Progress Update- rendering and particles (Patreon)

If you missed the streams, VODS are here. ('Videos' tab at the top.)

What’s being worked on?

Blue indicates progress since last time.

The main lines of work were mostly untouched. That’s because the particles/rendering side quest took most of my time. I mean, it was vital for progress, but I wasn’t expecting to have to delve so hard into it. :’(

So this week, I tried setting some short term goals. They were:

• Finish the rendering/depth sorting stuff I talked about last time.
• Make fluid particles work with the depth system, and the ECS.
• Be finished with all fluid-related tasks.
• Have something visual to show off.

How it went:

Goal: Finish the rendering/depth sorting.

Done, I think! Namely, I got inter-Spine rig layering working. Meaning I can put outside objects in a Spine rig, including other Spine rigs. I should finally be able to use external objects for penetration. Up until now, every toy had to be cloned across every potential usage and position on the rig. 'Twas madness! The real reason I needed to do this now was just to make the fluid rendering not go bonkers. But it’s awesome to have a simple solution to a restriction that’s been there from the beginning.

Quick technical explanation of how it works now: Groups of slots (images, body parts, etc) are put together and displayed at a depth, defined in Spine by a slot labeled "depth_(units)".

The slot's position defines the range of rig pieces in this group. The number at the end defines the depth of that set of pieces. Put simply- I can define how "tall" parts of the npcs are in the game world straight from the animation software. It’s janky af, but it works, no code needed!

So now I can slap a random asset into the game world at a certain depth, and see it intersect properly with all the rigs at once.

It is horrific to behold. But… goal achieved! It is below the legs, but above the bodies. Good, gooood.

Goal: Make fluid particles work with the depth system, and the ECS.

Okay... this actually is happening? The ECS now stores, creates, moves, and destroys the particles as Entities. And it can modify properties like size/color over time. 

Since this is what an ECS is built for, it's much more efficient than the old particle emitters.

But they're only visible if put into the display tree. So I have a custom rendering object that places them into the correct level, and renders them in the depth system I made.

They appear inside the layers of the Spine rig. So... it's working!

Next is making them splash when they hit the ground, and making them splatter when hitting certain bounding boxes. This is necessary to avoid the glitchiness of the above screenshot.

Goal: Be finished with all fluid-related tasks.

Nope, failed this one. Rendering and particles took all my focus. Thankfully, I’m almost done with that side quest.

Goal: Have something visual to show off.

Well… kinda. Since rendering is low-level, there’s not a lot of need to make things look sexy while working on it. Gonna say this failed, cause I wanted it to be sexy. Maybe next time!

Goals for next week:

• Finish particles, emitters, and collisions code.
• Finish all fluid code.
• Be able to show off fluid handling, transfer, storage, and emission in-game (jank is okay!).

Q&A

Will this be ported to mobile? Not ported. But with UI and camera updates in the future, mobile play will hopefully be serviceable at least. It is second priority to web/desktop though.

How will the new cleaning brush be able to be used? The plan is to make it usable everywhere, and attachable in various places as well.

Inflatable knots/plugs? Yes. Give me a bit on that one, but the code is there to support it!

What other characters are coming to the game? Oof, good question. Honestly, I can’t think about it right now. But there’s a whole list to include in the future, including gen 5 characters.

Will there be more positions for the characters? Yes, most likely! New code will make this easier, but there are still challenges to doing this. It’ll have to be a whole thing with rigging, but luckily code-wise it’ll be simple now with the ECS. Things that don’t move the mane/tail into new angles are wayyy more doable.

Is there an easy way to manipulate the Personality menu meters? Not yet! The game (in the upcoming version… dunno if it’s in current versions) will remember your settings for characters at least. But mass-editing of Personality traits is coming. Code changes allow this to be much more possible.

Wrap up

So far, having short-term goals is super useful. I was doing large, months-long goals before, and it was sometimes hard to keep my head straight about what should come next. Communicating my short-term goals beforehand will hopefully help y’all get a better sense of where my time is being put in, and what the return on that time is.

... and that’s all for now!

I really can’t thank everyone enough for being part of this endeavor. I haven’t been too responsive lately due to personal biz, but I’m still dedicated as ever to making this ridiculous smut game.

I’ve also been practicing drawing again for a while now, though most of my effort has gone into personal smut and practice. I’m not super confident yet, but my skill has definitely been improving. I’ll start showing stuff off here soon!

Thank you all so much~

<3