Anduo Report August 18th, 2023

 Welcome, feel at ease and cleanse thyselves with thy news from the creators! This moon we are paving new paths to see through.

PMPerfect:

 PM has been doing some iteration on the texture style. We were inspired by the Asset pack we bought to add more dirt and grime overlays to the texture style. Here’s some results of experimentation! 

JuggerDown:

Jugger has been hard at work on the new Dimiscus model. She’s getting closer and closer to being done!

PKing:

 PKing has been upgrading the models we got from the bundle we bought. The assets are amazing but we’d like to personalise them to show that they are made by the church specifically!

Also lots of pendants so we can hang them from everywhere and make things pretty dangly! :D

Nerada:

As you can see below, Nerada has had some fun making a little still of Dala and Alda! He also started work on a little animation that is going to play when Alda goes to bed! c:

Bearcore:

Heyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
I’ve been working on mostly 2 things: the new masturbation sex scene and our 2nd iteration of the dialogue system.

As for the sex scene, you can see a few parts of it below! C: It is by far the most complex scene we’ve done so far. Huge shoutout to the animator Swurst!

https://twitter.com/SwurstErotic

They did an outstanding job!

The scene will be activated by interacting with the shibari elves at nighttime. Dala will be leading your attention towards the tentacles! ^-^

After this first stage of the scene, you’ll be led to another part of the area to conclude it.

This screenshot of the timeline captures the extent of work that went into this scene fairly well.

One challenge was definitely the back and forth between Blender and Unity. I ended up having to re-export the different animations many, many times. Sadly, each export took 10-30 minutes. Exporting is also quite CPU intensive, so I was barely able to do other work while the export was going.

That’s definitely one thing I’d like to improve in the future. Not quite sure what I’m going to do about this yet though. It will probably get better as I gain more experience in this workflow.

Here’s a quick look at another animation that will involve Alda getting humiliated. What's great about this one, is that the skirt is using physics! This is great because hand-animating skirt physics is a pain!

Quick look at the day/night switching working! Alda’s room is very much not final and we’ll make a little transition animation instead of just fading to black. You can see a glimpse from Nerada’s section further up!

And here’s a look at the cutscene for meeting Alda’s foster father Marcus in the Guild building! It was animated by Nerada. This will drive the main story forwards and introduce Marcus as a character, as well as establishing the relationship between them. A lot of work has gone into lighting this scene, which is something LenChi is advocating for and I’m all for it! I hope I’ll get better at it! c:

(sped up 3x)

As for the dialogue system rework, it’s been a bit of a mess. Essentially, the crux of my issues boils down to where the data of dialogue lines are stored.

Up until now, my new dialogue system has been storing the dialogue line data directly inside of the logic that asked them to appear. I didn’t think much about this when initially setting up the system, but it ended up becoming a massive pain point.

Here’s a screenshot of what this looks like:

We have a state machine, which runs the logic of many things including dialogue. In this state machine, we have states and actions. A state can have many Actions. One of those Actions is “Play Dialogue Line”. It does what it says, it plays a dialogue line.

The data of the dialogue lines (such as voice over audio clip and subtitle) was stored inside these “Play Dialogue Line” actions. This was no problem for a while. The issues only slowly started creeping in.

The biggest one was that in this state machine user interface, I cannot edit multiple actions at the same time. This means that if I want to change the volume of the audio of multiple lines at once, I was unable to do so. I had to manually select each line individually to change its volume.

Another reason was searching. If I wanted to search for all lines that have the text “come here”, doing so with the dialogue line data stored inside the actions would have been extremely difficult. The way things were, I would have had to go through every single level we have in the game, search through every single object in that level to see if there’s a state machine on it, then in each state machine go into every state and look through all its actions. A recipe for issues.

The solution I ended up with is to create Dialogue files, just like we had in third crisis. But instead of going down the same route as third crisis, I’d still retain the ability to write dialogue directly in the state machine.

Each dialogue has sub-files which are the lines. This is also a change from how it used to work in third crisis, where there is only a dialogue file with the lines being stored inside that same file. The benefit of having the lines be child-files of the dialogue is that unity is able to multi-edit them by default.

Also, this solution will let me search through the dialogues extremely easily. I just have to go into the Dialogues folder and load all ErokinDialogue files. It’s trivially easy.

The big drawback in all this, is that I have to re-implement every single dialogue…. I had to do this either way because I’m no longer using the very first dialogue system I had chosen, but I was already about 40% done with re-implementing the dialogues into my new system when the issues with how I was storing the line data initially were really starting to surface.

That’s what I’m doing right now. I think I’ll probably need another 2-3 days to really get everything into the new dialogue system and running.

LenChi:

As you can see below, LenChi is working out more details of the city, providing us with ample ideas for interactions and characters around town! The team immediately latched onto the dog house for elves and LenChi started adding more detail to that.

Less:

The guards were getting a little monotone, so less had the idea of adding a female guard. I love this!

Pixie:

Besides voicing the elf in the new masturbation sex scene, Pixie has been adding a blush texture for Alda and is currently working on a more stylized sweating texture for her. Very excited to see more of this!

Thank you for your dedication to thy cleansing and you, the dedicated one, we wish you a wondrous weekend!