Community - Message Boards

I made some changes today to the way items and inventories work. Hopefully the changes are pretty intuitive. Here are some highlights:

* Coats and Accessories can now be held in inventory, so you can hold items you aren't currently using.

* Personal inventory space has been expanded from 8 slots to 12. Coats take up 2 slots, everything else takes 1.

* In order to equip/unequip coats and accessories, use your mouse to drag items back and forth from inventory. You can do this on either your detective page in the gear dropdown toolbox on the Case page. I tested this on a few different browser configurations, but let me know if you find a bug on the drag and drop system.

* Here's a big one: Items are now degraded on a per-use basis instead of per-case. Only your equipped items should degrade, so you don't need to worry about items in your inventory falling apart.

* Items no longer degrade when you store them in an agency locker.

Please leave any feedback regarding this new system on this thread.

Making these changes is going to allow us to offer much more diverse items (for instance, we can now do coats and accessories as favor prizes), and this was also an important first step to making container objects, so we can now start working on visitable agency headquarters, and (eventually) private apartments.

Have Fun!

Thank you for the update, Ben. ^_^

Thanks for the nice ajustment, Ben!

Has the price offered for goods by the porn broker just dropped?

I just noticed what might be an unintended consequence of items wearing out on a per-use basis. I just did a case wearing black gloves (charm +1). They were in excellent condition at the start of the case (perfect - 1, they had been used in only one previous case). I have Charm at 5. I finished the case charming 3 or 4 times (I can't remember, exactly), so the gloves shouldn't have worn at all. However, they are now Worn (down two steps from Excellent). Now, I may not have had them on the whole duration of the case.

I saw a similar thing with a pair of blue gloves (hair analysis +1). I bought them during the case, and examined two hairs I found in the crime scene. My skill is 1, the gloves add +1. After the case, the gloves are in Good condition (down 2 from Perfect).

So my question is this: Do the items wear out if the skill is used or if the bonus the item adds to the skill is used? It appears that using the skill while wearing the item causes the item to wear, weather the bonus given by the item was needed or not. If this is the case, you should only put on the item when you need the benefit of its bonus.

Is this by design and are others seeing this behavior?

MR.

For those of you having problems with either the Gear toolbox being out of date, or if you are switching between accounts and seeing one detective's gear when logged in as the other...

I believe this is a problem with your browser caching old versions of the data. I've put up a change that should fix the problem going forward, but you may need to clear your cache to get rid of old data now.

So, if you are still seeing what appears to be outdated data in any of those toolboxes, please try clearing out your browser "cache" or "temporary internet files".

Instructions for doing this on any browser can be found here:

http://www.wikihow.com/Clear-Your-Browser's-Cache

As I said, the problem should be fixed going forward, so you should only need to do that once.

Marco,

For Skill based items, you should only be taking a hit when the item actually helps you. i.e. when you would not have had that particular skill use available without the item. Additionally, if you have more than one item equipped with a particular skill bonus, it should only ever damage one of those items per use.

Now, for an item that only gives you +1 skill point, the amount of damage for a single use is now slightly higher than what the item would have incurred from a single case under the old system. This is intended to make up for the fact that you won't always make use of that additional skill box in every case, so the relation of bonus skill uses (for a +1 item) is something less than one per case.

That's why you're seeing the text description of the item condition degrade faster than it would have before. It's not really 2x the damage taken per case, more like 1.2x which is what the research I did before making this change suggested was the correct conversion.

The whole item degrading algorithm turned out to be quite complicated. I'm not sure I got all the numbers right, but I am monitoring them.

Some of the thhings taken into account:

* We want to maintain the approximate expected lifetime of existing items. So a coat that was set to last 300 cases before the switch should still last about as long (assuming it's equipped the whole time).

* We don't want an item that has more effects to degrade at a faster rate than an item with fewer.

* Only one item should ever take damage for a particular use, so players aren't punished for having two equipped items with similar effects.

* Negotiation bonuses work significantly different than other skill bonuses, so the degrading algorithm needs to function differently as well.

* Items that speed up evidence analysis also need a different scheme.

* Same with Status bonus items

I've gone ahead and increased all agency locker sizes by 50\% to offset the increased space requirement for coats.

Thanks Ben. :)

Thanks Ben. Now we can use the locker :-)

i just love these changes, thanks!