Updates (Patreon)

We know we've been very quiet lately, and we apologize for that. Progress is being made, it's just that we've run into far more difficulties this month than we anticipated.

When we shipped Charlotte, we knew there were issues with her. We didn't have time to fix those if we were supposed to get a build out, so of course we've been very eager to fix them now for the next build. And we are... It's just that each time we fix an issue, it's like another one pops up in its stead. It's like it has been this never ending game of whack a mole. And the moles keep popping up.

I was hoping we'd have everything patched by the time we posted this update, but the truth is it isn't. There's still issues we need to fix. But while that may be the case, we have still made some progress that we'd like to share.

First up - redesign of Charlotte's tits.

The inflated state turned out a lot more balloon-feeling that we intended, so we have completely remade the inflation for Charlotte:

New inflation

https://gfycat.com/ImpartialSecretBellfrog

(Comparison to old)

https://gyazo.com/8d0e6b31f5cd968df59c316e346ef7ec

As you can see, the tits look more natural now and sag a lot more too.

They also react to belly inflation:

https://gfycat.com/OffensiveMediocreChupacabra

Furthermore, teats and inverted nipple shapes have been moved to "Breasts" category and now also work properly with inflation/deflation:

https://u.nya.is/pfaptw.mp4

We have also worked a lot with trying to get the deflated state to look better. In the latest release, there were some really odd and undesirable shadows showing up. This has now been fixed.

New deflation

https://gyazo.com/dd02a24e90ee8d5308d26aa351d9e652

Comparison to old

 https://gyazo.com/3bc3b98d8b7530dcc1c633e76465c957 

(Was very noticable in certain lighting)

https://gyazo.com/2ec395aff0a92096aadbc96d080db274

This was actually kind of hard to accomplish, and probably more advanced from a technical point of view than might first seem to be the case. The problem (partially) is that as the shape of the body is changed (through deflation), we need to update the surface properties as well (vertex normals) to reflect these changes. Previously, we have pre-calculated those properties, but the issue here is that some blend shapes affect the same surface normals, and thus cannot be pre-calculated (in this case area between tits and belly). This forced us to come up with a real-time vertex normal update solution. So what you're actually seeing here is the mesh surface being recalculated and updated in realtime each time inflation is changed. This was hard to optimize, and we still aren't quite sure if this method is feasible or not. There's some delay (~50ms, background process, doesn't affect framerate) before normals are recalculated when changing the inflation. This is only noticeable though if you drag the sliders really fast, so hopefully it shouldn't be too much of an issue.

The end result is really a lot better, as the normals will always be adjusted for the current mesh shape.

Herm/Futa

Due to all the issues we've had with fixing Charlotte, we're behind schedule on the herm/futa variations, but they're still coming along.

https://gyazo.com/47131bd37176393747ac765d12e64bec

https://gyazo.com/bb8280125751ea065cc5b7f6635bac82

https://gyazo.com/e15f874b1e1963cd37a4d5f9757c9316

Custom skins

A pretty big new feature coming in 0.7.1 is the ability to use custom skins for characters. Any skin slider you can change in the game can have its texture replaced with something custom made. This is accomplished by simply putting a texture image in a certain folder. Yiffalicious will detect that texture and load it instead of the default ones.

Here are some examples of custom skins:

http://imgur.com/a/itpCI

To help make this process even easier, jei3 has been working on a custom app to make installation and management of skins super simple.

Drag and Drop Skin ZIPs into app DB:

https://i.gyazo.com/9648436db1b755e73dcfd3ddfdbfe5a7.gif

Drag and Drop skins into game slots, right click to clear:

https://i.gyazo.com/1735e35959c6f7ec4bd12e7f1c3a3a34.gif

Delete skin ZIPs from within app:

https://i.gyazo.com/6d453f79ed7044caf7bf1641f449f4e9.gif

We'll come back to this topic later on and show in more detail how you can create your own skins for Yiffalicious.

YL2

Many people want to know how the development of YL2 is going. And so - getting straight to the point... Development is progressing, but not at the speed we were hoping (especially not this month with all the trouble Charlotte has caused us).

We've still managed to come some way though. Now, measuring progress by counting the lines of code written is kind of retarded, but it does give somewhat of an indication. So far, we've written about 3000 lines of code on the new engine (our own code, not 3rd party, i.e. actual new engine code). That code is mostly outlining structure, but we've also started to implement some core concepts. The new structure is so much better and so much more enjoyable to work with compared to the current one. We can't wait to see it come to full fruition. Which brings us to the next point...

There's actually a thought process behind implementing the custom skins system at this point in time. It might seem strange we invested time on the current engine like this when we should be working on YL2, but that's exactly what we're trying to enable with this move. Because, as it turns out, working on the current engine and content while working on YL2 has proven difficult. Working like this does interfere with the development of YL2 quite significantly. So we wanted to create some space for us where we can work on the new engine at ease, not constantly worrying about getting something out all the time. And that's where custom skins come in. We are hoping that by creating this skin system, the community itself can provide new content and make the experience feel fresh (much like how the cloud pose system works), giving us more space to work on YL2.

So in case we're not clear, this is what we're saying:

Working on YL2 while working on the current engine/content hasn't worked out like we were hoping. As we want nothing more than to work on YL2, we feel we need to divert more time and resources towards it at the expense of the current engine and content. This means we won't be able to push out current engine releases as frequently as we have previously. Because of this, we felt compelled to implement custom skins for the current engine, as that will provide new content for users without costing us any time (other than the time it took to implement of course).

So if you're pledging solely to get access to new builds, you might want to pledge more tactically and time it with new releases, as we probably won't be able to release something each month. (If you however want to support the development of YL2, we're very happy if you choose to stick around.)

Most of the stuff made on YL2 so far is mostly just structure, and isn't that interesting to share. But we have also made a couple of experiments that are a bit more exciting, and we had a certain one in particular we thought we could share.

https://gyazo.com/2be5a205ea84f8ec24df5f64f4c6c2fe

This is a soft body system. The implications of a such a system are very interesting to say the least.

Now, I want to point out that this is just a test, and we don't know when or if such a system could be implemented in YL2, but it's definitely something we will try to do.

So yeah, that's pretty much it.

This was a pretty long post, but I guess it's justified considering how long it has been since we wrote something. I hope you can forgive us for the lack of updates, and I hope you will have patience with us as we continue our work, especially considering how we now may not be able to push out builds at the same frequency as previously during the development of YL2.

- odes