty big. I went and looked into the battle coding I mentioned before and found out it's much simpler than I thought and doesn't really need stats as is, so I did some work and migrated it in! So now you can trigger a random battle with a Rabite from Secret of Mana!
The battle option is in Hunter's menu for now, and it'll also pop up after Hunter talks about how there are no zombies around. The Rabite will appear, and you'll have a choice of attacks. Strong attacks can do a lot of damage, but can be more easily countered/blocked, weak attacks do less damage but go through more often, that kind of thing. You can also counter the Rabite's attacks and do damage or block them depending on what the Rabite does. The first one to get their hp knocked down to 0 loses! I also added a Run Away option if you get bored or if things aren't going well, and it'll always work so don't worry too much about that. This SOMETIMES does that thing where a sprite doesn't disappear when I tell it too, but just retrigger the battle and run away again and it should clear the Rabite away. You don't get anything for winning or lose anything for losing/running away right now, it's just for fun.
The Rabite's SORT of a placeholder since it was the first thing to come to mind to test it with, although I do like the idea of battling Rabites, haha. I just like Rabites. :B I feel a little weird using sprite art directly from Secret of Mana though. I may redo it later or something, it doesn't have that many frames. But for now you can enjoy the pixel Rabite, haha. It blinks and hops and will react to what you do (it'll lunge forward to attack and wince when hit). Hunter likewise has a whole new set of poses for battling. You'll notice when she's bouncing that she'll stop when talking then start bouncing again - this was surprisingly tricky to do! But having figured it out it'll be a handy thing to keep in mind in the future.
The way the system is set up is fairly flexible, so I could potentially add special abilities/magic in the future, or add in stats and have them affect the damage you do/take as well, MAYBE add in items, but I guess I'll fiddle with that as it comes. I THINK I have a way worked out to set up other monsters as well, though I'll have to add a new one first to test it. Right now, Smoker's pretty uninvolved and the Rabite will only fight Hunter. I could POTENTIALLY add in a specific monster that Smoker would fight, but it might be a bit complicated. Besides, Hunter seems more like the type to jump a wandering monster than Smoker anyway, haha.
-This is another fairly big achievement on my end, tho I dunno how impressive it'll look to you guys if you don't see the backend coding like I do, haha. But anyway the Rabite HAS ITS OWN SPECIAL BALLOON! Figuring out how to do this is AWESOME because this means I can give Charger her own balloon when she eventually shows up. I felt weird about her potentially inheriting Hunter or Smoker's, so this is great. The Rabite's balloon should also have a different font and color than the others (if you didn't override the balloon font selection in the SSP preferences anyway).
Unfortunately, balloons are sort of separate from ghosts for odd reasons, so I don't think their balloons will update along with their normal network update. So I zipped up the new balloon folder with the Rabite balloon, which you can download here. You can TRY dragging and dropping that zip file onto Hunter and Smoker while they're running and seeing if they'll install the balloon, but it might be a little awkward since they should already have their balloon installed, I dunno how well it handles balloon updates. I'm not sure, I haven't tested this yet. But the more reliable/easy way to do this is just to unzip the hsballoon.zip into the SSP(or HSClean depending on which version you downloaded)/balloon/for_H&S/ folder. Just overwrite everything in the for_H&S folder. If you look in there and see a dwballoon.psd file, then you should be set. Then trigger the battle and see if the Rabite's balloon pops up! It should be a fairly simple black and white pixel thing that vaguely resembles a Dragon Warrior menu, teehee.
I don't anticipate making a lot more balloons, so I'm thinking the next time you'll have to do this will be for Charger's balloon and then that'll be it.
1/9 - [Spoiler (click to open)]Just tell them to update.
A lot of mostly terrible things have happened since the last update, if you've been wondering where I've been. Working on this is sort of comfortingly mind-numbing though... the coding moreso than the images. Anyway... this is a fairly big update, a good chunk of new stuff.
-There are two new items in Smoker's item menu. The first one is a book with an anchor on it. This is a default item that you don't have to find or earn, it'll always be active. You've probably noticed the hyperlinked names in their conversations by now, and how if you click them you'll get an explanation of that person. They're generally referred to as anchors in the coding, thus the anchor on the book. Anyway, the book will keep track of each anchor link you click on. Once you click one, it'll be added and you can retrigger it whenever you want. This is handy to me mostly as an easy way to test anchor links without having to find the right convo (Space Pony's was always tricky since he only gets randomly mentioned as a weird item you can give them) or use Hunter's test variable, but I thought you guys might also find it useful as well. Unfortunately the flags for each anchor haven't existed until now, so you'll have to click each one again to add them to the book. They should be marked with ???? and then fill in with the name when you find it. I also added David as an anchor link, I probably should have done that earlier. I may add more names to the book as they're needed. the anchor book will also come in handy for the second part of this update.
-The second item is a walkie talkie (vaguely modeled after Snake's walkie in Metal Gear 2). The flags that determine whether or not it's on didn't exist until now, so it might not immediately appear in the item menu. The easiest way to fix this is to hit Smoker's feelings reset (this will also reset/create some other new variables, so you should do this anyway). To turn the walkie on so you can use it, use Hunter's test variable. You can use the walkie talkie to...
-call Charger! Yes I added Charger, finally. When she first appears, she may be positioned weirdly or her balloon might be off (more on her balloon in a second), but if you move her to where you want, she'll stay there and always reappear in that same place. There's not much I can do to fix that I think, so you'll just have to adjust her yourself. Anyway, Charger will always appear with the walkie, but there is also a 5% chance she will appear at the end of Smoker's "where's Charger" convo as well. Shoot, I forgot to add the flag for turning the walkie on if that happens. Well I'll fix that in the future. For the moment, she only has the one pose with a few different expressions, though that'll change in the future as I add them.
Once she appears, "chargermode" turns on, which changes several things around. When Charger is on the screen, Hunter and Smoker'll shift over to a specific set of conversations that include her in some way (since I thought it'd be weird to just have Charger standing there all :| while the two of them talk like she's not there). They will ONLY use this Charger set until she leaves. Likewise, some of the anchor links will change when Charger's on the screen - off the top of my head, she'll say something different about David, Jockey, herself, and Mousey. I may add more to the others as I go along. This is another reason why the anchor book is handy.
-Charger has her own double click menu, though it's a little sparse right now since I'm not sure what to give her. You can change her name, which I sort of decided to enable at the spur of the moment, so until you either give her a new name or set her to her default, some of the conversations will look weird probably. I'd recommend doing that first, once you set it the first time it should fix it.
Anyway, you can ask her questions but more notably, you can ask her how she feels about Hunter and Smoker. She'll give her normal :| answers, but things get more interesting if you put Hunter or Smoker to sleep with the hypno pendulum. If one of them is asleep, she'll be a little more forward, but still pretty neutral. However, if BOTH of them are asleep, she'll actually get ~real~ with you and tell you what she really thinks about them. Mostly she wants you to take care of them and be nice because she loves them. :<
Doing this involved setting up some sleeping flags, which I might be able to use later, but the bothsleeping flag is trickier to pull off. Right now it's not exactly perfect... for Charger to register both of them as asleep, you need to put them both to sleep first, then wait for the dialogue box to come up asking if you want them to keep sleeping or wake up. Tell them to keep sleeping, then you can ask Charger about either of them and get her realtalking. I might be able to set up a better check for this in the future, I dunno, but this'll work for now.
Oh, the sleeping flags don't kick in when either of them fall asleep naturally, ie around 1-5 am or when Smoker falls asleep when you open her menu. Unless you wait for the dialogue box to come up, then it'll work. Those are pretty rare anyway, though.
-Charger will stay on screen until you reload the ghost or close them. You'll have to call her again when they boot up. As mentioned they have a pool of Chargerconvos but at the moment it's still fairly small, and also Hunter doesn't have any sprites facing left so unless you shuffle em around she'll always look like she's talking to Smoker. Assuming you have Hunter on the left and Smoker on the right to begin with, I can't stop you from putting them wherever you want on the screen. Anyway I'll expand the options as time goes along. If you get bored, you can tell Charger to leave via her menu, and she SHOULD go. If she doesn't just ask her again, sometimes the sprite disappearing thing doesn't work like it should.
Figuring out how to set the randomconvos to a limited pool of certain responses will be super handy in the future though for various things I have planned.
-Charger has her own feelings counter, although I'm really not sure what to do with it just yet. It's there though, and Hunter's test variable will also increase it by 20 with the others and Smoker's reset will reset it to 0 (this is one reason I wanted you to hit her reset first, otherwise Charger's stats get all screwy). You can give her items like the others too. Like Hunter and Smoker, you can also pet her or try to grope her, and, like them, your feelings rating will change her reaction. She'll never be entirely happy with petting, but over 100 she'll be okay-ish with it. Stroking her face never really goes over well, no matter how high you are, and, like with Hunter and Smoker again, if you try to grope her while your rating with her is over 50, she'll get really upset at you for betraying her trust. If you try groping her while under 0, she'll just leave, and unlike Hunter or Smoker, she'll actually stay gone until you call her with the walkie again. You can check your rating with her via the stats option in her "Charger, I..." menu.
And, just like Hunter and Smoker, you can hit Charger by double clicking her face. Be warned though - doing this makes Hunter and Smoker EXTREMELY angry at you, to the point where they will refuse to open their menus until you apologize to Charger via her Charger I... menu. Once you apologize to Charger, they'll let you use their menus again. However, hitting Charger also makes the two of them take a big hit to their feelings for you, and apologizing to Charger DOESN'T fix that. You'll have to make it up to them in other ways. I meant to shift the random convos so that they'll even refuse to talk at all until you apologize, but I forgot. In the future though.
-Eventually you should be able to use items with Charger like the brush or pendulum, but that'll come along when I do the sprites and such.
-Right, I mentioned Charger's balloon up there. This is a similar situation to the Rabite balloon from the last update. Speaking of which, I hope you did a random battle since then, cause otherwise some of Charger's convos might not work right. Anyway, Charger has her own balloons, but I also did some editing on the spacing with Hunter and Smoker's balloons and fixed some things that were bugging me, so on the whole they should be a bit cleaner looking.
I added the new files and rezipped the balloon here. Just unzip it into your HSClean/balloon directory (or SSP/balloon, or wherever you installed SSP). Basically, you want to overwrite everything in the HSClean\balloon\for_H&S folder with what's in the zip. If you look in there after it all and see ballooncharger.psd, then you should be set. Can also check by seeing if Charger has her own balloon, obviously. You might be able to drag and drop the zip on Hunter and Smoker while they're running to install it/update it, but I haven't tried it myself.
1/12 - [Spoiler (click to open)]Just tell em to update!
-Nothing too major here, just mostly closing some loopholes. Vel helpfully pointed out some potential actions that can cause Hunter to glitch out of her random battle, thus leaving a Rabite to hop around your screen. Now, when Hunter is in battle, you can't access Charger, Smoker, or Hunter's menus until it's done. I also shifted Smoker's base pose so you can't punch her either while it's going on. However, you CAN punch Charger still and knock Hunter out of the battle, but that'll be fixed once I start doing alternate poses for Charger so it's a temporary oversight.
-If you punch Charger, she now won't leave until you apologize to her. Mostly this is because if you punched her and then asked her to go, she would just leave and this would trap Hunter and Smoker in a loop where they'd refuse to open their menus for you until you apologized, but you can't apologize to Charger if she's not there and there'd be no way to call her back unless you had the menus. OOPS. Anyway now Charger will stick around until you apologize to her, and also Hunter and Smoker have a set pool of random convos they'll switch to after you do it as well hinting that you should MAYBE APOLOGIZE MAYBE. You can always just close or reload them if you don't want to apologize/glitched it out some way (tell me how you do this if this is the case) and that'll reset them. Hunter and Smoker take you punching Charger very seriously.
-The Hypno Pendulum now has a better check for their sleep flags so if you do put them both to sleep, Charger should immediately be able to do her realtalking convos instead of you having to wait for the menu to come up. Still haven't figured out an easy way to set the flag for them falling asleep naturally though, so you'll still have to wait for the "let her sleep?" option to come up on those for it to register.
-That stupid problem where sprites sometimes don't disappear properly still plagues me, but it's not a huge problem most of the time, it just looks sort of weird. However the Rabite is different since you can't get rid of it unless you start a new battle, so I put in a check for it if it's on the screen. It won't be immediate, so the Rabite will hop around for a while, but when Hunter and Smoker shift back to their default poses, the Rabite will disappear as well. Or should, anyway. I wish there was a faster/more reliable way to do this check but I guess this'll work.
-Added a bunch of Charger convos, most of them time related, so there are now Charger specific convos relating to January, Winter in general, and the various times of day (early morning, morning, lunch, afternoon, evening, late night, midnight, that sort of thing). There's a whole bunch of these so hopefully you'll see a few of them depending on when you have them open. I've been neglecting Hunter and Smoker's convos lately but since the Charger set is so new and so small, I want to try and shore it up a bit. Possibly some new sprites will come next, who knows.
By the way guys if you do notice bugs or weird behavior let me know - since I'm the one coding them I automatically think about the right way to trigger an action or whatever, but a lot of the time people might do something totally different, haha. But if I know about any bugs I can try to fix them! So let me know if you find something weird (that I didn't already mention, like punching Charger during Hunter's battle).
1-19 - [Spoiler (click to open)]Just tell em to update!
Another big delay but I've been distracted with another thing I want to get done by the end of the month, haha. And this is a small one consequently, but it's something, right?
-Caught a bug where Smoker's charger convo would turn Chargermode on, even if she wasn't actually around.
-Added some convos for January and February, as well as the days of the week, for Hunter and Smoker. It took me forever to get the day ones to pop up, haha. But they're there. They'll only come up if Charger's not around though.
Along the same lines, I also added some boot dialogue for various holidays coming up through January and February up to International Women's Day in March. :B So if you run them on certain days you should get specific messages when they start.
1-29 - [Spoiler (click to open)]Just tell em to update!
A bit more substantial this time. I really don't want this to be one of those projects I lose interest in and abandon (like so many others) after making so much progress on it, I gotta stick with it. But anyway
-Redid a certain pose of Hunter's that I didn't like (surface515.png if you're curious). It was driving me crazy before but I like the new one much better, so you'll probably see it more often from now on.
-Did some facing left poses for Hunter for when she talks to Charger. I can't control how you line them up or where you put them on your comp but if you line em up at the bottom of the screen with Charger on her left she should now look like she's talking to her. :B It's a fairly basic default pose and there aren't any more specific reaction shots like surprise or whatever, but she covers a lot of different expressions so that's something. However at one point I had to redo some of the coding in surfaces.txt because of dumb layering issues I zoned out on and I had to redo all the dialogue tags, and i THINK I caught them but if you notice Hunter with a sort of bizarre expression or something at one point let me know, I might have missed one of them.
I did figure out some coding tricks for surfaces.txt with these poses that definitely condense and simplify dealing with Hunter's ears moving and her eyebrows and whatever. On the technical side this means future poses with Hunter will be much simpler coding wise and take up far less space and be more flexible, but on the user side you probably won't notice much of that. :B It's just a note to myself really.
-Charger has some convos set up for February, for when that rolls around. I also added my name to the link book since they drop it all the time and I thought it might make things a bit easier. The quickest way to add it is to use Hunter's "report a bug" option in her menu, since she says my full name in that one, then you can just click it from there.
-I'm considering putting in an option for the random battles where you can "switch" out Hunter for Smoker (or Charger) if she's around, although it'll require a bit of tricky coding to pull off. I'm not sure what to give Smoker for a weapon though... Hunter just punches, but if I gave Smoker her gun where would she aim it? Straight ahead? For short monsters like the Rabite she's going to look like she's missing and also like she's shooting her friends if they're in the way. Maybe I'll give her her bat, although another problem is figuring out how to align them all properly when the monster appears... you may have to manually realign them. I dunno, maybe it's too much of a hassle, but hmm.
-Oh yeah, I found a minor bug. If Smoker does the first part of her Charger convo, then you call Charger with the walkie talkie before the second part, she'll finish her chain and then Chargermode will be set to off until you send Charger away and call her again. The reason this happens is because of how I fixed the bug last time... basically if the convo calls Charger, chargermode turns on, but if it doesn't it specifically turns it off. If you have Charger present before the second part, it turns chargermode off even though she's there. Maybe I can set a flag for the second part to check if Chargermode is already on or something, that could be workable. I'll probably do that next time.
2-3 - [Spoiler (click to open)]just tell em to update! Pretty big this time around.
-You'll notice that there's now a small heart icon in the bottom corner of all their menus. This heart will dynamically change depending on your relationship with them - it'll fill as they grow fonder of you and lower when they dislike you. You can see it in action by messing with Hunter's test variable (+20 to all feelings) or Smoker's reset feelings (all feelings to 0) one. The lowest it can get is a black heart. You can also click the heart for a quick shortcut to their stat screen to see exactly where you stand with them. Much easier! I still need to fancy up that screen once I figure out how I want it to look...
Likewise, you'll also see a snowflake symbol on the other side, which is just a symbol for winter. :B There's also one for summer, fall, and spring now too, which you'll see during the appropriate seasons.
-I forgot to mention this last time, but I added an item explanation in Hunter's 'I have questions!' menu. I also added an explanation of the feelings system there, which feature a surprise cameo from myself, haha. I manage to cram both an EarthBound ref, Sabrous ref, and a Mother 3 ref into one convo, yesss
I really need to reorganize Hunter's menu already...
-The sleep system! Here's where all the major changes have taken place. You can now put Charger to sleep like the others, and the option will appear/disappear depending on if she's around like you'd expect. However, since Charger is not a hard-coded character like Hunter and Smoker (she appears to be, but ukagaka are supposed to have two characters, 0 and 1, and a lot of functions only work with those two, it's technical), I had to do her sleep cycles a bit differently. When she's asleep, they'll shift over to a pool of sleeping convos and just do those until she wakes up. You can wake Charger up by double clicking her, and there's also one specific convo that will lead to a chain where she'll wake up naturally. You can also pet her while she's asleep if she's having bad dreams. :> Though that also has a chance of waking her up.
In the process I decided, for consistency and to make it a little less pester-y, to shift Hunter and Smoker's sleep convos to a separate pool as well instead of having you have to confirm it each time. So now when you put them to sleep, they'll just naturally cycle through their responses, and like Charger, one will lead to them waking up and you can also wake them up by opening their menus or rarely by petting them.
Their solo sleep convos if Charger's around will mostly be the same, but a few will change. Along the same lines, there are unique convo pools for the various combinations of sleeping characters (Charger and Hunter asleep, Smoker and Charger asleep, all of them asleep). I just realized I forgot Hunter and Smoker asleep while Charger's there, oops. Well I can do that for next time. But basically there's a whole bunch of new convos available depending on who's asleep and who's awake.
3-3 - [Spoiler (click to open)]UGH I CAN'T BELIEVE IT TOOK ME THIS LONG blaaargh I need to get back on the ball. I should get started on the quest system or something. Anyway, just tell em to update!
-Hunter has a new pose that you might catch every now and then, and Smoker has a concerned one and an angry/embarrassed one you might spot here and there. The easiest way to see the embarrassed one is to try and stroke her face when your relationship with her is high, although it sometimes might show up for when you pet her head too when it's high.
-They should now have convos for March and Spring in general, with and without Charger.
-Caught a minor bug with Smoker's wherescharger chain that kept turning Charger mode on even if she wasn't there. That chain I swear to god. You can still glitch it out by calling Charger in the middle of it. I've got to set up a better way to check for that.
-Caught a few minor graphical errors where a random black pixel was appearing on Smoker's face while her mouth was moving. Turns out I just need to make sure the top left pixel in the pna file isn't white, durrr. Well, something to keep in mind for the future.
-Finished all the sleep convo combinations I think. If you put Hunter and Smoker to sleep while Charger’s awake, you might even catch Charger cracking a joke (!!).
-OH YEAH they should have a few (angry) things to say if your relationship with them both is below 0 but I can’t remember if I tested this or not.
5-6 - [Spoiler (click to open)]I'VE BEEN NEGLECTING THEM SOB but anyway just tell them to update!
-This isn't a huge update or anything mostly, but they should have things to say for April (tho you can't see them unless you reset your clock durrr) and May, with or without Charger. I think they also have a few random new convos here and there.
-I reorganized Hunter's menu! So now it is a bit less messy, haha.
-Smoker's reset option now let's you choose if you want to reset their feelings, the items, or both at the same time.
-I've got most of the outline down for the first quest, so presumably if I get it together that should come next.
6-17 - [Spoiler (click to open)]GETTING BACK INTO THIS just tell em to update!
-They should have convos for Summer and June in general, with or without Charger.
-Charger has three new poses - a tired/waking up one, a thoughtful one, and a shocked one. You'll probably see them most often if you play around with the hypno-pendulum and waking her up. This also covers up that hole where you could hit Charger in the middle of a battle with Hunter and break the sequence, so you shouldn't be able to do that anymore! Hurray!
6-19 - [Spoiler (click to open)]Just tell em to update!
-Charger now has convos for the day of the week! A lot of them got longer than I intended, haha. There's one for Tuesday that I particularly like. :B Also added another one to January since I noticed that one only had three (there are usually four convos for each day/week/month/time whatever).
-Charger has a new convo where they'll ask her what she thinks about you. Her response will change depending on your relationship with her, although if she doesn't like you, Hunter and Smoker's relationship with you will also take a hit. They are v protective of her, haha.
-I noticed the feelings reset made the numbers go screwy when it reset to 0, so now it resets to 1 instead, which smoothed things out a bit.
-Did some minor tweaks on a few poses here and there, nothing hugely noticable I think.
-This is kind of frustrating on my end, but most of the work I did was entirely on backend stuff that you'll never see or notice. IT IS INVISIBLE WORK so no one will even know I spent all that time on it. But basically (HERE COMES BORING CODING STUFF) there's surfaces.txt right, which keeps track of all the different poses they have. When I first started with them I didn't really know what I was doing so I coded their poses in this very long and tedious way. Only when Charger came around did I figure out a much quicker and simpler way to set up a pose, but I didn't want to go back and recode all the existing dialogue I've done. On the other hand, finding the specific pose I wanted in a sea of nearly identical duplicates also took forever.
In the end, I went through the file and finally redid a lot of surfaces coding so now there are certain "base" poses I can refer back to, which HOPEFULLY will make it easier for me to set up a pose I want without flipping through dozens of duplicates. I also went through and fixed a dumb coding thing for all the other poses I did before I realized this, so if you noticed on some poses that their eyebrows would disappear when they blinked, that shouldn't happen anymore, haha. It was annoying to have to scroll through the file fixing all these going DARN IT PAST SELF YOU IDIOT WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO FIGURE OUT HOW THIS WORKS ALREADY
Anyway this was a whole ton of work you won't notice or see HURRAY. On the other hand at least it's done, so that's something anyway. This SHOULDN'T have impacted any of their poses but I could have missed something somewhere. If you notice an odd pose let me know and I'll see if I can track it down.
9-7 - [Spoiler (click to open)]Just tell em to update! HUGE GAP I KNOW
-They should have convos for June, July, August, and September with and without Charger, and with Charger they should have a few for Fall in general. This might not seem like a lot (especially since you won't even see most of it unless you set your computer's clock back some months) but writing and coding the dialogue in this thing can be very timeconsuming, haha.
9-27 - [Spoiler (click to open)]Just tell em to update! This one is fairly big, haha. Well, in a way.
-They should have a set of convos for Fall in general by themselves now.
-I added PNA files for everything! What this means is that they're going to look a lot smoother while on your desktop. I don't even know how many people will notice (or have even downloaded them) but it looks nicer to me, so that's what counts I guess. I also went through and did some fiddly minor edits to get rid of some annoying black pixels in places. Mostly, if you ever noticed Hunter or Smoker with an odd black pixel in the white of their eyes, that wasn't intentional! After a bit of experimentation with the PNA files and setting up a one pixel color block in the top left corner, I think I managed to get rid of all of these. I also fixed one annoying thing in one of Smoker's poses where the top left pixel of her mouth would get transparent, but there's another one I noticed after uploading all the files that I'll probably fix next time, bah.
Anyway this is some 250 or so new files so uh ENJOY THE LONG UPDATE
11-9 - Just tell em to update!
-I updated the zip/nar files above, so if you haven't downloaded them before, if you download those they should be up to date. Or if you just wanted to skip all the pna file downloading, haha. Though be warned, installing anew will reset all their relationships and such. But anyway, the zip and the nar are up to date now.
-I lightened Smoker's speech balloon slightly to make it a bit easier to read, so I also updated the balloon zip as well. Just download that and unzip it into the ssp/balloon directory, it should just rewrite a few files in the for_H&S balloon folder.
(If you downloaded the whole zip file above, I also included the balloon fix in that, so you don't have to worry)
-I changed a bit of their update dialogue so it should be a bit faster. Hopefully. I'll have to find a way to test this myself at some point.
-I added a new feature of sorts! You can find it Smoker's menu, under something along the lines of "Can you cheer me up?" Basically, you can ask the two of them to either give you support or motivation. Support is just kind of nice things meant for if you're feeling a bit down, and motivation is to try and get you to finish whatever it is you're working on. I've been meaning to add this feature for like ages but finally got around to doing it just now, haha. It's pretty self-indulgent but hey, maybe you guys'll enjoy messing with it. I'm considering adding some specific ones for Charger if she's around but the way I have it set up right now makes that a bit picky, I dunno. I'll have to look into it.