October Update!

Hey guys,

I've got a new build available for you this month, which I'll be posting a link to after this update!

The content I've added in this build is gonna be a bit different than you might have expected from the previous update.

I'd mentioned that I purchased a bunch of new animations, and I was going to start adding them to the game. But when I went to do that after exporting them all, I found that for some reason almost all of them were corrupted, with the hips twisting around 180 degrees and other weird glitches.

I'm not sure if I exported them wrong, but the first few animations I exported seemed fine, so perhaps I accidentally changed something while exporting all the rest of them, In any case, I wanted to get a new build out for you asap, and I didn't know how long it would take to fix the animations, so I switched gears and decided to add a bunch of new avatars instead, as well as some sound and particle effects to make the world feel a little more alive!

Specifically, I added:

1. A macro herm fox, leaning on the roof of the house.
2. A male wolf, which replaces the clone of the male shark in the living room.
3. A female wolf, pleasuring herself in the sun room.
4. A female shark, which replaces the female bear clone in the shower.

The female wolf and shark are both animated with a couple of the animations which were salvageable. The shark animation is a little janky, with the legs twisting up a but, but I'll have to fix that later.

The shower scene also now includes particle and sound effects!

There are also now the sounds of wind and birds outside. And inside as well, because I need to look for an audio solution that can block souunds through walls, but I opened the doors up so it makes sense you can still hear them faintly inside. :)

I tweaked the post processing and main menu slightly as well. The dark background on the menu was messing with the auto exposure and causing the buttons to be over exposed when it was taking up most of the screen, so I removed the background entirely, except behind the logo up top, which I think actually looks nicer in VR. There's still a panel there so the targeting laser will show up as you move it over the region, but it's invisible.

Regarding the scale settings, I implemented the 10x boost setting I'd mentioned I was going to add to allow you to get really small or really large, but I ended up removing it after implementing it for several reasons. For one, the VR interaction system didn't like it, and stuff like movement and teleporting stopped working. For another, the near clip plane can't be set low enough to not clip the hands away at small sizes. The menu text also gets messed up even at 0.05x scale, and I'm not sure if it's possible to fix that.

I have another idea for how to implement extreme size changes however. I was thinking that instead of shrinking the player, when I implement a way to load different scenes, I could provide an option to scale the scene itself up by 10x, which would give the same effect as shrinking the player by that much. I am a bit worried about whether things like the particle effects and audio sources will scale properly with the world though, so I wouldn't expect this feature to go in in the near future, as it may require quite a bit of work to implement, but I just thought you'd like to know I'm looking for potential solutions. Worst case is I just have to add more macro scenes instead of allowing the player to scale themselves down to create their own. :)

Oh, and while working with the menu I did finally find the reason why the drop down selections weren't being selected reliably when you click them, so that's fixed for whenever I make those actually function!

I can't think of much else I added, but I did start re-arranging things so the avatars and house and vr rig are all in individual scenes, which was necessary for when I start adding new locations and when I eventually add the ability for you to load your own avatars into the game. Though this does mean the dynamic bone colliders on the hands have stopped working because you can't have references in the editor that reference objects in other scenes, so to get that working again I'll have to write those scripts I talked about to create the proper collider references for the dynamic bone script at runtime. Not sure exactly when I'll get to that. Might be a couple updates down the road.

Oh and speaking of colliders, I disabled the colliders on the female shark and wolf because when you shrink yourself, the player capsule can't get smaller than 0.3 meters and adjusting that value caused teleportation to stop working, so I have to figure out why that's happening, or yo u can't get close to them with colliders enabled. I left the colliders on the male wolf in the living room for no particular reason.

Anyway, the rest of this month I'm gonna be busy with halloween stuff, so the next update will probably come out around the end of November, but I hope the content I've added with this update will be enough to tide you over till then!

PS: If you don't have access to the build tier, I'll be posting a video on Twitter and e621 shortly showing off all the new stuff, as well!