SITREP #9: RAE UI, desktop point & click, VR touch (Patreon)

A big part of what I'd love to do with Æternum relies on interaction and emergent storylines.  Simply put, I want it to be a game, not a software where you have to drag sliders and juggle plugins. The bad news is that is not the direction VAM modding is going at all and there's not a lot of stuff I feel that I can use to help me that would make my job easier.  It feels way faster to figure it out from scratch. The good news is I'm having fun figuring this stuff out and I'm making great progress even though I don't get to work as much I would love to on stuff like this.

RAE UI

I've been working towards a  new character interaction system that will allow Æ to take a different approach on the clothing & hair systems and it will also support new features related to aeternum like tattoos, job assignments, dialogue and i hope much more. This will also be used as a quick way to see character info and as an interface for other interactions like the minigame in the video which i'll release soon, probably this weekend.

I had an earlier demo similar to this system but it was an experiment done through traditional vam methods, buttons, triggers and it only worked for a single person and in a specific scene setup. I wasted a bit of time but I figured out how to redo it with a bit more advanced code. To get this going right now you just have to add the plugin to a person in any existing scene and done. Click or tap on the forehead of the person and the UI will open. Much more cleaner and it will work for unlimited people also.

DESKTOP POINT & CLICK, 

I figured out now how to capture clicking on desktop on individual atoms and their colliders and I'll be able to use that to streamline a more complex UI and make this something that's just as fun to play on desktop as on VR. That's the goal at least. There is a problem I'm still having that I don't know if I'll figure out quickly. At times there's either a light or the eyecontroller getting in the way, 'stealing' the click. This happened as 00:19 for example and I had to rotate the angle a bit to get to hit the forehead. I don't think it's a big deal but it's an annoying little thing.

VR TOUCH

In VR I'm trying to do more stuff with touch rather than point and click. For example to open that person interface in the video you have to tap the forehead of the character. To clean the colors for the minigame you'd have to actually wipe them. I'd love to do some more advanced stuff now that I figured this stuff out. For example double tapping on the right shoulder to make the character rotate 90 degrees to the right. I'd take that any day rather than opening menus and 3ds-maxing it.