Happy New Year! A look at 2019 plans... (Patreon)

I'm back from a very nice and greatly needed holiday and wanted to post my thoughts on what I hope to accomplish with VaM in 2019. But first, let me thank each of you for an amazing 2018! I am honored and amazed by the amount of support on this project and also the incredible community working on plugins, scenes, looks, textures, morphs, etc. to make VaM even better! Thank you!

I expect sometime this year I will split VaM into 2 release streams. 1.X and 2.X. The reason for this is the 1.X stream is becoming more difficult to add more features to without making performance even worse. There is quite a bit of duplication and inefficiency in all the physics systems in VaM (joints, soft-body collision, skin collision, hair, clothing) that is the primary performance bottleneck. It is time for a refresh and reset to open up the performance bottlenecks and also bring a bunch of new technologies into VaM. Getting 2.X out of the gate is going to take a lot of time and effort, so my plan is to get 1.X in good shape and add more community-based features so that 2.X work can proceed while 1.X can still thrive. Here are the rough plans for 1.15, 1.X, and 2.X:

1.15

• Clothing sim improvements and fixes
• Some new sim clothing
• Plugin system improvements
• General bug fixes

1.X over next several months

• Clothing import
• Hair import and/or styling
• Morph compositor (combine several morphs into a single compiled morph)
• UI and quality-of-use improvements.
• Performance improvements if possible
• Review of open community requests and reports. Trello board cleanup and review in prep for parallel 1.X and 2.X streams. 

2.X starting in several months. Early alphas will be provided to backers for a sneak peek.

• Move to Unity 2018.3 and beyond. Some significant changes to prefab system make it hard to update 1.X to 2018.3. The 2.X reset is a natural time to make this update. 2018.3 brings a lot of exciting new technology and performance improvements.
• Move to DAZ Genesis 3/8 models. New dual quaternion skinning system and joint-controlled morphs (JCM) will produce more natural joint bends. Genesis 3/8 models also generally come with much better textures than current Genesis 2 models. 
• New High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP). Better and more efficient lighting. Better shadows. Built-in post-process stack that will be extended to users to allow customizing a scene's look and effects like bloom and depth-of-focus. Most effects work in VR.
• Completely new skin and subsurface shaders that are compatible with the new HDRP system.
• New physics system for soft-body and skin collision. Will either be merged in with GPU physics system used for cloth and hair or utilize Unity's new CPU-based ECS and job system depending on which gives better performance after some research and testing. I expect this alone could more than double VaM performance and remove the current main CPU thread bottleneck that exists in 1.X. This will also most likely allow for higher fidelity soft body physics with more areas of softness (thighs, stomach).
• Fluid physics. With improvements to skin collision above, accurate fluid to skin collision should be possible.

As you can see 2.X will be a lot of work and is quite ambitious, but I'm very excited to continue to make VaM the best interactive adult sandbox application out there.

Meshed