problem with "Write a Song"

Kudos Kudos 2
1

i seem to be having a problem with the “Write a song” solo activity. it doesn’t appear in the game!

i checked the csvs, and a reference to it does appear in the solo_activities.csv, but the sole prerequisite seems to be a skill called xp_music. there doesn’t seem to be a way to get this skill since learning any of the instruments gets you music_[InstrumentName] (ex: music_guitar), and getting a job playing that instrument gets you xp_music_[InstrumentName] (xp_music_guitar)

i tried changing the writesong prerequisite to xp_music_drums, which i have, and the game crashed when i try to access it in-game.
tried adding an xp_music field to the music jobs, and i got the xp_music, but trying to write a song crashes the game as well.

any thoughts on this?

feel a bit odd since i seem to be the only one having this problem.

i purchased the game from reflexive by the way, and patched it all the way up to 1.07 without any problems.

2

just found that jamming at the funky munky gives 10% xp_music skill at 99% retention. however, with that skill, trying to access Write a Song still crashes the game. the crash happens in the solo activities dialog, when trying to scroll back from Walk in the Park.

3

feel weird talking to myself, but hopefully this’ll help someone.

i fixed, sort of, the songwriting glitch. there’s apparently a problem with the dialog box it’s trying to call. that is, the entry in the ondisplay column (column 10 i think) labeled songwriting. changing this entry to anything else allows writing songs, but accessing it in-game under solo activities gives you a window with just the description (i imagine there’s supposed to be a dialog similar to the screenplay one with a title and a progress bar?)

looking through the mods forum now to see if there’s anything on the dialog boxes specific activities call.

4

I’ve never had a character musically inclined enough to try their hand at songwriting, so I can’t be much help here. When I saw the header for this, I honestly thought you’d put something for Rock Legend into the wrong thread!

5

i wanted to try out as many career options as possible in one go, and i thought that an easy way to start would be to boost the skill you could get learning an instrument, starting the musician path early, then make lots of money writing songs while working on the other career paths.

works fine now, except for the lack of the progress bar. to deal with that, i set it so that you could write a song in one go so that the progress bar is irrelevant. that’s 8-90 dollars a week PER SONG, at one song per activity session (ehrm, one per weekday and two each on saturday and sunday that is.) imbalances the game quite a bit, but i’m planning on putting it back to defaults and tweaking from there once i’ve tried all of the career paths. hopefully, someone would’ve found out how the dialog boxes work by then. can’t seem to find anything about that so far.

6

1.5 years after the previous message on this topic, I’m experiencing the same problem.
(I’m using the “SomeGuyInABikini” expansion, installed over a new 1.09 version I purchased a week ago.)
I was wondering why no activity appeared for writing a song, then I examined the solo_activities file and this thread.
The only xp_music increase I could find was, as mentioned above, the “Funky Monkey” event in events.csv. However, “Funky” currently doesn’t seem possible to happen, as it appears to specify xp_music as a prerequisite as well as a gain:

,jamsession,Musical Jam Session,“Fancy coming along to the Funky Monkey club tonight for a jam session? Your music skills are renowned, and it’s a cool way to raise your image on the music scene. We wouldn’t invite just anyone, but as it’s you… See you there tonight?”,“All the fun of playing live music, all the attention, all the glory! And none of the lugging equipment around. And lets not forget the free drinks everyone bought you for being in the band!”,“music,1.0”,“kudos,0.4”,“xp_music,0.1”,“industry_music,1.0”,#,“xp_music,1.0”,#,“kudos,0.09,_KUDOS_DEGRADE”,“xp_music,0.1,0.99”,“confidence,0.1,0.25”,“alcohol,0.10,0.5”

I played with that event for awhile, but couldn’t get it to trigger.
Then I just modified the job scripts like so:

ApplyEffect(xp_music,0.01,_JOBXP_DEGRADE);

However, once I got my music experience ramped up, I got the same crash while traversing through solo activities as described above.
I’m certain it is while trying to access the write a song activity, as it occurs right after “working out” when clicking the forward arrows, and “walk in the park” when clicking the backward arrows. These are the entries in solo_activities.csv that precedes and follow “write a song”. (Discounting the “write screenplay” which I don’t have the pre-requistites for.)

Unfortunately, I don’t know enough about all the fields in solo_activites to experiment with a solution. It could be “Call(writesong)”, which I presume is a routine in the code I have no access to.
Neither do I have any idea what the sequence of 0’s, 1’s, and -1’s do.

#,writesong,Write a song,Work on a new song that could help you break into the big time. You will find that tears of happiness or sadness will help the good tunes come to you.,Songwriter,0,Call(enddaygui);Call(writesong);Call(dirtyhome);Call(homewithpets),0,songwriting,0,0,-1,-1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,#,“boredom,-0.5,0.25”,“stress,0.1,_STRESS_DEGRADE”,“tiredness,0.1,_TIRED_DEGRADE”,#,“xp_music,0.6”,

Has anyone out there been able to get the writesong function to work?
Does the same problem happen for Write a Screenplay?

Thanks for any thoughts,
Underhill

7

SOLUTION

Ok, I re-read Walker Evans posts above, and figured out how to get songwriting working in my own configuration. The solution is really Walker’s, but I’ll provide some more detail to make it easier for others.

It’s advisable to back up your data files before you go modifying them, of course.

The first step is to setup some way of increasing the xp_music skill to 60%. The default data files only allow this skill to increase by the “Funky Monkey” event. However, as discussed above, that event itself requires xp_music as a pre-requisite, and I myself could never make it trigger.
Instead, I added a line to increase xp_music to all of the “music_*” scripts in the data\simulation\scripts\jobs folder.
Below is an example from music_guitar_0.txt. The new line is in bold.

ApplyEffect(tiredness,0.120,_TIRED_DEGRADE);
ApplyEffect(xp_music_guitar,0.01,_JOBXP_DEGRADE);
ApplyEffect(xp_music,0.01,_JOBXP_DEGRADE);

So now, your xp_music skill will gradually increase with any music job.

The second step is to fix the writesong event, contained in the solo_activities.csv file in the data\simulation folder. As Walker noted, there is a problem with the songwriting script that causes the “Write a song” dialog to crash the game when you’re cycling through the solo activities selections. Walker found that replacing “songwriting” in the data entry with anything else will bypass that problem. I used “screenplay”, as shown below:

#,writesong,Write a song,Work on a new song that could help you break into the big time. You will find that tears of happiness or sadness will help the good tunes come to you.,Songwriter,0,Call(enddaygui);Call(writesong);Call(dirtyhome);Call(homewithpets),0,screenplay,0,0,-1,-1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,#,“boredom,-0.5,0.25”,“stress,0.1,_STRESS_DEGRADE”,“tiredness,0.1,_TIRED_DEGRADE”,#,“xp_music,0.6”,

With this tweak, you can now bring up the “Write a song” dialog. The “Write a song” button at the bottom WILL generate progress on the current song. However, you will not see a progress bar for current song, progress will only be stored internally. If you substitute “screenplay” in solo_activites.csv as I did, the progress bar will show a screenplay that will be forever at 0%. The important thing is that internally, progress will increase for the current song each time you work on it, and it will eventually complete.

The third step is optional. You can modify the progess done on the current song with each “Write a song” activity. This parameter is in config.txt, in the data folder. The parameter is GV_BASE_SONGWRITE_PROG.
The value when you first install the game is 0.07.
Walker has experimented with setting it to 1.00, so one doesn’t have to deal with the invisible progress bar at all.
I’m experimenting with 0.51, so it generally takes 2-3 sessions to write a song. (Which means one don’t always make a full 51% of progress every time, but that’s ok.) I can mentally keep track of how far along I am with a song at that rate.

There’s another value in config.txt right below it named GV_INST_SONGWRITE_PROG, I haven’t figured out what that one does yet.

Strategy Note: As indicated in the dialog, extremely high or low happiness contributes to the quality of the song. It’s probably better for your other activites to maximize rather than minimize your happiness before writing a song. A low-quality song can be rejected. I’ve had songs rejected when my happiness was 85% when songwriting, so make sure to take a walk in the park first, or watch the comedy channel on cable tv.

Regards, and thanks again to Walker,
Underhill