Continuing Week 3-4: Loli Employment (Patreon)

Lolis can now walk around the town. They will for the moment loop around their neighborhood and just randomly walk in paths through the park and alleys:

Something I had to deal with recently was performance. See, the new physics/animation system is very expensive for each character. This is because there are expensive physics operations running every frame to ensure the animated character sticks to their ragdoll animation. What I did to alleviate this problem was create an lod system for the physics and animation. Basically, the farther you are away from the loli, the slower the rate of updating the physics that loli will get. So from up close she will look normal:

But from far away the animation and physics will skip frames:

You won't ever see this choppiness up close and it is also hardly perceptible from far away. So I thought it was a good solution. Another optimization that I added on top of this was distributing the work load of the stepping to all characters. See, if I had each loli skip frames at the same time with the rest, the framerate would suffer a spike because on that frame every character's physics and animations would run together. Instead, I made sure the skipping of each character is unique and never synchronizes with other characters. This prevented the "updating everything together in 1 frame" issue.

I've been adding more and more support for heavy physics interactions to the ragdolls as well. There is a new system that I call puppet touch that allows any physics to loosen up certain joints of the loli's ragdolls. This allows the player and other physics objects to shove and push away in a realistic way that mimics momentum from the incoming force. Demonstration of me pushing certain joints:

Puppet touch feels really really good in VR because it feels like you are interacting with a living entity that is trying to stand up. It's also completely animation independent so it can happen at any time.

My next task is to make some new behaviors for lolis interact with each other and form some kind of group. I'm not quite sure what kinds of things they can even talk about since they don't have dialog sound files but I am playing with the idea of giving them some form of speech bubbles.

Loli Town is growing. Help us come up with a name for it. Comment below to suggest a good name. The town's name should have some sort of Mexican aesthetic. The characters living in this town will be completely random characters from your cards folder, not just Shinobu.

Stay tuned!