Continuing Wrap Up Part 6 (Patreon)

I am halfway through adding sleeping mechanics back in. I also worked on the special Halloween part of the October release. I will not show that part of the update in this devpost to keep it a surprise. Expect scary noises, spooky ghosts, a mini-game, and blood.

The sleeping mechanics are going well thus far. There were quite a few things I had to do to get it working with the latest logic pipeline. The first problem was handling the animations. The Viva engine has over 350 animations for the lolis. Each animation is part of a group of animations that corresponds to a certain body state (walking, standing, etc. go into STAND). When the game needs a character to play a certain animation, the loli must perform all the necessary animations beforehand to reach the destination animation.

For example, telling her to sleep requires the loli to first crouch, get on her hands and knees, and then lay down. Previously this was all in a very cumbersome way that was not future proof. Today, I implemented A* pathfinding to fix this.

You may have heard of A* (a-star) pathfinding before if you do some game development yourself. Essentially it's just an algorithm to get from A to B.

This algorithm, however, does not need to be applied to physical destinations. It can be used for any sort of graph. In my case I used it to traverse a graph of animations:

This saved me a huge hassle of having to manually calculate the animations needed to reach a certain destination. In action:

Multiple lolis has been implemented for sleeping but I need to iron out a few quirky bugs, namely they keep running into each other. Here is a good test scenario:

You could tell each individual loli to sleep in a specific bed. This however was cumbersome and tedious so now selecting a group of lolis and then pointing to one bed will distribute them to the other nearby beds.

The next step will be to add back in the poking, headpatting, and sleeping logic to them while they are on the bed.

Stay tuned!