YL2 - Erection, sheath, physics (Patreon)

We're back again with a new update.

This past month has been a bit scary. With Yiffalicious 1.0 out, the pressure to get YL2 out has increased even more. There's just about a month left of 2017, and with the amount of work still left to do, we're starting to realize we probably won't make it before the end of the year. (Our internal, original plan was to have an early build of the character creator done by that time). We're confident we have most of the pieces required to put the character creator together, but actually putting it together is a whole story of its own. We don't want the first release to be a mess, rushed, or "fake" (as in not possible to expand on). This time around, we make decisions that are long term. That means no shortcuts, no cheating, no hard-coded segments. Everything we do, we do with the long term in mind. If we, in our development, come across a problem where we can choose to either get results fast, but with no regard for the future, or slow, but that we know will pay off in the long run, then we always go with the latter option.

Naturally, this has consequences. For example, a significant portion of time this month was spent on refactoring the serialization and deserialization processes of entities within the framework (saving and loading), to avoid problems that otherwise would have made themselves apparent at a later stage in the development. This was a very important and necessary thing we needed to do. But while utterly necessary, this also probably isn't that exciting to most people. I don't think this is what users want to hear when share our progress.

So with all this in mind, we've been trying to come up with a plan how we keep our patrons happy and engaged, while making long term decisions and "unexciting" core framework development at the same time. Something we realized was that we could mix up core development with more juicy stuff, so we're making progress but also have flashy things to show. Actually, thinking about it, this is pretty much what we've been doing for some time now. However, we also want to offer our $12 patrons something now when Yiffalicious (1) won't be getting any more updates. But with the character creator still needing more time before we can release it, what would that be? Well, we had the idea that maybe we can create smaller interactive demos from the technology that we've been developing. So that's also what we've been doing this month.

We think this approach is great for several reasons. First of all, patrons get something interactive to play with (obviously). But it also forces us to get something workable out, which means we can't procrastinate tasks that otherwise could be considered tedious (but necessary). The whole "wrapping it all together"-act is not to be underestimated, so we think it's healthy being forced to do it every once in a while.

So with all that said, let's jump into todays demo!

Erection, sheath, physics

Making erection and sheath tech is something that's been in our plans for quite some time, and we finally decided to implement it as this month's "juicy stuff" to share. Hopefully it's more exciting than serialization refactoring. Here's a demonstration:

https://gfycat.com/QuarrelsomeFrigidCaracal

https://gfycat.com/GrizzledScientificAnemonecrab

As you can see in the recordings above, we have a working sheath and erection implementation. And not only that, but the shaft is physically simulated too, and in such a way that you can interact with it. One thing we wanted to get away from in regards to Yiffalicious (1) was the feeling of "hard wood", where the shaft would basically feel like a static piece of timber rather than something made out of flesh. While the the shaft it still hard as can be, it still able to bend, as you can see if you study the images. (In Yiffalicious (1), the shafts were simulated by 1 rigid body, making them unable to bend when unmounted.)

Another thing you might notice is that the behavior is governed by two sliders rather than one - erection and unsheath. Each slider does what you expect it to. Erection makes the shaft hard, while unsheath reveals the shaft. That means you can actually fully reveal a shaft without erecting it:

https://gfycat.com/CircularNiftyAlpinegoat

Its physics will respond accordingly, making it fling around in a realistic manner if you interact with it.

To get the sheath working, we had to make an improved implementation of our dynamic mesh morphing tech from Yiffalicious (1) (that were used for orifices). This time around, it's able to adapt the body's shape along the mesh (and not just at the end of the orifice):

https://gfycat.com/RevolvingPresentAuk

As you can see in the image above, the sheath starts adapting its shape even before the shaft reaches the opening.

None of the behavior displayed in any of these images has been pre-animated or pre-baked. Everything is processed in real-time, meaning we can reuse this solution for other shaft models without having to spend time on animating them or pre-baking anything.

If you're a $12 tier patron, you can download this demo and play around with it right now!

A thing to point out about the above demo is that it gives a glimpse of what the interface is going to look like in YL2. It's using YL2's framework to display the demo's properties, which means it (the interface) is not hard-coded or made just for this purpose, but rather is reusable. You can also filter properties and expand/close categories etc.

Actually, in case you're interested in how the we're implementing things, here's all the code required to get all the properties displayed and interactable. Everything else is handled by our framework:

Of course, the actual framework itself has a lot more code to make all this work. But just to give you an idea of how we're trying to make things as simple and elegant as possible for us in our development.

Other things

Dogson has continued working on content for the character creator, translating high poly models to game-ready shapes. These low poly shapes are still something we're tweaking and trying to figure out how they're all fitting inside the editor, so it's a bit too early to show that progress. However, he's also been working on a couple of other things that we feel comfortable sharing with you guys.

Here are a couple of shaft models he's been working on.

Canine shaft:

Humanoid shaft:

Scalie face:

Summary

It looks like the character creator won't make it out before the end of the year, as was our original plan. With Yiffalicious (1) released, and with no more planned updates for it, we've been trying to figure something out what we're gonna offer our $12 patrons meanwhile we're continuing our work on the character editor. We came up with the idea to share small demos of the technology we're developing. This month we've been working on erection/sheath tech, which you can download a demo of right now if you're a $12 patron!

Our work on the character creator continues.

That's all!