Shtick - A New AAF Participation Minigame BETA WIP!!!

[riveth]

1 hour ago, FieryVortessence said:

I wanted the result to have a real consequence, and XP was the closest thing I could come up with. If there's no meaningful consequence, then there's not much point in playing the minigame. If you have to work to get out of an aggressive scenario knowing youre going to lose something the minute you get sucked into it, and its just about minimizing the blast radius, you have a stake in it. I just want the player to have a stake in it beyond mentally trying to 'roleplay' a stake in it. For what it's worth, the XP loss is capped at.... 80? I think? And you cant be de-levelled. 

XP penalty is fine, but one could use MCM option to set value of penalty to their game style.
I'd like 100 xp penalty, because I use Sex education too. 

taking caps is pointless, many mods (Pervert included) rob player on rape scenario anyway.

[JonX67]

1 hour ago, FieryVortessence said:

I gotta ask, what mod does the tanline come from?

 

Looks nice, right?  

For me personally it's the best body-texture ever.

 

The name is "FSMBodyTextures5.0.1"
Unfortunately it's no longer available on Nexus, as the author removed it quite a while ago already. 

 

For a while someone shared it here at LL ....but I guess that thread has been removed as well. 

You will still find it if you search the internet, but as I don't know how safe the sites are that offer them, I don't want to link them here. 

 

 

[judge007]

21 minutes ago, riveth said:

XP penalty is fine, but one could use MCM option to set value of penalty to their game style.
I'd like 100 xp penalty, because I use Sex education too. 

taking caps is pointless, many mods (Pervert included) rob player on rape scenario anyway.

I use Sex Ed the same way, and my PC only earns Exp from sex.

I use Lucrative Augments to increase Exp, so I wonder how this would affect all that.

[judge007]

1 hour ago, FieryVortessence said:

I gotta ask, what mod does the tanline come from?

 

3 minutes ago, JonX67 said:

 

Looks nice, right?  

For me personally it's the best body-texture ever.

 

The name is "FSMBodyTextures5.0.1"
Unfortunately it's no longer available on Nexus, as the author removed it quite a while ago already. 

 

For a while someone shared it here at LL ....but I guess that thread has been removed as well. 

You will still find it if you search the internet, but as I don't know how safe the sites are that offer them, I don't want to link them here. 

 

 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/15-Bdogc_mUdClg1MeSU7vltS7Ooh8ZcZ/edit

[FieryVortessence]

42 minutes ago, judge007 said:

I use Sex Ed the same way, and my PC only earns Exp from sex.

I use Lucrative Augments to increase Exp, so I wonder how this would affect all that.

It shouldnt affect anything else. It just adds +10 or -10XP per climax. Your other mods wont even see it. It's just doing it on its own. 

And @riveth I can totally make the cost per very steep. I mainly just kept it at 10 because my other mod allows for strings of climaxes in series, so they can sometimes add up aggressively under certain constraints, but I'm leaning to agree with you a good bit that it should be more harsh than 50. I'll probably eventually end up putting it in an MCM slider. It's a good idea.

[riveth]

32 minutes ago, FieryVortessence said:

It shouldnt affect anything else. It just adds +10 or -10XP per climax. Your other mods wont even see it. It's just doing it on its own. 

And @riveth I can totally make the cost per very steep. I mainly just kept it at 10 because my other mod allows for strings of climaxes in series, so they can sometimes add up aggressively under certain constraints, but I'm leaning to agree with you a good bit that it should be more harsh than 50. I'll probably eventually end up putting it in an MCM slider. It's a good idea.

Battling through each stage of animation tree sounds like a great idea! Seperate XP panalty / bonus for each stage would be perfect.

1) idea - failed stage results in avatar positioning on next stage (to make nex stage harder) Won stage, put avatar on "easier" side.

2) idea - if picked animation doesn't belong in animation tree, when the time to change stage come, Shtick would "press" pgdn button instead of right arrow, to pick next animation. Only hard thing is to determine if picked animation is part of tree or not...
That should solve problem with too short scenes when "single" animation is picked by AAF.

Also if You manage to make this stage thing work, I would re-consider dynamics of Shtick. It should be more responsive then (faster oscilation I guess), so each stage shouldn't take too long to finish.

[FieryVortessence]

1 hour ago, riveth said:

Battling through each stage of animation tree sounds like a great idea! Seperate XP panalty / bonus for each stage would be perfect.

1) idea - failed stage results in avatar positioning on next stage (to make nex stage harder) Won stage, put avatar on "easier" side.

2) idea - if picked animation doesn't belong in animation tree, when the time to change stage come, Shtick would "press" pgdn button instead of right arrow, to pick next animation. Only hard thing is to determine if picked animation is part of tree or not...
That should solve problem with too short scenes when "single" animation is picked by AAF.

Also if You manage to make this stage thing work, I would re-consider dynamics of Shtick. It should be more responsive then (faster oscilation I guess), so each stage shouldn't take too long to finish.

I dont really see it currently as winning or losing, more like ... enduring the thing so you can move on, or enjoying it for max pleasure. You can choose whichever in any situation, but it's up to you. The avatar in Shtick just controls arousal rate increase. You cant really win a non consensual encounter if you're overpowered. That's meant to feel unpleasant. 

But I have definitely considered the idea of multiple different games. I could totally see a 'fight' game... where you're metaphorically pushing back, vs a different pleasure/indifference game, which would probably be what we have now, slightly reframed. 

Edited Wednesday at 09:59 PM by FieryVortessence

[Darkmind_mc]

5 hours ago, FieryVortessence said:

 

That said, I'm not married to the exact penalty forever. If Willpower/Submission eventually become mechanically meaningful enough that they actually affect normal gameplay, then using them here becomes a much more interesting option.

The problem is finding a consequence that actually matters. Health is already low if you lose an altercation, and injuries are basically a Stimpack away from disappearing. I thought about taking caps, but that feels trite and honestly a little silly.

If low Willpower made you gain XP much more slowly, reduced movement/sprint speed, hurt dialogue checks, or otherwise affected normal play, I'd absolutely consider using it. Maybe if Submission screwed with your VATS probability calculations or something. I want the consequences to feel more visceral, and I want the player to be motivated to minimize the damage in an aggressive scene. I always hated how the ocnsequence of aggressive scenes was "get out hte popcorn, we're taking a small temporary stat debuff we can sleep off if we want to!". I even consdiered trying to figure out how to link low self-esteem and/or willpower and/or trauma to the weather, and make those states force rainy weather and fog for a while, maybe some visual distortion and muted colors. Could be cool....

Do you play with AFF Violate?  It has submission affect your surrender chance - if your willpower is low and/or your submission is high, you start having chances to automatically surrender during combat.  Which of course leads to aggressive sex, which lowers your willpower and raises your submission...  (And likely gets you bound to one level or another.)  Depending on the settings, chance, and what other mods you have the end of the encounter can then be anything from having to escape during a short window where they aren't hostile afterwards, being sent back to one of your beds to rest, all the way up to being sold to a nearby raider group, your items taken and stolen, and you set up with a bomb collar around your neck that you have to remove before you can escape the raider base.

 

Willpower still regenerates pretty fast, but it starts being something you have to think about - a forced surrender can be anything from a 'get out the popcorn' scene, to several hours of derailed gameplay that you have to deal with before you can do whatever you were planning to do.

[FieryVortessence]

39 minutes ago, Darkmind_mc said:

 

Do you play with AFF Violate?  It has submission affect your surrender chance - if your willpower is low and/or your submission is high, you start having chances to automatically surrender during combat.  Which of course leads to aggressive sex, which lowers your willpower and raises your submission...  (And likely gets you bound to one level or another.)  Depending on the settings, chance, and what other mods you have the end of the encounter can then be anything from having to escape during a short window where they aren't hostile afterwards, being sent back to one of your beds to rest, all the way up to being sold to a nearby raider group, your items taken and stolen, and you set up with a bomb collar around your neck that you have to remove before you can escape the raider base.

 

Willpower still regenerates pretty fast, but it starts being something you have to think about - a forced surrender can be anything from a 'get out the popcorn' scene, to several hours of derailed gameplay that you have to deal with before you can do whatever you were planning to do.

Yeah,  that's exactly why Im not treading on that space. This mod essentially intended to specifically work with Violate as well as I can get it to. I dont want to step on Violate and what it already does. Honestly, Violate is kind of the reason Shtick exists. 



Double experimental tree support is active in 0.4.0.

ENABLE TREE SUPPORT IN MCM!!!!

Everyone let me know if you see the stage indicators in the hud and if it progresses properly. Im not holding my breath, but I give it an 80% chance of working.
 

1. Shtick should tell you how many scenes are left,
2. the progress bar SHOULD scale itself to overall length
3. It should have lines that tell you when the scenes are supposed to shift,
4. you should have to 'earn' every scene transition
5. If the scene transitions on its own, make sure you let the AAF .xml position tree files I bundled overwrite any EAP files that are there.
6. And finally, crucially, it should terminate on its own at the end

Let me know if any of those things do or do not work as expected. I just dont have time to test right now but I think I've found a viable strategy to make it happen but it was a very ambitious, rushed effort. I've left old versions up in case its a mess. 

I tried to test and couldnt get toa  staged scene before i ran out of itme. I found a scene I thought was stage,d but it was not in any of the 750+ trees I modified from EAP.

We cleared the NG/AE hurdle, hopefully that stays good. We got alternate controls working in MCM , the actual game seems to work. I think it's fun, hopefully everyone else does too. 

If trees are partially solved now maybe I can start building an API for it to talk to Shtick-ASIF (Ambient Social Interaction Framework) that I'm dreaming up, and in the process get it ready to be a framework for other mods that may or may not want to use it. 

Does anyone have any other major requests for eventual  MCM modifiers? I like the idea of making XP rewards adjustable. I wouldnt take them out, but I'd absolutely make them adjustable.

 

Edited Wednesday at 10:57 PM by FieryVortessence

[JonX67]

5 hours ago, FieryVortessence said:

..... I think it's fun, hopefully everyone else does too....
 

 

Yeah, totally missed to tell you: 

 

It is fun! 

 

And no I'm going to try 0.4.0 to see if and how it adds to it.

[JonX67]

I had a few scenes running now with 0.4.0 and it appears as if shtick isn't taking control over the animation tree.

 

Actually the stages do not move at all anymore, neither those that you usually control via the arrow key nor those that have stages which are controlled by UAP or EAP. 

 

The stage that starts the animation runs forever until the overall length of the animation ends, or once the NPC reached maximum arousal.

 

So the scene ends once the NPC is done, so to say. That part of shtick seems to work. 

 

But the NPC arousal bar (that's the red one on the top, right?) only moves if I press the E or R buttton (didn't test the alternative configuration).

 

If I do not press any button, the red bar does not move at all. 
But it always moves (quite a lot even) no matter which button I press and no matter if it's "with the flow" or "against it". 

 

Not sure if that's intended, but I sure hope it's not

 

I also - well, not me, but my poor heroine did not experience negative XP, even if she climaxed during aggressive sex. 

That might be because scenes are not tagged correctly. And unfortunately I don't know enough about animation to tell you how they are tagged. 
But I guess an animation that's called "Aggressive Powerbomb" will be tagged accordingly and should not give XP, right? 

 

The thing that does seem to work is the connection to the Sex Attribute arrousal system. You can clearly see a difference in how fast the arousal bar is moving in correlation to the arousal settings in SA, Willpower and Self Esteme. 

 

However, it's still fun to play around with shtick, though for now I can actually only use it to maximize XP output from a scene :) 

 

[JonX67]

Okay, 

I have to correct myself. 
I started a new game on a new profile that's only for testing and the animation tree of the first scene that run was controled by shtick. 
It went through the stages as intended. 

All other things that I described above stay unchanged. 
And it's only one scene for now (I had some others running, but these didn't have stages)

 

The screenshot shows which animation worked. 

Edited Thursday at 07:33 AM by JonX67
typo

[JonX67]

Next update (and correction): 

Had the first scene with negative XP. 
It was triggered by Sexual Harrassment (Hypno Approach) and my heroine was forced into the scene. 
Maybe that made the difference?

 

 

[FieryVortessence]

So

4 hours ago, JonX67 said:

I had a few scenes running now with 0.4.0 and it appears as if shtick isn't taking control over the animation tree.

 

Actually the stages do not move at all anymore, neither those that you usually control via the arrow key nor those that have stages which are controlled by UAP or EAP. 

 

The stage that starts the animation runs forever until the overall length of the animation ends, or once the NPC reached maximum arousal.

 

So the scene ends once the NPC is done, so to say. That part of shtick seems to work. 

 

But the NPC arousal bar (that's the red one on the top, right?) only moves if I press the E or R buttton (didn't test the alternative configuration).

 

If I do not press any button, the red bar does not move at all. 
But it always moves (quite a lot even) no matter which button I press and no matter if it's "with the flow" or "against it". 

 

Not sure if that's intended, but I sure hope it's not

 

I also - well, not me, but my poor heroine did not experience negative XP, even if she climaxed during aggressive sex. 

That might be because scenes are not tagged correctly. And unfortunately I don't know enough about animation to tell you how they are tagged. 
But I guess an animation that's called "Aggressive Powerbomb" will be tagged accordingly and should not give XP, right? 

 

The thing that does seem to work is the connection to the Sex Attribute arrousal system. You can clearly see a difference in how fast the arousal bar is moving in correlation to the arousal settings in SA, Willpower and Self Esteme. 

 

However, it's still fun to play around with shtick, though for now I can actually only use it to maximize XP output from a scene

 

1. So something in the staging pipeline isnt firing the "next stage" trigger. I'll see if I can narrow it down. Good news is now I know for sure that if shtick can successfully fire next stage, it'll work. Getting it to grab the next stage wasnt the hard part, so that's encouraging. 
2. "The NPC arousal bar (that's the red one on the top, right?) only moves if I press the E or R button"

• This is 100% intended. The only catch is that you can't just hold one button constantly. You have to put in some effort to get out of a bad scene! The basic idea is that the red bar only advances when you're actually "playing."

• If you start over on the right side and you're trying to "resist," the quickest way to reach the resist side of the meter and limit your arousal rate is to deliberately induce what I call "slip" (if you're on the right and the wave is moving left, hold right), and then hold left while the wave is moving right. Doing this awards zero completion progress. That's why orientation matters. As soon as you cross the center line, the rules flip, and those same inputs can start counting toward progress again.

• So the two rules for advancing the NPC arousal meter are: move with the wave when it's carrying you toward the outer edge, and push against the wave when it's pulling you back toward the center. Those are the two conditions that earn completion progress. I think it's a lot more intuitive to do than it is to explain!

• The whole point of Shtick from the beginning was that if you initiate a scene voluntarily, you're choosing to participate and advance the NPC arousal bar. If you're forced into a scene nonconsensually, you still have to spend time and effort doing something your character doesn't want to do in order to bring it to an end. There's no shortcut. You didnt consent, but now you, the player behind the keyboard, have to 'provide the service' anyway, knowing it will have negative outcomes for you. 

• I designed this game because it makes sense to me, and I hope I can explain the vision and intent to everyone else and they see the reasoning and agree with it. If everyone really just hates something, Im open to changing it. But from the jump, it seemed silly that an AAF violate non-consensual scene was bad for your character, but not really a problem for YOU, the player. Shtick is intended to bridge that gap and now suddenly these things are YOUR problem too. 

3. Aggressive powerbomb - This one is a little tricky. I have absolutely stumbled across aggressive scenes that are tagged wrong. Cant remember which. But there is a very important distinction to be made here, so let me know if the situation you experienced doesnt fit the following cases here:

• Case 1:
  • AAF Mod Whatever can initiate a nonconsensual scene
  • It tags it as aggressive/rape
  • Then it randomly pulls an aggressive tagged scene or tree
  • It is now a "rape", and the 'aggressive/NC' rules in Shtick apply
• Case 2:
  • AAF Mod Whatever can initiate consensual
  • It usually will pull a non-aggressive scene, but you CAN select aggressive scenes, and I think sometimes they will too
  • An aggressive scene can be Consensual, AND it can be aggressive
  • Shtick does not take away XP during a consensual aggressive scene, and that's on purpose. It must be a scene that is being tagged as a 'rape'
• Case 3

  • A mindbreak occurs, or the character's FPA stats become sufficiently biased in a particular direction.

  • The character may begin to "enjoy" nonconsensual encounters.

  • This can change the XP award/penalty criteria, effectively treating the character's response as though they're consenting.

  • I'm not particularly happy with that wrinkle. Personally, I feel like a genuinely nonconsensual encounter should still carry an XP penalty. But I don't currently have a clean way to override it without interfering with the existing framework.

  • More importantly, the authors of the systems Shtick integrates with deliberately designed this behavior. I'm reluctant to break something they intentionally made work this way just because I might have chosen differently. People are voluntarily downloading these mods because they implicitly endorse exactly those mechanics. 

  • Likewise, I don't want to penalize players who voluntarily choose aggressive animations. Aggressive doesn't automatically mean nonconsensual, and it shouldn't automatically mean negative XP.

Edited Thursday at 11:02 AM by FieryVortessence

[FieryVortessence]

I think i cracked it. Ive tested and it's working!

Edit: Not quite that easy - it only works if the randomly pulled scene is S1 of a sequence. I think we can get it from here, though. 

 

Edited Thursday at 04:52 PM by FieryVortessence

[JonX67]

5 hours ago, FieryVortessence said:

2. "The NPC arousal bar (that's the red one on the top, right?) only moves if I press the E or R button"

• This is 100% intended. The only catch is that you can't just hold one button constantly. You have to put in some effort to get out of a bad scene! The basic idea is that the red bar only advances when you're actually "playing."  ......

 

After testing a bit more (and without being interrupted by such mundane things like work ), I am getting a better feeling for how that minigame is actually played the way it is intended and the way I can use it for the "roleplaying" purposes. 
So, yeah... it toally makes sense the way you've designed it. 

[deff.]

One question - your mod conflicting with Extended AAF patch. It must overwrite EAP?

[FieryVortessence]

24 minutes ago, deff. said:

One question - your mod conflicting with Extended AAF patch. It must overwrite EAP?

Yes, it's overriding scene lengths. Im going to see if I can come up with a more clever solution in time. But it basically just extends the timer timeout for all EAP tree'd scenes. Ideally I'd like to have a switch where you disable Shtick in the MCM and it will revert those values back to defaults for you. But for now, yes, shtick needs to override the default EAP scene durations. 

If you dont want it to do that you can just tell it to load before EAP, you just wont get to play through  the occasional tree it can properly find (turn off trees in MCM too, probably)

Edited Thursday at 06:02 PM by FieryVortessence

[deff.]

8 minutes ago, FieryVortessence said:

Yes, it's overriding scene lengths

 

Yeah, I tested mod, looks good, but one incompatibility. Not compatible with Photo Mode   I mean it's not impossible to make photo during scene when your "shtick" is on screen. But that's ok  I mean there are folks, who just plays the game. I'm playing and screening as well. 

[FieryVortessence]

1 hour ago, deff. said:

 

Yeah, I tested mod, looks good, but one incompatibility. Not compatible with Photo Mode   I mean it's not impossible to make photo during scene when your "shtick" is on screen. But that's ok  I mean there are folks, who just plays the game. I'm playing and screening as well. 

I slapped this together kinda quickly. Press 0 to hide. I dont know what button makes the most sense, but I figured zero on the numpad might be good for it and probably isnt used for photo mode??? I dont know. Let me know if it works. 

ShtickBetaV0.5.6-HideUI-0.zip

Edited Thursday at 07:26 PM by FieryVortessence

[deff.]

1 minute ago, FieryVortessence said:

I slapped this together kinda quickly. Press 0 to hide

 

Thanks  Actually I need to figure out why powerofthree Photo Mode is working on my 1.11.240. Looks like it causes several issues and sometimes it's not working properly...

[deff.]

19 minutes ago, FieryVortessence said:

Let me know if it works. 

 

It works, thank you very much! 

[msmfoster]

Looks interesting. Is there any way to indicate if a scene is consensual or not? Sex Attributes can be very arbitrary on that matter.

 

Non-consensual also partially goes out the door if you Dubious Consent from Provocative Perks. 

[JonX67]

V 0.5.6 is working quite nicely!
It may not yet grab all stages of all animations, but as they can still be moved manually it's still an improvement to the game without your mod. 

 

Not sure, though, how it would be in a play where you have lots of AAF scenes, because the overall scene duration increases quite drastically. 
But for the occational "cut-scene" it's perfect!

 

[JohnyBurner]

19 hours ago, FieryVortessence said:

I slapped this together kinda quickly. Press 0 to hide. I dont know what button makes the most sense, but I figured zero on the numpad might be good for it and probably isnt used for photo mode??? I dont know. Let me know if it works. 

ShtickBetaV0.5.6-HideUI-0.zip 643.35 kB · 1 download

 

Can these keys be assignable in MCM? I currently use Numpad 0 for Beggar Whore mode toggle, for instance.

 

Also, full disclosure, I still haven't tried this, I've been modding stuff myself these days with very little free time, but I'm very keen to try it out! It's a great idea!