PORTRAITS 2.0 WIP - First Sneak Peek. Veiled Realms Weekly Updates - Adjustments. You Know This Is Definitely Still A March 31 Post With Such A Boring Title (Patreon)

Hi! How are you this beautiful March morneveafternight? Isn't March great? When I grow up, I want to be just like March. Being right here and right now and definitely not late has never been Marchier.

Ahem... SO, I used to have plans for March. The big one, of course being the Veiled Realms Weekly development updates, which... will still be happening, although I would like to make a few adjustments to account for the upcoming expansion and... oh, but we're still in the intro! So I shouldn't go into details just yet. This is the ado part of the Monthly Mod Report. We can't mix the ado with the non-ado, that would be very unprofessional!

And besides, we also have something a bit more tangible to look at in regards to our Stellaris mods. I know you've all been waiting for some visuals on PORTRAITS 2.0, which...

...remember? It's still the intro, so you won't see that here n_n Nuh-uh-uh! Proper procedure is important. You know what we have to do first, right?

WITHOUT!

FURTHER!

ADOOOOO!

PORTRAITS 2.0

So... the usual disclaimer! All the pictures you're going to see are currently just unoptimised placeholder graphics that we use as visual aids for development, and is designed to be easily adjustable so we can test different ideas. The final product will most likely look a lot more detailed, polished and specifically fitted to the PORTRAITS 2.0 skeleton.

However! As of today, we have only settled on the silhouette - the camera perspective and how much of the body is displayed in the shot. We haven't yet fully decided on the final form number, positions and scalability of bones and all the other things that will be relevant to layering and animations.

Specifically, we are in the process of figuring out how the arms should work, whether we want them posed, and how articulated they should be in animations. After that, the next step will be to decide on any additional support bones we need for extra limbs, animated elements of clothing and hair. Our end goal is to create not just a new portrait base for our existing mods, but an entire universal framework that can serve as the foundation of future projects, and even third-party mods (if there's any interest).

So we are trying to design PORTRAITS 2.0 with as much foresight as we can, but without overloading it with redundancy and structural complexity that would get in the way of developing assets.

In the end, the closer we can get to WYSWIG asset development for basic (vanilla-equivalent) bodies, face, hairstyles and outfits, but still have enough support for optional features, such as fake-physics-simulated elements, modular accessories and extra/alternative extremities, the closer PORTRAITS 2.0 will be to perfection in our eyes.

With that said, let's go over some pictures!

For a start, we'll take a look at the overall silhouette - the resting pose and framing we've settled on.

Oh, please don't mind the hair. It's a vanilla placeholder that's just here to provide a reference. But you can probably tell by the... rather stark quality contrast that none of the old assets are sufficient for our needs going forward. That's why we'll be redoing all the hair from scratch, as well as coming up with a lot of new hairstyles that take advantage of all the layers and animated bones we'll have at our disposal.

But... let's go back to the present for the moment, and tackle the more exciting news!

As you may have realised by now, the new framing... contains quite a lot more of the character.

This will allow us to design outfit assets that go all the way down to the hips but we've decided to stop just short of fully rendering legs. It was an idea at one point, but ultimately we've decided that it would have diluted the portraits too much. Considering how small they actually are in game, too much focus on the body would have made the faces barely discernible.

But it's still quite a lot more body than our vanilla-based portraits used to display, and it's just enough to encompass the one thing we have big plans for - the entire arms.

Oh! Speaking of...

*POP* they go! Ehehehehe~ <3

As of right now, hands and fingers aren't part of the texture yet, but don't worry, they will be included as well. And the entire arms will be poseable... to some extent. As I mentioned before, we haven't quite decided on the specifics yet. One of the things we still need to do before the current phase is finalised is rig the whole thing to to our new skeleton and try different poses, to see how much we can articulate them without turning them into abominations, or transitioning to full 3D (which, while tempting, would be a nightmare for asset development, so while it's a potential last resort, we probably won't have to go that far).

But the mere presence of poseable arms isn't the most exciting thing about the new portrait setup. While rough, hopefully the picture also illustrates the layer mechanics we're hoping to utilise extensively in our more complex assets.

The body is currently broken up into three primary layers, corresponding to perspective planes. The right (our left) arm occupies the front layer, the body itself is in the middle layer, and the left (our right) arm goes behind the body. At least in this resting pose. But, those layers are dynamic, and we are able to animate each individual bone to bring particular parts of the body to whichever plane we need at the moment. And while we cannot demonstrate that at the moment, we are super excited for what it will mean for future clothing and hairstyles. Complex layering means that we can do complex, expressive animations, without worrying about spatial anomalies and transporter accidents. Things that would be all but inevitable with our current portraits, even if we wanted to make new animations for them.

AND! There's one more super neat trick we're excited to utilise...

What you see here are three ear variants.

Traditionally, variants like these would constitute an absolute nightmare for asset creation - we'd have to create separate textures for each ear variant, and then multiply it by eye variants, skin colour variants, etc. etc.

But because we have full control over the skeleton, we're actually able to include ALL possible eyes and ears inside one texture (saving us from having to break up the mod into 40GB worth of asset packages) and simply assign models with different bones enabled across different Phenotypes and Colour sliders!

But that's not all! Because each Phenotype can have its own clothing and hair assigned to it, that also means we can fit hair and accessories to different ears. That means we aren't restricted to one-size-fits all earrings, earcuffs, hats or hair designs - we can make sure that accessories always fit perfectly with no compromises on design or quality! And all that without inflating the size of the mod to untenable levels.

Which... uh... is a real concern, given that once we start implementing PORTRAITS 2.0 in our mods, low-resolution assets will cease to exist. Asari will benefit the most from that because uh... we don't talk about Princess-Of-The-Past's development pipelines and source file hygiene >.>

And on that note, this is all for today when it comes to PORTRAITS 2.0! Development is ongoing, and we are hoping to maintain a good tempo throughout 2023, so hopefully you won't have to wait long between updates. After all these years, we're excited to come back to our roots in portraits, and give them the overhaul they deserve!

Veiled Realms

So... How about those weekly updates that were going to start this month?

Welp, strap in, because we're in for a bit of a recap!

So... do you remember how in the last month's announcement, I said that I had finally figured Veiled Realms out completely, and the key to solving all the issues was turning the instant "Feed" action into a more abstract "Hunt" scheme, because unfortunately, CK3 made it far too awkward and unintuitive to track and change characters' physical locations on the map?

Well... I'd like to imagine that some dev saw that MMR and was giggling maniacally, waiting to unveil their upcoming expansion - Tours and Tournaments - just a few weeks later, along with the huge free patch that's set to introduce intricate mechanics for Travel and overhauled Activities to match.

Or maybe they weren't even developing it at all until I wrote that MMR, and they suddenly came up with the idea and announced it just to make me look like a clown. I would not put it past Paradox devs. They're a menace, I tell you! >.<

But... they're my menace, and I love them, and... it seems like once again, they have come up with a timely solution to a problem I needed solved.

That said... as you can see, that also threw all my "set in stone and definitely happening this month" plans into absolute and total disarray.

Unfortunately, I don't know when T&T is coming out, and I'm not involved in any beta programme for it, so chances are, I won't be able to actually mod around all the new mechanics until the patch is out.

But... I also don't want to delay my plans for who-knows-how-long, and there are certainly a LOT of other parts of the mod to work on in the meantime.

So, after giving it a long hard think, I think I have finally settled on a new-yet-hopefully-not-drastically-different plan:

I will proceed with the original intent of developing the "Hunt" (which desperately needs a unique name, but I can't think of one right now) process as a Scheme. And once Tours and Tournaments is out, I will convert it into a proper Activity, and by doing so, achieve the best of both worlds - letting it be a dynamic adventure where choices matter to the outcome and the journey itself, while also bringing back the physical aspect of it and the immersion that adds.

At the same time, I also think that... it would make sense to look at the vanilla activities - such as hunts, feasts, tours, tournaments, etc. - and utilise the "intent" system.
After all, if you can murder someone during a Feast, surely you could also... opt for a dish not served on the table. Intents will allow me to very easily integrate vampire-flavoured acts into vanilla Activities in an organised and (hopefully) compatible way, which currently would be quite hard with how tangled up and devoid of player agency Activities are.

SO, all that said, I am hoping to (actually for realsies this time) launch the Veiled Realms Weekly Updates sometime in April. And I've also decided to post the progress both on Discord, and on Patreon, for those who cannot or do not want to connect their accounts (which I fully understand).

Please look forward to it <3

And in the meantime, thank you, thank you forever for continuing to support us and taking interest in our work. It wouldn't be possible, or as meaningful, without you, so we are determined to reward your patience and faith with our best effort for as long as modding is our passion ^O^

You'll be hearing from us again soon, but if you want to observe us in our natural environment (which is to say, a perpetual state of total chaos), please join our Discord server! Or my Twitter, which... one day might become active again, pending the mental strength to manage social media again.

And in the meantime, let's always have fun playing Paradox games and/or thinking of playing them but actually waiting for the next big patch, saying to ourselves "THIS is the one for my long-planned serious campaign!"