DevBlog -lets talk about automation

Hi!

let me tell bring you up to date with what i am doing or better said what i did the last weeks!

You know i want to do Big games with a small budget and all alone,

Furrier you silly fluffball how is that possible you may ask?

Let me tell you about my plan!

The key word is Automation, 

take a look at the video above, you see a good example on what i mean by this.

You see that annoying green Capsule on her Mouth? :O

Don't you worry you won't see it in the game, i activated it to show you where i do a Collision test.

Let me explain,

in all my games before, i did very much with Animation notifies,

so every sound,

every fluid generation,

every morph target change order

and so on and so on.....

This can be very work intensive to set them all on the "perfect" location in the timeline when you have like 200 animations (no joke) look at the right of this image :D

https://ibb.co/8bHcDW2 

In the center you see the Notifies,

Now there are much less, the only things i set up there now is the order to disable the look at and body dynamics so her mouth for example is there where i want it and she is not looking somewhere else.

These notifies are not that important for timing so i can just put them in and it works, 

this alone saves so much work....

But Furrier you big plushnose i hear you say, how do i get my all important salvia in the game?

don't worry about it either!

Thats where automation comes into play,

https://ibb.co/8mb4Q23 

What you see up there^

is the code that checks for if something collides with the tounge of a character, and if yes checks if it is just her own head... we don't want this. 

But if not guess what, we look at what we "hit" with our lazy little collision solver.

We take the character we "hit" take the Bone name (bodypart) and throw all this information to our Salvia actor we create to handle all this mess....

https://ibb.co/5jPsKbY 

There we attach the end of our salvia string to where we hit, check the distance between those points and stretch it or let it rip appart if needed.

These Salvia strings break at a random place, fall down hit stuff and then slowly grow smaller and when they are very short we just delete them out of existence (heartless i know but your computer loves it, imagine we sacrifice them to the all mighty framerate god)

You can see all that in action in the video above, which is wip (really need to get the transitions right and a deep throat animation can not be missing...)

Thats just one example of automation that saves me so much time....

Now lets talk about the fight against bugs,

You still know that fur collision thingy i made?

It looked fine when it touched long fur, while adding animations i noticed a problem....

the way it makes thes collisions with the fur is it checks the distance between lets say a long and hard "sausage" and then moves the points of the fur model away from that.

This is very fast and works.... on long fur.

When lets say she should eat that sausage it happens that her mouth and nose will also get deformed like that which is... wrong.

Watch the Bug in action:

https://vimeo.com/585032625/f5cb044d00 

Warning extremly Creepy theeth showing bug :O

I searched for a solution for that, and Unfortunately i did not find one and had to remove fur collisions....

NOT :D

There is a super secret way i tell you,

you know there is a extra channel on the points making up a model, its called "vertex Color"

But Furrier you fluffy dandelion seed i hear you ask, how does a color help you with that?

Its easy, i use it as Fur deph mask :3

https://ibb.co/B2FZyBz 

White parts is long fur, black is short/none

i just Multiply these colors inside the shader where i do the offset of these points.

And because it calculates in the vertex shader its very fast, much faster than using a texture, so its usable and you get your Fur Collision! YaY :3

Altough i am not posing that much at the moment, there is much work being done in the background.

I added a new animation method in saving animation poses, which changes the way animations are stored and loaded.

For example, before i had for a "sausage eating" animation 8 poses, which where stored inside a "Blend space" now i save them inside one Animation Sequence and get the desired pose by messing with the time inside the sequence, this means i now get like 30 poses inside one sequence without extra work, smoother animations and faster loading is the result of that.

There is so much more i changed/added to the base Character class i don't even remember myself,

https://ibb.co/cvKByY5 

This you see up there ^

is the character base class, it is so bit that whenever i have it open it kills my framerate, but it executes quite fast, i used sequences whenever possible and i do very little in tick (perframe).

Also new is the new Fluid solver:

https://ibb.co/ZNLWTmx 

It detects what body part fluid hits and gives you nice messy fur on that part,

its not yet perfect, but thats how it will be in the very next game, for future releases i am thinking about a way to actually make the fur go down and get destroyed over time.

So what is next?

I am on finishing your next game which is that pony game, i wanted to have it out before my birthday but yea... i tried to crunsh it but all i got out the sleepless nights was headache -_-

I will continue working on it until it is finished, on the todo list is mostly optimizing stuff, i had a version ready but with everything working together the framerate was way too low for everyone that does not have a 3080... 

so i am working on rearanging the main level, and optimizing the code, there are some places i know where a bit of work can make a huge difference.

Will be back soon with a huge 9gb (MiniGame) :O

Most of it is animation data, since i noticed that i can make 3ds max much faster by converting everything from editable poly to editable mesh i made animations like crazy...

♥u

Your Furrier,

Video Download:
https://vimeo.com/user143774380/download/584350531/bda098ceee