Monthly Report: October

Hi! I'm posting a report like this near the end of each month, reporting on what I worked on behind the scenes and what the vague plans for the next months are. It is intended to help you decide if you want buy-in on the coming month or not.

TL;DR: Due to real-life reasons they will likely be no major releases in November. There will be no releases for the rest of October either. If there will be anything during this time, it will be public. If you choose to unsubscribe, you can do so safely the moment you read this. You won't miss anything that way. However, you might want to stay as follower and come back for a major release planned for December.

The coming few weeks I will be busy with my real-life job. Our project is approaching a major milestone and I will likely have to clock some overtime. Thankfully my company has a rather good overtime policy, so there won't be 100h crunch weeks like in some other game companies. Still, I won't have time to do much VaM stuff.

PostMagic

This month I released my PostMagic plugin, which allows post-processing effects within VaM. I would very much like to get AmbientOcclusion to work properly. I'm not fully out of ideas yet, but the chances are slim. It would likely require a major time investment. Since there is the possibility that Meshed decides to activate PostEffects in native VaM in the near future, there is a chance that work might be wasted. Assuming I'm not struck by lightning with some new crazy idea how to do it, I will probably not continue working on PostMagic for the moment.

Audio-Sync Breathing

You might remember my audio-synced breathing plugin I released early this year. For December I'm planning an new version with major improvements:

• I got a deal with someone with access to a proper recording studio. We will be able to do high quality recording of actual breathing in the exact way we need for this. We will start with recording one girl only, but the long-term plan is to have 2 girls and one male to choose from. The original plugin had just 40 different sounds extracted from VaM. Now we will be able to have 100+ different breaths per character! At least that's the plan, we will see how much effort that will actually turn out to be.
• I would also like to match the quality audio with appropriate animation. For this I have another someone on the line who provides proper breathing morphs. No more turning of the chest joint! The lungs should inflate with air! The plan is to have separate chest and stomach morph animation based on this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CRMgPcgKp4
• For slow idle breathing you will be able to choose from nose and mouth breathing.
• The old plugin had a rather quirky way of connecting it to a VariableTrigger that in turn could drive an AnimationPattern. That was what allowed "the action" to be in sync with the breathing in the Sofa scene. For the new version I would like to try a more modular approach. Non-programmers will be able to add one or more "Driver plugins" that connect to the Breathing plugin and can either drive an AnimationPattern or a VariableTrigger. More advanced users will be able to implement their own Driver plugin that could control more complex setups or even external devices....all to be in sync to the breathing. 
• Since we have a recording studio and hire a girl we technically could also do voice recordings that match the breathing! I was thinking about short sentences ("Ahw, yes!", "OMG!") that would be played at random during the action. The challenge here is mostly on how to make it lip-sync while doing all the breathing stuff at the same time. The solutions we had so far in the community did not really convince me. Yes, I know my problem is a quality fetish ;) Anyway, for now its a stretch-goal for some time next year.

Modular Life Plugin

Actually the breathing plugin could be just another part in a series of inter-compatible "life plugins". Of course breathing would be the most complex, but basically the idea is that you can drop a single *.cslist onto any character and you get Breathing, Gaze, Idle-Motion and Expressions without any further setup. There could even be different *.cslist's with different default settings.

So far this is only a vague idea in my head. My goal would be that this were used by other creators to release their looks and scenes. No more dead people, please! 

(Remember: My usage policy allows even limited commercial usage after the EarlyAccess ended. Check my "Overview" page and ping me if you have questions.)

Another environment?

I was also thinking about another environment that would be used for a demo scene of the breathing stuff? Maybe a living room similar to the old sofa scene or a larger version of the SecretRoom? I'm not sure yet on how much time I can spend on this.

Cheers, MacGruber