Continuing Canyon Shenanigans Part 1 (Patreon)

I released the first Beta v0.7a with the new horseback and map features. People seemed to like the new horseback and I received good feedback for it. I have recently been polishing and bugfixing a few things to make sure everything works better. I am gearing up for the next Beta v0.7b which will include general polishing and bugfixing. I expect to release it Friday.

Some of the new features I did not get to talk about horseback riding before releasing v0.7a is the dynamic spine logic that the loli has when riding a horse. Basically, it wasn't enough that I just parent the model to the horse. It didn't look like she was being affected by the horse movements. She looked stiff and lifeless like this:

So what I did was implemented a way for her spine bones to counteract the movements of the horse. Essentially making her always face upright, which is what we do when we ride horses. Demonstration:

And here is me stress testing the system like a mechanical bull:

Notice how she keeps her hands on the saddle. I had to also throw in IK for her arms for this. The system overall looks really good in the game and really breathes life to her movements. She will also occasionally play this animation:

Also yes that's Senko with a tail. Eidenz and Utata have been working hard on making tons of new characters. They have made Reimu, Takagi, Filo, Remilia, Bronya, Momiji, Renge, Tomoko, Hachikuji and more. Some of course are better than others but the cool thing is that as I improve the game and tweak settings, these characters will improve as well without having to recreate them.

As for the development of cooking, I have just finished some tech for mesh splitting. You'll need to cut up the fruits you find in the canyon to be able to use them as actual ingredients. Slicing geometry is a massive rabbit hole in the realm of computer science but I made sure it was performant for VR. It supports soft-concave meshes but for best results it should be a convex polygon. Demonstration:

Speaking of the canyon, there are some improvements I am trying to push out so it blends better with the day/night cycle. Right now it only looks good during the daytime because the reflection maps are baked for daytime only. This causes the following visual bug:

Everything looks like it has a glowy halo to it. It's not very dark. To fix this I will be replacing the shaders used for the canyon rocks with a shader that changes the environment map every so often as the time of day changes. This will allow it to eventually look like this instead:

More or less anyways. Fun stuff coming soon.

Stay tuned.