Random act selection (left) achieves the "relaxed" ending >90% of the time, while a player who tries to maximize their strength and intelligence stats and prioritizes triggering events (right) always achieves one of the three confession endings.
Running a Monte Carlo Simulation of a simulation game… Baudrillard probably has something to say about this.

Random act selection (left) achieves the "relaxed" ending >90% of the time, while a player who tries to maximize their strength and intelligence stats and prioritizes triggering events (right) always achieves one of the three confession endings.
Running a Monte Carlo Simulation of a simulation game… Baudrillard probably has something to say about this.

There are already two parties interested in developing games using this engine (and the accompanying suite of simulation tools), and, while it may take the back burner to any game jams I’m involved in, I fully intend to provide support for this engine in the coming years. Don’t hesitate reach out if you want help using this code to make a game!

I confess that parts of this code are a bit scrappy because I didn’t want to take the time to rewrite significant chunks of the original engine– renpy treats all variables that aren’t scoped to a method or function as global, and it’s not considered bad form to look at these global variables in scoped code. So some of my rewrites to convert renpy code to python code make dodgy use of the global keyword. I may or may not come back and clean that up in the future.

At some point in the next few months I intend to write a PR for the base DSE engine that includes some of the more generic improvements that I implemented, so do look forward to that if you don’t need the full suite of simulation tools.

As for the rest of the changes from the base DSE engine, I’ll just transpose the contents of README.md here:

dse: Rougelike Fork

Dating Sim Engine for Ren’Py The Dating Sim Engine (DSE) is a framework for writing games based on events that are triggered by statistics. It comprises a number of independent modules that can be combined to create games.

Features of this fork

• Core renpy files updated to modern versions.
• Additional “Relationship status” screen that displays scores with love interests.
• Optional “Hardcore” mode, which disables saves and stores all user data in persistent variables.
• Random events for each day are rolled at the start of the day, instead of right before they occur.
• Because events for a day are pre-determined, “hintable” events will be highlighted on the scheduler.
• An event viewer menu, which allows the player to revisit any scene that they have already seen. Note: This uses the renpy replay function and may lead to undesired behavior if contents of events are conditioned on player stats. There may be a patch to address this in the future.
• And last, but certainly not least: an included gameplay simulator which can predict player stat values and endings under different play strategies.

Minor site updates

This site is now a member of the *nix and yuri EVN webrings! Go check out these awesome sites!

I have added a separate rss feed for the “now” series of posts. If you sub to both this and the blog rss feed you should be up to date on all the minor updates of this site.

While this site is hosted on neocities, the last updated field there isn’t reliable due to the way my comment system works– this site gets “updated” any time that a spam comment gets posted or deleted, which happens roughly on the daily.

See ya soon!

Expect another post in a day or two~

Key features:

• Automatic thumbnail generation and integrated lightbox: give users a high-level glance of your work with low-bandwidth images, with high-res versions a single click away.
• Robust tagging and filtering system: user-definable and hierarchical tags make it easy for users to find the works they want to see or for you to link users to a specific subset of your works.
• All gallery information stored in a single file, which can be updated through a bundled python script: no pesky copy and pasting of image locations and descriptions!
• Direct link to individual images in gallery view: avoid hotlinking raw images and preserve the bundled description for a given piece.

Making this was both a stretch of my web dev skills and a way to reach into Jekyll and learn more about what it can do. While I have a much better grasp of how to work with liquid and ruby now, some of the internal workings of this are a bit.. hack-y.

I designed this gallery to be modular and easy to update, but I didn’t exactly prioritize portability or ease of installation– even if it takes some effort to get running, hopefully this project can still be of use.

Aside on background knowledge: I wrote this guide assuming that the user has a baseline familiarity with navigating a command line interface, but I recognize that many readers of my blog may not have this.

I have a brief cliffnotes guide on this very topic here; the two things that you need to know for this are that cd can be used to change directories– when I say “inside x directory”, I mean that you need to cd to be inside it– and that control + c can end a currently running command

Prerequisites

The following software must be installed:

• Python
• Jekyll
• ImageMagick

Note for Windows users: While it is possible to install all of these tools under windows, I highly recommend installing WSL and running JIG there instead.

Step 1: Get the demo online

Bundled with the gallery is a demo that you can use to make sure that Jekyll is set up properly. You can see an example of what the demo should look like here.

1. Download the latest version of JIG from the releases page.
2. Create a new Jekyll site with

   jekyll new mysitename
   

3. Extract the contents of the JIGv*.zip into the mysitename directory.

If there are any warnings about files with the same name, overwrite the ones in the Jekyll directory with the ones from the JIG folder.

4. From inside the mysitename directory, run the following command to build and serve the webpage locally.

   bundle exec jekyll serve
   

This may take a few minutes the first time you run it because thumbnail generation is happening in the background. As long as there are no error messages, this is fine.

5. Open your web browser and navigate to http://localhost:4000.

Voila! The demo should be running on your local machine.

Step 2: Populate the gallery with your own images

The gallery expects all images to be stored in /imgs/gallery/ and stores a file with information about all of these at _data/gallery.yml. The script generateGallery.py can automatically update the yml file based on the contents of the image directory.

1. Delete all image files currently inside of /imgs/gallery/.
2. Copy your image files into /imgs/gallery/.

JIG will try to sort images based on image names. The heading that each image is placed under is decided by the filename up to the first underscore (_). All image filenames must have an underscore for the script to work.

3. Edit _data/gallery.yml and remove everything under the images heading.
4. Remove the contents of the tags section and add your own tag structure.
   • You can have as many tag groups as you like, but remember that every gallery item will need to be tagged with at least one item from each root group.
   • Gallery items may be tagged with multiple tags from any group.
   • Hierarchical tags can only go 3 layers deep.
5. Inside the directory for your project, run python generateGallery.py -i and follow the prompts to describe and tag your images.
6. Run bundle exec jekyll serve and check your local browser to make sure that the gallery appears as expected.
7. To export the gallery to your website, run bundle exec jekyll build and copy the contents of the _site folder to your web host.

Step 2.5: Update the gallery with more images

This project was designed to make this step as simple as possible after the initial setup.

1. Copy all new image files to /imgs/gallery/.
2. From the project directory, run python generateGallery.py -i and follow the prompts.
3. Run bundle exec jekyll build and copy the new contents of the _site folder to your web host.

Step 3 (optional): Integrate the gallery with the rest of your Jekyll site

This step is a little involved because JIG leverages many features of Jekyll, all of which need to be integrated for the gallery to work.

1. Copy the following paths from JIG into your project directory:

/assets/*
/imgs/gallery/
/_includes/image.html
/_layouts/gallery.html
/_plugins/jekyll-responsive-magick.rb

If there are any collisions, they will have to be refactored.

2. Modify your _layouts/default.html file and include the following in your <head> tag:

{% if page.layout == 'gallery' %}
<link href="assets/glightbox.min.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
<link href="assets/gallery.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
<script src="assets/glightbox.min.js"></script>
<script src="assets/gallery.js"></script>
{% endif %}

From here, go to step 2.2 to finish setting up the gallery.

Step 4 (optional): Gallery configuration settings

How to specify image tags via URL

Example: ?category=photograph&photograph=animal,mineral&warnings=no-warning-needed

• add a ? to the end of the URL and list each tag group and selected tags after that, separated by a &
• both tags and groups are lowercase and “slugified”, ie all spaces are replaced with - and all punctuation is removed
• when specifying multiple tags in the same group, separate them with a comma
• when specifying a nested tag, all tags that are above it in the hierarchy must be defined as well

Default view

In _data/gallery.yml, the default groups on page load can be specified by adding a default group with tag groups inside it, formatted the same way that they are in the tags section. Items that do not have these tags will be hidden by default.

For example, the following will hide all items tagged with “arachnophobia” from the demo gallery:

default:
  Warnings:
    - No warning needed

Thumbnail size and quality

Some settings for how ImageMagick creates thumbnails can be defined in your _config.yml file. The default settings are as follows:

responsive:
  pixels: 22500  # approximate number of pixels in each thumbnail
  quality: 30    # image compression quality

In Closing

Please let me know if you experience any bugs or errors while using this tool. Some aspects of JIG are a little rough around the edges, but I believe that this gallery should work for most users.

Because I have released JIG under the MIT Licence no attribution is required, but I would appreciate a link back if you did use this software on your website. And let me know about it! :)