The June Update

Hey guys,

Sorry this update's a little late. I was really hoping to be able to release a new build for June, but I ran into a bunch of issues this month getting the menus working, and on top of that my second vaccine dose put me out of commission for a few days.

The next build probably won't be ready for a couple more weeks, but I've got a screenshot for ya, and an update on what I've been working on and what I'll be adding soon.

So the first thing on the menu for last month was, well... the menus. I wanted to implement a slider to allow you to change your size.

Unfortunately neither the creator of Hurricane VR (the Unity plugin I'm using which provides the physics hands, player collision, and movement controls) nor the creator of Curved UI (the UI system I'm using which allows for curved menu cnavases in VR) could tell me how to make the two systems work together.

My initial mistake was to assume I needed to enable the SteamVR setting in Curved UI to make it work with Hurricane, and then drag the hand objects into the slots for those, and select the trigger as the interaction action, because I'm using Steam VR with Hurricane, but this didn't work, and I didn't know that it was the wrong way of going about things.

I then learned of another Unity pakcage called VR Interaction Framework, which is very simular to Hurricane VR, and which supported Curved UI natively. I spoke to the creator of that, and he was so helpful that I paid the $70 for that just to try it out, and to see how he got Curved UI to work, and I found through that that I was supposed to be using the Custom Raycast setting instead.

Unfortunately VRIF didn't have out of the box support for finger tracking on the knuckles controllers, and the hand collision with the environment was limited, but the author did point me to yet another Unity plugin called AutoHand which does handle that, along with the Alyx-style phyics posing, so I spent the $40 on that as well, but unfortunately the two systems don't natively support one another, and inregrating them would take too long, so it wasn't a viable replacement for Hurricane even though the API seemed a lot simpler and better designed.

Still, having the code for both those may come in useful down the road even if it's only to use as reference. And $100 was a small price to pay to save myself another week or two trying to figure out how to get the menu interactions functioning correctly.

It was around this point that I got that second covid shot which put me in bed for 30+ hours and kept me out of it for a few days with aches and pains.

Once the effects of the vaccine subsided, I got back to work on creating the menus, and I was met with another issue. How should I design them? What options should I present? How should the player select a position and partner? Did I want to have a series of drop downs to select species, sex, skin, genetalia, etc... a full character creator? Or should I simplify things a great deal so I could get something up and running more quickly for you, and not do a bunch of extra work that may not ultimately be in the final game in that form? For example, while I would like to have players be able to customize characters, at the same time I kind of like the idea of having named pre-designed partners for you to choose from, and the gameplay elements that may arise from that if I introduce any dating-sim like elements at some future point, even if the dating sim element is limited only to using a cellphone app to choose partners and locations. The game is so early in development all this stuff is in flux and I don't know what it will look like in the end. I only have vague ideas about where I'm going with this, and the strong interest in the macro and vore fetish stuff makes me want to find ways to incorporate that more fully than just including a shrink ray somewhere which was the original plan. I also had to consider elements like, if I were to allow the player to shrink or grow any of the characters at any time, what happens for example, with that pool scene? If you shrink her, then either she's just gonna be laying there underwater, or I'm gonna have to make her switch to swimming and well, while that's possible, it'd also be a technical nightmare to deal with all those situations. I simply don't have the time or budget to handle that.

I ultimately decided that the easiest and most logical course of action for the moment would be to impose certain limitations. For example, rather than allowing you to grow or shrink your partrners any time, anywhere, instead I'll allow you to select different positions / scenarios, which will include ones where your partner is giant, or small. So for example, you can have a giant female bear laying in the pool, but you could also have her standing over the garage where the male shark was, and you can have the male shark in the pool instead. There might also be a position where your partner is looking over the house and leaning on it. But then, there are also positions / scenarios where your partner is normal sized and inside the house, standing in the living room, or laying on the couch, or in bed, or standing in the shower. This setup still allows me to introduce something like a shrink ray of course, but it would be limited to certain scenarios, like, for example, if the character is sitting on the couch, I can allow you make them grow and push the furniture out of the way. And I could do the same for specific scenarios outside as well, so if I did decide to, I could still have a scene where your partner is floating in the pool on a chair, and you make them big, leading to the scene you're now familiar with. But I don't have to worry about someone making the character grow when they're say... inside the shower, and not having a means to deal with that properly.  

So, if you look at the menu as it now stands, I've got a positon dropdown and both top and bottom dropdowns. The reason I have top and bottom there is because I'm thinking of situations where you might want to swap positons with your partner, and have them be on top or vice versa, or you might want to have two partners  going at it on their own while you stand aside and watch. It's not really applicable to all scenes, the macro ones in particular, but for many it would be.

But this may only be a temporary solution, because I have another idea for how to implement this which I like a lot. Imagine walking around the house, and pointing at the couch, and seeing an outline or ghostly apparition of your partner sitting there, and then you click on it, and they appear at that location. This would be a lot nicer than selecting things from a menu, and would encourage you to explore the house looking for locations where you can interact. You go into the laundry room, and there you find one with the bending over with their head in the washing machine for example. :D

This sort of system would also work well if I implement a dating-like system where your partner shows up at the front door and you want to direct them to go to different locations, so it's appealing in that respect too.

But for now, the easiest system to set up and which won't involve tossing too much work if I change it is the dropdown menu to select a location, so that is the first method I'll implement just so you can start playing with things quickly.

And speaking of dropdowns... If you look at the screenshot on the right hand side, you can see all the options for the partner selection that I'm going to try to have in there for the next build! You'll have male and female bears and sharks, a herm fox, a male jackal, and a female wolf and doberman.

Another reason the build was delayed is, as with the last one, in order to have dynamic bones you can touch for all these I'd either have to edit the script or manually assign dozens of bones, and I haven't had time to do either, but I think I'll be trying to edit that script this time instead of spending an hour dragging bones around again just to have that work go to waste later.

Finally, yesterday I found and purchased one more asset. And its a major additon to the game.... A dynamic penetration system! It's not the one people have been using in VRChat, that one isn't licensable for commercial use and in any case it's kind of a hack done with a shader and point lights. This one does things properly, using blend shapes and bones to do its thing. It's still going to be a lot of work to implement, so don't expect it in the next build, but its proboably gonna save me months of work!

Anyway, I think that about covers everything for June. Hopefully I'll have a new build for you in a couple weeks. It may only feature the size changing code, but we'll see. I'm not sure how difficult swapping the avatars around the map will turn out to be. Shouldn't be too dfficult, but special cases like laying in the pool might present some issues I'll need to work around.