Continuing Character Customization Part 7 (Patreon)

This should be one of the last devposts for character customization because it is nearly complete and fully functional. I connected the last pipes together today and after lots of debugging and fixing, I am very proud to say that it is now complete and ready for Beta testing.

Let's talk about the final card workflow. The editor will allow you to upload, tweak, and finally create your shareable character for the game as PNG cards. I managed to optimize storage and was able to store ALL textures into 1 card. Therefore the editor will produce 2 cards. One for the 3D model, and one for the textures.

Calpico made some sound effects for the character creation as well so it feels very slick! Also, the cards are built using Multi-threading so they build very very fast just like clothing.

 This is what a character model card looks like. Fully functional!

This card is in charge of storing your 3D model data as well as your eye/hair/and skin tweaks. And this is what a skin card will look like:

This one stores all of the textures that your model uses. To be able to spawn and use Miku as a game character, you will need to put these 2 cards into your Cards/Characters and Cards/Skins folders. This means we are going to be moving away from the Deck folder and replacing it with Cards. So your game folder will have the following:

The idea is that you will be able to mix and match textures with the same character, thereby allowing one to have 1 Miku model and 10 different hair color/skin mods.

I will be working all day tomorrow to push out a stable Beta for Supporters. I also have to write up a tutorial for creating your character with my pipeline and tools. As I said before, the overall creation workflow is very easy but you will need to have some modeling experience to port character models. Lots of testing is needed and I implore you to post your experiences, test results, or ask for help in the new #characters-discussion channel!

I don't have much else to talk about in this devpost. I have been very busy working on this system. A lot of error handling was necessary for various branches of the custom character system. I'm writing/rewriting roughly 2,000 lines of code every day to make this happen.

I also occasionally post Tweets on my gamedev related stuff. In my down time at work I've been messing around with potential wave tech for the beach update for later. If you are interested, you can see a video of it here: https://twitter.com/DevShinobu/status/1169417401542176769 

As always, thank you and stay tuned!