Xmog Test Build and Character View Poll (Patreon)

Greetings!

First off, I want to thank everyone for participating in the H-scene poll! It looks like the Alex/Ana/Sami combo won, with Alex/Ana not far behind. After posting the poll I did some more thinking about how I'll have to introduce this new ecchi area. Unfortunately, I might need to make the first scene just Alex/Ana, simply to have the whole scenario make more sense. I haven't fully decided yet, but If I do end up doing that, the Alex/Ana/Sami scene will be the very next one. Sorry, guys - I don't mean to be a tease!

I've been continuing to work on writing, but for the last several days I took a detour to work on something that I've been promising for a while - the transmogrification feature. To recap what it is, transmogrification lets you make one outfit look like another. The whole point of this feature is to allow a bit more character customization. Like WoW - from which this idea comes - character power in this game is determined mostly by the equipment you wear. At any given time, there's usually only one 'correct' outfit to wear if you're looking to maximize your power. But what if you don't like the look of that outfit? Before, the answer was "Tough luck!" but now you can do something about it!

I've finished the initial version of the transmog plugin, and there's now a version of 0.8 in the test builds channel of the Discord server that implements it. The transmogrifier is on the second floor of the Sorcerer's Society building, which you can only reach if you've started Shiri's quest from 0.8. Please test it out if you have the opportunity! I'd like to identify any problems before the feature gets released in 0.9. It seemed to work fine for me, but players are always much better at breaking the game in interesting ways than I am!

Writing the plugin was a bit of an effort; I had to dive pretty deep into a few more game systems to make it work. Once I understood everything it wasn't too bad to write, but the game engine is moderately complex and completely undocumented (a bad combination). Figuring out how things worked involved poring over the mostly uncommented source code, searching DuckDuckGo (usually in vain) for answers to similar questions, looking at how other plugin makers solved related problems, and then going back to the source code. But after all that, I know a lot more about how another major part of the engine works! Now I just need to write it all down before I forget everything... >_>

Anyway, the transmogrification feature also implements the data backend I need to create something else I've been promising for a while, the character view feature, and that's where I need a bit of input from you guys! The idea of the 'character view feature' came from a suggestion by a patron quite a while back. As I sat down to start working on it, though, I came to realize I didn't have a clear idea of what it was I was trying to create. More specifically, there's two ways I've thought of to implement it:

• As a menu item: There would be a place in the menu - possibly in the equip menu - where you could go to see a render of what *any* character in your party looks like at that moment.
• On the game screen: You would have the ability to make a render of the PC appear on the side of the game screen as you walk around. You could toggle this with a button. Several other H-games have a similar feature.

Initially, the render would only depend on what the character was wearing, but I could later add support for the render to change with emotional state and what have you.

 Poll question: Would you rather see the character view feature implemented as a menu item or as an image on the game screen? 

Please let me know, and thank you for your support!