VaM 1.20.0 Released!

Hi all-

1.20 is finally here! Thank you for your patience and understanding, and most of all, your continued and amazing support! This was the toughest release that I have ever worked on. I wanted to give 1.X a good sendoff since I will personally be moving to 2.X development after the 1.20 release cycle. The rest of the team will continue on 1.X so you can still expect more on that front while 2.X is developed. More details in a future post.

1.20 contains 30 new features, 6 new content items, 46 tweaks, and 10 bug fixes! This is by far the most packed release to date and the longest release notes ever. It took longer than I estimated because the new features required a lot of rounds of testing, tweaking, and bug fixing. I'm quite happy with the final results, and I'm excited to see what people will create using the new features geared towards making content easier.

How to get 1.20:

Please see the download and install VaM post here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/downloading-and-32794384 

Highlights:  

A highlight video is coming, but I did not want to delay the release any further to get that completed. Expect the video in a few days. If you can't wait until then, check out the release on your own and look for these major changes inside: 

Improved new and existing user experience

• New start screen, new demo scenes, new mega-scene browser
• Dozens of new usability-oriented tweaks and features

Improved performance

• 10-25% general improvement, >100% improvement in specific cases

Vastly improved (10-30X!!!) scene and texture load performance

SubScenes (a key part of the Scene Wizard system)

• SubScenes are a group of atoms that work as a unit that can be easily reused in multiple scenes
• compatible SubScenes load extremely fast

Improved presets system

• Preset locking – keep settings between scene or other preset type loads. This is another key part of the Scene Wizard system. Examples: Use your favorite Person appearance in any other existing scene! Lock skin, hair, and morphs, but let the scene dictate the clothing being worn.
• Preset merging – allows layered preset loading. Examples: clothing layering, morph merging

Something missing? Yes. The Scene Wizard and Hub Integration are not yet complete. Major components of both of these features are complete and some are included in 1.20.0, but rather than rush these features and delay the release any further, we have opted to move the Hub Integration to release 1.20.1 and the Scene Wizard to release 1.20.2. We expect additional feedback and bug fixes over the next couple of weeks that will also be put into these minor releases. We will release 1.20.1 and 1.20.2 as soon as possible. In the meantime, you can use the existing in-game web browser to browse the Hub. If you download a VAR package using this in-game web browser, it will automatically install it, and if that VAR package includes a scene file, it will automatically open it. It won't, however, find and auto-download any dependencies.

1.20.1 and 1.20.2 Details

Hub Integration Details For 1.20.1

The Hub Integration is two pieces: a custom in-game browser for the VaM Hub and the auto-download system. The browser will work a lot like the new Mega-scene browser. It will allow searching for VaM content by category and other filters. With just a couple of clicks the content will be installed and be ready to use. The auto-download system is used to download additional packages that the resource you are downloading might also require without you having to search for it as well. The Hub Integration is all to just make it a lot easier to get content to use within VaM.

Scene Wizard Details For 1.20.2

The Scene Wizard will allow you to quickly make new scenes from various components. Key parts of this system are in 1.20.0: SubScenes and the improved presets system. How does the Scene Wizard work? Imagine selecting an environment (bedroom, pool, etc.), then selecting a character combination (1 guy 1 girl, 2 girls, etc.), then selecting appearances for the characters, and then selecting a set of animations that work with those choices. Once everything is selected through a step-by-step process, a dynamically created scene is created for you that is customized to your tastes and desires with multiple choices of animations and other interactions once you are in the scene.

Release Notes:

Items in bold indicate key items

Features:

• SubScene atom and system - save and restore groups of atoms in relative position. Also has its own animation master.
• New mega-scene browser
• Animation: Scene animation system now uses params and can be controlled through triggers
• Load Performance: Texture caching - 10-30X speedup when loading textures. Works with all images including thumbnails and packaged textures.
• Load Performance: System for reusing Person atoms to greatly improve load times when loading a scene or adding new Person atoms to a scene
• Performance: >10% increase in baseline performance due to large effort in optimizing physics
• Performance: Huge increase in performance when changing morphs that effect advanced skin colliders
• Performance: Added performance monitor UI to Person to allow seeing what features effect performance. This can be used to tweak what is enabled to improve performance.
• Person: Improved and expanded eye control. Exposed previously hidden params and added new params for setting look at right/left/up/down offsets for micro-movement control.
• Person: user invoked add of person now loads general user defaults if set
• Physics: Added new maxVelocityEnable and maxVelocity parameters for joints and other physics objects. https://trello.com/c/Ao4c9WOe
• Physics: Added physics explosion recovery button. Should not be needed as much with the other physics fixes in this release.
• Physics: Added freezePhysics Atom parameter which allows halting physics on that atom
• Plugins: added new SuperController events for atom changes and other events https://trello.com/c/EUX31pz4 
• Plugins: added new FreeControllerV3 movement events https://trello.com/c/atRZY2uK 
• Plugins: added predefined symbols of VaM version that can be used in preprocessor conditions https://trello.com/c/5hkJvzvl 
• Presets: added plugin presets
• Presets: merge load system https://trello.com/c/VLbl8xg7
• Presets: locking system - keep settings between loads https://trello.com/c/ZGCVaKq1 
• Presets: added user defaults. A special store that can be quickly loaded. New button to load them.
• Triggers: New timer triggers for float params for Start/End triggers
• Triggers: Collision triggers - added relative velocity filtering https://trello.com/c/xnjOzpux 
• Usability: Atom isolate edit atom, which hides all controls that don't belong to that atom and prevents interaction.
• Usability: Overhauled file browsers - faster, more columns, larger buttons with no wasted space, limit shown for faster performance on large directories or flattened view
• Usability: New filterable popups for long lists to prevent performance issues and to make finding the item much easier. For desktop, filter can be typed in, and up/down arrows can be used to navigate the filtered list, while return key selects the item.
• Usability: New user preference to hide targets that are completely off to reduce clutter and make it easier to select targets that are on. This is on by default. Option is in Misc tab in User Preferences
• Usability: Added favorites system to all files (including packaged files). File browsers have new option to only show favorites.
• Usability: Added hide system to files. Works with packaged files as well to hide content you don't want to see without deleting it or editing package
• Usability: additional key shortcuts for camera control https://trello.com/c/Xgkg0QCD 
• Usability: automatic monitor camera view and focus shift when UI is open. Allows seeing the focused control better. This is a user preference and is on by default.

Content:

• Person: 2 new skins from Ren: Simone and Lexi
• Person: 3 futa skins thanks to Class S Weeb and Ren: Kayla, Maria, and Mia
• Person: Exposed additional 50+ breast pose morphs
• Completely reorganized built-in content to put into packages for easier management and disable if not wanted. 
• Some new scenes, assets, and templates added. Some old scenes updated
• A few popular plugin addon packages included in the distribution (AcidBubbles Timeline 172, MacGruber Life 7, NoStage3 UnityAssetVamifier 20). Used in some of the new demo scenes.

Tweaks: 

• Animation: Motion animation system seek to beginning now resets physics for more reliable restart
• Animation: Scene animation system now has autoPlay parameter
• Animation: Scene animation slider values can now be typed in
• Load Performance: Vastly improved load speed of audio files from packages
• Load Performance: Custom Unity Asset - minor improvement in load speed and hanging when loading from packages
• Load Performance: Default skin (female3) is now never unloaded to make Person reset and scene loads faster
• Load Performance: VAR compression - files already compressed (jpg, png, mp3, assetbundle, etc.) are now stored without additional compression for faster load
• Misc: Thumbnails now encoded at 70% quality instead of 100%, resulting in about 4X size reduction
• Misc: World scale can now go up to 20
• Morphs: now always animatable
• Morphs: min/max range is now auto-adjusted and not saved in scene/preset json files
• Morphs: easier to find in trigger selection as selection name starts with "morph:" and popups are now filterable
• Performance: Several tweaks to improve runtime and less memory GC allocs when atoms and other objects are disabled and re-enabled
• Person: Improved auto-eyelid morph control. Improved blink while looking up or down. Improved eyelid movement when looking up or down.
• Person: Exposed additional eyelid morphs normally used by auto-eyelid system (disable to use these morphs manually)
• Person: general presets now store everything (was previously missing bones, plugins, triggers, and head audio control)
• Physics: Tweaked some of the Person collider names so they are unique and work better with the Collider Editor plugin
• Physics: Sim clothing and hair now reset when physics simulation is paused (like in snap pose preset load) to prevent fast flying and tangled clothing/hair
• Physics: Sim clothing and hair collision is now also disabled if the Person they are attached to has collision disabled
• Physics: Improved physics when loading pose preset
• Physics - improved advanced skin collider reset and physics pause to improve stability and reduce explosions
• Physics: Improved breast reaction during snap pose preset loading
• Physics: Moving person when off is now much more reliable when turning back on
• Physics: Grab moving Person from root node now freezes physics on that Person for easier moving and ability to pull out of stuck places like floors (can be changed back to old behavior with a toggle)
• Physics: Added way to turn off soft body physics (all 3 regions: mouth, breasts, glutes/genitals) per Person atom for increased performance.
• Plugins: cslist files can now reference cs files in other packages https://trello.com/c/JCEvKcFG 
• Plugins: have access to new filterable popup using CreateFilterablePopup function
• System Memory: loaded audio is now properly freed from memory after it is removed
• Usability: UIButton/UISlider/UIToggle interaction is now properly blocked by other atoms in front of them
• Usability: Disabled packages no longer show dependency errors in the log
• Usability: Selection handles now immediately draw on the newly selected controller instead of 1 frame of lag
• Usability: Triggers - improved Test button functionality. Added initial state tracking and added Reset Test button to put param back to state it was in before testing
• Usability: Improvements to edit mode controller and other visibility when UI is toggled off.
• Usability: Improved file search - now looks at whole path and also package UIDs (i.e. you can type AcidBubbles and it will find stuff)
• Usability: Improved bottom monitor-only UI bar to be smaller and have secondary popout panel if needed. Allows more of the scene to be shown vertically
• Usability: New startup and key entry system for faster launch.
• Usability: Improved Add Atom menu: options to auto-select and/or align player to the newly added atom
• Usability: addon package refresh button is now in the package manager
• Usability: Improved tool bar - 2 rows, more features that are often accessed, rearranged for quicker access, option to flip the toolbar button order (for VR users to account for lefty/righty)
• Usability: save scene overwrite confirm
• Usability: load scene confirm and user preference to turn on/off
• Usability: Improved Select menu: filterable/searchable lists, open UI on select toggle, move/align player on select toggles
• Usability: Mouse grab handles now support select and other interaction passthrough - free rotation was disabled since it was not really useful
• Usability: file browsers now show path to hovered over file button
• Usability: added up/down scroll buttons for online web browser since it is nearly impossible to scroll in VR
• Usability: mouse drag and pan is now disabled if head is possessing to prevent issues

Bug Fixes:

• Physics - fixed game crash when person collided through another object like the floor. Also fixed crashing when explosion occurs.
• Fix VaM hang/crash when setting atom parent to self
• Fix issue with collision filters not working when atom was parented to another atom
• Atom self-parenting is now properly disabled
• Fixed physics joint issues when setting Person scale back to exactly 1.
• Fixed issue with atom selection changing when renaming an atom
• Fixed issue when collision trigger caused atom to be removed (scene load, etc.) and that atom was not able to be removed
• Fixed issues that could be caused when grabbing something when it is destroyed (atom removed or scene loaded)
• Fixed issue with atom parented to another atom that is physics based and control getting lost on the child atom after moving the parent
• UISliderTrigger and VariableTrigger - when disabled, controlled param is no longer reset to 0

The End!

Thank You and Goodnight!

Meshed