Regolo Engine 1.2

Hey guys,

here's a really satisfying 1.2 version. It's a big release, with a lot of new behaviours. We have kneeling, we have crawling, we have leaning, we have kissing!
I really can't believe how lucky I was developing these new features alltogheter, I can say a lot of things aligned incredibly well from the start, and here we have the result.
I think I can go on vacation with a large smile :D .

So, let's go with new features

• on her knees and related behaviours
• on all fours and related behaviours (different near the couch)
• crawling
• leaning towards him
• caress on him (face, chest, legs)
• kissing (with two types of control)
• new anima (romantic, obsessive, submissive)
  - romantic one will focus on you, privileging contactful behaviours
  - submissive one loves humiliating poses, so will stay on her knees a lot (and will only crawl to move herself)
  - obsessive one is experimental, forces her to stay at the couch, not specifying how. I had this idea thinking about a stalking personality, but it's mainly a future thingy.
  - seductive is like the standard ones but allowed to the sexier stuff more frequently and starts from higher values of indicators excitement

Some thoughts about the above bullet points and some additional topics

I suggest you the submissive and the romantic anima to try out the new behaviours quickly.

When you change the anima please give the girl some time to understand what she wants. She needs to recalculate her priorities on the fly, so don't pretend she immediately switches mood. She needs time to realize ;)

I introduced the boredom factor, so if she stays too much on the same spot she wills to change. Not sure about it's calibration, will monitor it.

I experimented about the kissing, in the normal version she approaches you and then she tries to follow you if you move your head. It's more complicated to manage but it can give life to more dyniamic moves.  
If you want a more simple kissing, with her staying on the final position approached, you can disable dynamic kissing in the UI.
Please let me know you thoughts about these two approaches. I don't want to put flags for everything in the UI so I want to understand which one is better, so that in case I can discard it.

Also, respect to the video, I enlarged the distance between her and him, because it was too close using it in VR. Not sure how many of you are using the engine in desktop mode, if you want I can give the possibility to change it. 

You can have a taste of the new behaviours in the video. The strength of the engine is the huge variety of mixed animations she can exhibit, so it's actually already hard to make a standard list of the different possibilities.  Moreover it's always somehow different, so better to try it out in first person.

I also refined again the decision algorithm, since the introduction of unexpected loops in the graph and more articulated states. It will be probably the feature that will change the most going on with the behaviours. I'm realizing I should not add anima every release, but I also want to make the user able to enjoy immediately the new animations somehow. This will be a crucial design decision to understand the mid-term direction of the fruition mode of the engine. Once there will be more behaviours I will put efforts on set a milestone for it and clarify you on the rules behind it.

Last but not least, I have fixed a remarkable quantity of issues so far (jerky chest movement, crouch near the sofa, wrong rotations, zero vectors here and there, null object references here and there, a lot of wrong timings, incompatible animation sequences and so on).

The other side of the coin

Since the focus on the quantity I have probably missed a lot of bugs, in case let me know and I will try to fix when I'll come back.

So far I can think of the following issues:

• going back in standing is not so beautiful to see (in particular from leaning position)
• going on knees now near couch seems ok but crawling from there not so fine, to be fixed
• when she tries to crawl from the couch sometime she collides too much with the guy and bad things could happen (from him forking the legs to the classic vam graphic explosion)
• hands rotation on the upper part of the guy's chest not well inclined
• crawling not always perfect, like sometimes crawling height for legs is wrongly calculated, investigating
• turning towards him has a known bug (behind center of the room is always triggered), discovered too late to fix in 1.2, but it's not making too damage for what I've seen
• still a lot of question marks on kissing fruition in VR

How to use it

This is for VAM 1.17.0.6. It seems to work for 1.17.5.1 too, but I don't recommend it since it's a beta version and first time i tried it had a lot of bugs, like the green control points were not visible for example.

So as usual:

• download your version
• load the room
• possess or align with the boythe boy
• load the plugin on the girl (the dll file)
• choose the anima (if you want to change the standard one)
• choose the kissing type (dynamic or static)

About the boy

Now there's a boy, a real one (at least for her), so her attention is on him. Please possess him to receive such attentions (or place yourself there) :P

Please be aware that the lower part of the boy should not move (infact I have put hold controllers, the prange ones, on his legs and hip). Please try to not move him too much (even the upper part) since girl leaning and kissing movements have not been tested otherwise.

Moreover this means that the room has become more cpu-heavy to run. Please consider this.

What's cooking for 1.3

So I have put out really a lot of animated content this month. In my mind it should have compensated August, when I will be abroad for two weeks, so I was tempted to fractionate it and distribute in two months.  But "Heck" - I thought - "it's quite ready, why not give it out now, then for August we will see" :).

So, having lost the chance to make a good impression, next month will probably consolidate the decision making, fix bugs and try to develop new base functionalities.
Anyway animation side I'm done till September.

As I already pointed out the main focus now it's to make the engine robust enough to scale properly with the addition of further behaviours, gestures, expressions, decisional forks. I need to rethink stats and indicator in accordance with the increasing number of intertwined gestures. Standard anima for example starts to show a lot of possibilities, like if it's ok to let her crawl from the start or not. It depends on the progression philosophy we want to adopt.
The more I add features and behaviours the more I need the decision algorithm to be simple yet powerful to ensure a meaningful mood/action progression.

Beside that I want to add at least one new important feature. don't want to disclose it yet but I will work as I can to make it real. 

In conclusion I want to make the 1.3 version the foundation of what will come from September. A lot of ideas animation side, but they need a solid base. The engine core needs to be future proof if I don't want to put additional work on it every month, and this is the perfect chance to strengthen it and add some fundamental capabilities.

Said that, enjoy the summer to who is going away for vacation and good work to who will stay at study/work. To both, thanks again for the great support! See you in August!

RegoloVR