sgthale

Return from Vacation. Finishing Fireworks and Beginning Onsen.

I just returned from my vacation. I got A LOT done this past week and have tons to show today. To start, I have finished the fireworks. They came out very well. Big thanks to Calpico for being in charge of the sound engineering. First, how they work.

Rockets will be purchase-able in the market like other fruits and vegetables, when using the action button, the firework will light up and the fuse will start:

2020-07-21 05:24:11 +0000 UTC View Post

Beta Pre-Release v0.8e

[Upload issues atm, download directly here] 

password: market test

This is a small showcase of the upcoming market mechanics. Here's how it works:  When you are in the market, items that you want to buy will spawn inside wooden containers. You MUST place the...

Continuing Loli Merchant

Hope you had a happy 4th of July break.

The market has been visually finished (outside of a few small props) and features Mexican "papel picado" ornaments hanging from strings. There are also some foliage props:

There will be 3 types of merchants (for now). This is the chicken merchant stand where you will buy eggs and maybe chickens:

2020-07-07 10:52:54 +0000 UTC View Post

Beginning Loli Merchant

First, I finished fixing the older existing behaviors for the new physics ragdoll mechanics. So you can now headpat her, tell her to go to bed, and make her cook while in ragdoll mode:

The next thing I did was begin the merchant employment for the characters. This will allow some lolis to take up the job as a seller of the town market. Currently the behavior assigns a job to the character and m...

How to Join the Riot IM for Viva Project

Before the Discord was shutdown, we made a Riot chat server for the game. It is almost identical in interface to Discord. The video above shows you how to join but we recommend the following clients:
[Riot for Desktop (download)]
[Riot for Desktop (browser)]  
2020-06-28 07:50:30 +0000 UTC View Post

Continuing Week 9: Physics improvements

I've been getting a bit of progress done with fixing the loli ragdoll physics.

To start, I have improved how the character loli the ground to ensure she does not clip into it when walking over it with a physics body.

Before, the ground detection was rough and it caused the character to stutter and occasionally jump. This looked very awkward:

However the new ground detection is more ...

Restabilizing Development, Beginning Week 9

Quiet a few things have happened in the past week. For starters, the Viva Project Discord was banned earlier today by the Discord staff itself under the grounds of violating the rules about "depicting minors". Despite dutifully filtering and enforcing those rules for almost 2 years, Discord deactivated my account with no warning and with no word on what picture was too risque for them.

Fortunately, last Saturday we anticipated future rule enforcement and migrated everyone over to 2020-06-24 06:33:30 +0000 UTC View Post

Viva Project Beta v0.8d (VR Only)

Redeem code:  vr physics

This beta is identical to v0.8c except this version is meant to be for VR only. Unity has been an absolute butt with a version upgrade and has broken some visual bugs so the house is darker than usual (for now). The day and night cycle is about the same except the map's shadows change to a dark mode at night. Again this version should just be to test the new ragdol...

Viva Project v0.8c (Mouse and Keyboard only [for now])

Redeem code: physics preview

This Beta is very early in testing and a lot of release features are broken. Please play around with the latest feature: full physics of the loli character. You can now pick her up from any limb in any and maybe even throw her around. Do try to throw her around and see how the physics feels. Grabbing items should feel much much smoother and the annoying i...

Update

The poll results are in and the game will have a Japanese Poolhouse in v0.8!

I will start this feature after I finish hashing out some VR issues and the town market's merchant lolis.

Also, the latest version of Unity in which the project was migrated to has killed the VR input system that it was relying on for tracking and button management. As a result I spent today migrating and trying to fix the VR system. What ...

v0.8 Water Feature POLL

Decide on what the next water feature will be! Voting deadline is in 1 week!

[Strawpoll link] 

Finishing Week 5~6: Extension

Finally out of the tunnel of development. The new physics revamp is awesome and very fun. The great thing about it is that it now allows one to really interact with characters in a full physics way. The image above is actually me picking up the loli. Here's a video:

 Since these are new methods of interaction, some things may still need to be smoothed out. The video above shows me picking up the loli in a very crude...

Almost Finishing Week 5~6: Extension

I'm almost done with the new physics code rewrite. This was a rewrite from almost the ground up to accommodate the new "full-physics" paradigm for Viva to ensure everything is physics. I still don't have much to show in this particular devpost but I can tell you about how it will work in-game from now on.

Up to this point, holding items in the game was done by parenting models to character's hands. This worked fine when characters weren't physics ragdolls. However because everything wil...

Continuing Week 5~6: Extension

The last beta that was released featured a lot of fun new features to play around with. Physics are inherently funny with ragdolls. However, I did notice how some people were not able to play in VR mode. This is my fault and it will be addressed for the next beta (which I plan to have when this week extension finishes). Reason was that there were still too many changes to digest when I implemented physics ragdolls.

Viva Project has for a long time develop in a very non-modular way. This...

Beta v0.8b Pre-Release

Redeem code: flying pancakes

5/27/20: Updated to Beta v0.8b with lots of stability though some activities are still buggy.  YOU CAN NOW PRESS F1 DURING THE GAME TO RAGDOLL LOLIS.

Several big changes are in this beta. THIS IS A VERY BETA PRE-RELEASE So there are bugs! But the major changes are: 

1.) Multiple lolis (Keep spawning them in the mirror,...

Finishing Week 3-4 Part 2: Loli Employment

I have added more logic and animations to the loli's social link system so there is more variation and so it looks like they converse together. There are a few new animations. The most important one is the new "social1" animation which will play when they stop to talk to other lolis:

They make idle sounds but it just looks like they are talking (especially from far away). They will take turns l...

Continuing Week 3-4 Part 2: Loli Employment

I was supposed to upload this blog last night but I needed the extra few hours to tend to some life things.

Anyways I am still programming the logic for the loli's employment. The past few days have specifically focused on interactions with other characters. Lolis can now have "social links" which is just a basic way of keeping track who they have interacted with recently. This is useful for telling when the characters should greet the other. Like so:

2020-05-17 22:51:25 +0000 UTC View Post

Continuing Week 3-4: Loli Employment

Lolis can now walk around the town. They will for the moment loop around their neighborhood and just randomly walk in paths through the park and alleys:

Something I had to deal with recently was performance. See, the new physics/animation system is very expensive for each character. This is because there are expensive physics operations running every frame to ensure the animated character stick...

Beginning Week 3-4: Loli Employment

Right now I am working on the logic that will drive the autonomous actions of lolis in the town This aspect I refer to as "employment" because it is their job to complete the random tasks assigned to them. This brings me to an important part of game development, scripted sequences.

If you've ever played large scale RPG games, you've probably heard the expression "The NPCs are not scripted and they do everything naturally!". This is usually a marketing phrase to hype up the AI of games. ...

Finishing Week 2: Finishing Physics Implementation

The past few days I have been finishing up the logic behind the loli to smoothly stand back up. In the previous devblog you saw 1 animation for getting up, face_down_to_stand:

I made 2 other animations to cover the other scenarios where the ragdoll body might end up before standing up. First is face_side_down_to_stand:

2020-05-05 08:34:42 +0000 UTC View Post

Beginning Week 2: Physics Implementation

Now that optimization week is over, I have begun to implement the ragdoll system for the characters. This is a big change because every single movement will now be physically simulated for extra responsiveness and realism.

To start, this means that characters are internally still animated using the same old animations except during the physics step, the bones will be interpolated to a separate physics armature that mimics the original animation armature. Thus, the ragdoll is animated in...

Finishing Week 1: Loli Optimizations

I've successfully optimized the loli loading code by a lot. It now completes in under ~56 ms from the original ~890ms and has no stuttering whatsoever. It actually runs faster when I compile the game into a non Unity-editor version. This means that when you want to load a loli or when lolis spawn for the town, you should not see anymore horrible framerate drops.

There isn't much to show in this...

Beginning v0.8

 v0.75 was a much needed polish phase for the entirety of the game. But  now I move on and start working on v0.8. Things will be revisited and  improved as time goes on just like the previous versions but I will be focusing on v0.8 now.

This update has two big parts; multiple lolis and some swimming/water related update. The road to v0.8 is the following:

Multiple lolis requires optimizations because of some very old internal technical reasons (combining skinned mes...

Viva Project v0.75 Public Release

This was a great update for the back end of the game, a lot of functionality is now available for me to play with and add more content in later updates. Also this added more fun things to do with your loli. Do know that this game is still heavily in development. The game now uses Vive Index as the default bindings so you may need to bind your own buttons using Steam VR Input if you have an alternativ...

Finishing Week 7: Refactoring

I'm still doing lots of bugfixing and improvements to make sure Saturday's release goes smoothly. However I managed to squeeze in a couple new improvements. Before showing them though, I fixed several issues with hair.

Bubbles now properly spawn on top of the head regardless of the character. This was a recurring issue that made some characters have bubbles float above their heads:

Also, ...

Beginning Week 7: Refactoring

Now that most of the major new pieces of the update have been implemented, I'm delegating the rest of the time to refactoring, bugfixing, and polishing the game.

First change is that there is now an actual night sky.

I felt this was necessary because the night sky in the game prior to this was very bland and uninteresting. This new night sky will slowly fade into view as the night grows ...

Beta v0.75d Pre-Release

Code: chickenrun

This version includes the fully complete (Well aside a tiny street) town. It is ready for you to simply explore and take your loli. This town will be populated with things to do in v0.8. The town has its own sound ambience and the town lights will turn on and off when it's fully night outside. This update also includes some of the first improvements and bugfixes incl...

v0.75 Public Release Date Announcement

v0.75 will be released 4/18/20 for the public. The next early release will be this Saturday for Supporter tier.

Additionally, I've just purchased a Valve Index so I expect better controller support in the future!

Stay tuned.

Continuing Week 5-6 Part 3: New Town

The next thing I took care of for the town was making materials for the  remaining house props. This includes the balcony, doors, and windows:

I started by building a concrete base for the frames of these props:

As  for the doors and windows, I wanted to make sure that they vary in  c...

Continuing Week 5-6 Part 2: New Town

 Now that I finished the base textures for the houses, I started  formulating a color theme for them. I used the following reference image  to pick my colors:

The theme of the town includes lots of bright earthy pastel like colors. Plenty of yellow and lots of brown.

It's still a w...