Monthly Report: April

This time of the month again, time for another monthly report!

The DoubleTrouble scene I had been working on continuously since December has now finally been released two weeks ago. This brought various improvements and fixes for LogicBricks and IdlePoser, but also with the PowerHandles release back in January it would not have been possible to build this scene. PowerHandles just says SO MUCH time and allows you to work almost entirely in Desktop mode, which is less exhausting than wearing a VR headset for hours upon hours. Anyway, it's always good to actually try to build something and see for yourself where the problems are rather than just making stuff based on "oh, this could be useful for someone, maybe".

So, what's next?

LogicBricks

Current plan for next month(s) is to make a number of additions to LogicBricks. Based on requests and questions of various people I have a couple of ideas what could be useful. Probably not all of the following will make it into the next release:

• SelectChoice: Similar to the RandomChoice, except that the choice is not random, but based on a drop-down parameter you can set via trigger. Basically its a "switch" statement you might know from many programming languages.
• DialogMachine: Variant of the StateMachine brick that is more suited to multiple-choice dialogs. Essentially instead of choosing a random transition, there would be a number of trigger slots like A, B, C, each having a different transition assigned. So you could hook those up to buttons, speech recognition, collision (touching body parts), etc.
• SpeechRecognition: Apparently its rather easy for VaM plugins to use Unity's build in speech recognition, which seems to be simply using Windows 10 features (Cortana). However, I have not actually tried this yet, there may be complications I'm not aware of. But the plan is to at least check out, if I can make a reusable LogicBrick out of this.
• Filter: In the DoubleTrouble scene I used a lot of TriggerSync signals to sync the various animations. Usually you are waiting for a particular animation to finish, but other animations might also be issuing TriggerSyncs, which would cause chaos. So in that scene I used a number of Relay bricks that allow me to block signals and only listen for the one I'm actually interested in. I have some ideas for a specialized brick for this. That way you would not need several Relay bricks and it could also be an option to wait for multiple animations to finish before continuing. However, there is still the problem with TriggerSync signals not being sent when the animation happens to be already in the desired state, as no OnEnter is executed. So I need to figure out a solution for that.
• ValueThreshold: This brick was already hidden in the DoubleTrouble release and will of course be officially added to LogicBricks. It allows you to fire a trigger when a float value crosses a particular threshold, the scene uses it for lube audio effects of the handjobs.

Tutorials

As a more long-term plan I think it would be useful to update the IdlePoser tutorial to the current state. While it still covers the basics, a LOT of features have been added since that was made.

Some have asked for a tutorial regarding the DoubleTrouble scene, to help understanding what is happening under the hood there. However, a lot of the things there are intertwined, which will make it confusing to follow. Rather than one huge tutorial I'm thinking it makes more sense to do a series of smaller tutorial articles. Each would focus on one particular interesting aspect of the scene. Where it makes sense I could include a demo scene that only shows that one aspect, instead of everything at once.