Animating Objects, Extra Shirt Customization and Curves in the Modding Tools (Patreon)

Hi!

Alex here for another Patreon post and this week, I will share a few of the many things we did recently.

Object Animation Tests  (For Patrons only! Please don’t share)

As part of live mode interactions, some objects need to be animated. It is the case for pancakes that are flipped in the air when a skilled character cooks them. Anna and Alice got this test working but it was a bit of a challenge to make sure that the character plays its animation while holding the pan which contains the pancake that is animated on itself. Keep it mind that the whole animation is still a work in progress:

If the above GIF doesn’t play for you on mobile devices, try opening this Patreon post on a computer.

Below is a good example of a technical issue that we encountered during these tests!

If the above GIF doesn’t play for you on mobile devices, try opening this Patreon post on a computer.

Tucked-in or Tucked-out Shirt Option  (For Patrons only! Please don’t share)

I wanted to tell you about a small Paramaker feature that we haven’t mentioned to you yet. On some shirts, there’s an option to wear it tucked in or untucked. This makes for some interesting outfits that feel pretty different depending on how you choose to wear the shirt!

Sebastian and Maggie showcasing how tucking a shirt can alter their look quite noticeably.

Modding Tools: Curves  (For Patrons only! Please don’t share)

This week, I added a window to the Paralives modding tools to allow developers and modders alike to define and edit curves.

A curve made of 3 points.

Such curves are often used for animating but this new tool is not meant to create character animations directly from within the game since this is best done in a dedicated software like Blender. This new curve tool will have other important uses that I will illustrate below.

1. A distribution curve could be used when generating a new random character so that most often, they are close to average height while more rarely, they would be very small or very tall (the curve in the image is in centimeters).
2. A curve could be used to smoothly raise the volume of a sound effect between the second 0.6 and 1.2 of an animation, for instance.

A lot more features around the game will (and already) benefit from curves like this so I’m pretty happy about this latest addition to our modding tools.

That’s it for today’s post, have a great weekend everybody!

Alex