Project of Theseus (Update/progress) (Patreon)

Sorry it's been a bit longer since the last update - I've been ADHD Hyperfocused™ on the work and inventing better stuff while also working two real jobs. I recently made a joke that my project is basically the Ship of Theseus in that it has had so many iterations, changes, improvements, and recreations that it ceased being ANYTHING like the original that I started with. I've hit another of those moments and have been continuing to improve specific parts of the NPC's per my priorities. Things I have been working on and achieved or am in the process of improving/inventing/etc:

1.) Improved the scripts and processes behind randomization of hair, material, and character skins in order to save memory while also ensuring that each 'model' represents potentially thousands of unique character combinations. (Mostly done, ongoing improvements probably needed)

2.) Put a ton of work into improving materials by making material collections for individual hair and outfit models that can be assigned randomly 'in total' to allow for more complex styles than single-colours. This is ongoing, and has been totally worth the effort :D  (Ongoing)

3.) Further customized the main shader I use for allowing liquid blood to allow for transparency (needed for some clothing and objects with parts that are transparent). This was a long-standing problem with the shader that now opens up so many other options. (Done)

4.) Figured out a way to project liquid from 'exit wounds' to splatter walls AND 'run' down instead of just being static decals. This is the most recent battle I've won and needs some testing and tweaking to get just right, but it's already awesome. (Ongoing)

5.) Started tinkering with my own animation controller and state-machine (think of it like a systematic controller of what animation is playing based on variables and states of the character). In the past I've been forced to use pre-made hyper-complex and heavy ones that were really tanking performance for what I actually wanted. Currently, NPCs are able to stand idle and recognize if the character is near them with a gun and will raise their hands. I'm making the state controller from scratch to ensure no unnecessary processing is done to tank performance right now. (Ongoing)

6.) Changed model creation, importing, and setup to use Blendshapes in order to allow for emotions, more expressive eyebrows, better lip-sync, and more realistic pain/death that also doesn't take so long to set up for each character. This means old models need to be completely redone...again...yay...(but actually, yay!) (ongoing)

7.) Deprecating/Removing - next up is to remove some of the blood vfx particles that were used to place decals on nearby floor/walls. I will either replace these decals with something much lighter or just stick with the new liquid ones. They just never quite looked how I wanted and I was never really happy with their shader either. This will also help memory usage and performance as those textures were pretty large.

8.)  Ragdoll and breast physics improvement and fixes for some strangeness that was happening with ragdolls. Each character has a slightly different skeleton and ragdoll, so each must be treated as their own unique creation. This is ongoing and will probably always be so.

9.) I've switched back to working mainly toward the VR version (though 90% of it all works for both) as it's what I started this whole thing to do and get the most motivation for. If you can't do VR, just know that I will update the FPS too - I just hyper-focus constantly and bounce around.