Hello everyone!
Newlife 0.7.1 has been released.
Early-access Patrons can find it in the creations section here. The changelog is below.
The previous version is now public. You can download it using the links on the right-hand side of the blog. The public version's changelog is here.
Saved files & templates from older versions will 100% not work in this version as they are not even in the right format.
For
new players - just use one of the links to the right to get a zipfile
containing Newlife. Once unzipped, you'll see a folder containing .jar
and .exe files. Either one of these will run the game.
For
either version you'll need to have Java installed. A lot of programs
use Java so you might well already have it. If the jar shows up as an
unrecognised file type, then you probably don't. In that case you can
get it from http://www.java.com/.
The
exe should tell you if you don't have the right version on your
computer, but you'll still need to install java to run the game.
There's a guide for new players here which includes some troubleshooting tips for installation & downloading.
This release mostly involved an extensive rework on how Newlife handles saving, which touched on a lot of the game's internals. This should have three main advantages:
First, it should fix a problem some people had experienced with saves not working with the most recent versions of Java.
Second, it should allow saves and templates to work reliably across versions as long as the internal data structures do not change. This is why I rushed to add basic hairstyle support in this version, so that I wouldn't need to do it later and break people's saves.
Third, the new saves are in json format which is human-readable. This means that people can edit their game in a text-editor, for example if they want to customise their clothing items. Back up your saves first though, as it's easy to break them with a typo in the wrong place.
Saves are initially created in a delightful "wall-of-text" format, but I found that using the json plugin for notepad++ let me easily format them into a readable structure. Json is a common format, so no doubt there are plenty of alternative tools for this as well.
The other change is the addition of internal hairstyle support. However, there's only placeholder styles and there's no stylist scene to actually change them in-game. I'll be improving on that very soon. So, if there's a hairstyle you want for yourself or your lovers then let me know in the comments, as well as where you think it should fall on the cute-sexy and elegant-casual axes.
Major changes & additions:
Completely replaced the way Newlife saves games (and templates), along with some significant internal reworks to remove bloat from the files.
Added support for hairstyles internally, although it currently isn't possible to change them except for save-editing and the values are largely placeholders.
Changes for user-submitted content:
Added a getHairstyle() method to characters in custom scenes.
Bugfixes:
Fixes to text issues. Thanks to and for reporting some of these.
Fixed a bug with the new error logging added in 0.7.0e. Thanks to DGF for finding this!
