SHF3 v.32 - Toy upgrades and lots of stuff! (Patreon)

Tier 2 patrons can try it early here! (downloadable versions added)

I'm gonna make a separate post talking about how this update took a long time, what I learned from it, and what changes I'll be making to improve. For now, here's a rundown of the new features. Feel free to just skim-

Touching and fondling: 

You can interact with the full body now. Every part that you can click on can be touched/fondled (except the eyes... for now). You can rub the character with an empty hand, or use a couple of the toys for more intense stimulation. 

This makes the biggest impact on tickling, since any decent tickling mechanic sort of requires access to the whole body. It's also good for foreplay, as there are now lots of places that turn the different ponies on.

To make this mechanic more useful, there's also-

Stimulation/sensitivity improvements:

Every character's body has different sensitive areas, and can handle different amounts of stimulation. As they get more aroused, they can get more agreeable to being touched in different places. Areas that are ticklish or hypersensitive can become more erogenous with higher arousal. 

Each body part now has a bunch of settings:

An individual sensitivity setting for each stimulation type (pleasure, tickling, pain, overstimulation). Some characters are naturally more resistant to tickling, for example, but feel everything else at normal values.

Erogenous point and min/max pleasure. Basically, at zero arousal, they'll be able to feel the minimum pleasure from a body part. So for the chest, this'll probably be zero, and for genitals, it'll probably be higher. The "erogenous point" is the amount of arousal it takes for the character to be able to feel the maximum amount of pleasure from that body part. 

For example, a pony with a hypersensitive clit would have a low pleasure minimum, high maximum, and a high erogenous point, which would mean that touching the clit with a vibrator would be uncomfortable for them until they're more turned on, and then it'd be super pleasurable. This can be true for non-genital parts too, like hooves, ears, the belly, etc. So it's worth touching their different parts to see what their reactions are.

This is in addition to the personality-based settings. After all, a character might be afraid of having their hooves touched, but that doesn't mean it won't feel good. 

Every body part on every character has its own settings. You can't view or edit those settings yet, but I'm working on the config UI now. 

Body variants

There's a "body type" button which will switch to different versions of a character. For now, it's mostly mare/stallion versions, and foal/adult versions. It's incomplete, so some characters don't have all the variants, but this is an area I can add content to with relative ease. 

Tech-wise, I really happy to have finished this feature. Up until now, the characters' bodies were immutable. The rig was tied too closely to the character profile in the code. There's a lot of possibilities now that I can define multiple preset bodies that share an identity but have different rigs :3

Toy improvements, part 2

Added a bunch of dildo types. In addition to the horse, dog, and plug shapes, there's also a transparent beaded dildo, a human type, two changeling types, and a massive dragon dildo.

You can now freely resize the toys using a linear slider. Instead of sizes 1-3, you can go from 1% to 100%, and even resize them while still inside the ponies. 

This is thanks to a major improvement to the penetration animation system. In the past, adding a new dildo meant adding a ton of extra work for myself, because I had to meticulously animate the orifice stretching around each individual size of each dildo for each part it interacted with. Now, the orifice stretching is its own animation, and all I have to do is define the dildo's shape and size, and it'll animate itself. 

Bulges

Since the toys are sometimes bigger than the pony they're inside, the stomach will now bulge to accommodate the insertion. This is a minor effect for normal-sized toys, but if you've enabled the "Stretchier" and "Deeper" spells, then the bulges can get huge.

New characters and species

Twilight's parents- Twilight Velvet and Night Light.

The other Pie sisters- Marble and Limestone

Trixie

And Gabby the griffon, drawn by the wonderful PussPuss and vectored by ParclyTaxel. This one is super WIP and I'm still figuring out sizing stuff, but I'm thrilled to finally have a non-equine rig working. Thanks to PussPuss's help, I've got multiple griffons and a full set of dragon characters in the works. Yay!

Other features

Orifice stretching and tightness improvements. This has always been a struggle for me to nail down. Now, with resizable toys, the system can be a lot more nuanced, since I don't have to tune it to a limited set of toys. I put a lot of effort into improving the orifices so they'll loosen up properly when being fucked. A toy with a bump or knot in it will gradually loosen an orifice until it can fit. Hopefully these changes will let the tightness mechanic still be fun to abuse, but will otherwise get out of your way.

Personality additions. Clothing, all body parts, and more fine-tuned settings for the different toy sizes have been added to the personality menu. I also tried to flesh out each character's default personality. Their personal opinions on each body part will tend to match up with how sensitive/erogenous that part is, for example. Some characters won't respond well to being treated in feminine ways, or will enjoy watching others be dressed up or touched in sensitive places.

Rig improvements. Added a small set of body-part-based reactions to make the characters respond a little to being touched by the mouse. This was last-minute so I wanted to keep it subtle, but I'm excited at the possibilities for this. 

Toy control. I've adjusted the way the side-side motion works with toys, since it was super annoying before. It might still be annoying but hopefully less so. Gonna keep working on that.

Other rig improvements. Thanks to my main vector artist DigiQrow, I've been upgrading some of the old manes/tails for characters. 

Also- some improvements to pussy animations and clipping. There was a lot of work in this area so it might be buggy still, but I think it looks more solid than before. 

Bug fixes. Too many to list. I made an effort to address the issue where the screen gets tiny for some people, but I haven't managed to replicate the bug, so I can't tell if I've solved it. Let me know >.<'

I ran out of time writing this, so I'm skipping the normal changelog list. Coming up next is a post on changes I'm making to my working process, and an update on shf:Factory. Since it's the holidays I'll be out for the next couple of days, so it might wait until after that if I don't have a chance to get away.

Love you all <3