PLUGIN UPDATE: Alive v38 (files) (Patreon)

NEW & UPDATED IN ALIVE V38

9 new types of procedural body movement animations have been added in the actions panel. These allow doing many sorts of animations with no work. 

One of my goals when starting making vam plugins last year was to make a sort of infinite dancing machine: a simple way to get the model to dance without a ton of work or setting up many plugins. The body movements in Alive sort of work like that, and while it's not as cool as mocap dances, it is infinite and always unique, keeping things fresh. The new hand movements help a bit more with that:
- if you shake the hands (so that they are relaxed), the animations will drive the hands to move around more like in the image above
- if you stick the hands to the hip or the head, the animations will drive the hip/head to move along with the hands
You can use these along with the sliders to get a lot of variety.

Added 18 light presets to have different kinds of lighting style easily accessible. Also added an option to automatically force close all other lights in scenes, for people that want to keep it simple and consistent across different scenes. There's also a slider for the range of the lights and a settings for light shadows. These settings are global so if you turn off shadows, all presets will always have shadows off. I messed up the UI a bit last minute and you can't see properly which option is selected, will fix that in the next update.

I've been working also on making the desktop UI a bit better. It's still not there, it's tricky to position it for me, sometimes I think it even drifts a bit depending on fov or the vam camera, you can see in the image above there's space above it, it's not aligned pefectly with the top. But I wasted waaay to much time trying to solve that, for now I'll leave it as is until I learn more about that stuff. But I did manage to find a way to make it stick better on top and prevent clipping, especially for interior scenes. I also found a fix for the browser focus problem that happens in vam, where after you interacted with the browser UI, you had to click somewhere in the vam scene for keys to work (WASD etc.). Now it should be more seamless.

There's a tiny new feature for desktop some might find useful, double clicking anywhere on atoms with the middle mouse button will select them. Works only on atoms with collision, it's meant as a way to quickly select walls, floors, assets, etc, items that are big and searching for their controller or going though UI just to select them is annoying.

I'm experimenting with dialogue and adding more interaction and feedback from the characters, and using AI to write the replies and comments to get far better quality & more variety than what I could possibly write myself. I'm still figuring out the best flow on how to proceed with dialogue, there are a few options an I'm not sure  which way is the most efficien and which way I'll go yet. I added a few lines to some of the commands. I moved some of them from the bottom UI to the person actions, to make space for other stuff in the bottom bar


MORE IN ALIVE v38:
- a few performance fixes
- I found a way to hide the controllers for the Alive & Aeternum atoms, even when Show Hidden is unchecked, to keep scenes cleaner and avoid having those get in the way
- fixed Aeternum UI interfering with the Vam start screen when set as a default plugin
- sound effects for sticky & shake features, and more sound settings
- there's also more background stuff for better & more interactive emotions I'm working on using AshAuryn's awesome morphs and also connecting some AI stuff but it's just backend for now
- Happy random expressions are off by default now. People who liked those expressions that were default in Alive v37 can enable them from the old UI in personality > happy. I'm hoping to do a general emotion state system and by default expressions need to be neutral for it

CHANGELOG V38
- NEW: added breathing, moaning & bj persistent sound settings in new UI
- CHANGE: adjusted breathing sounds volume & distance
- CHANGE: adjusted squishy sounds volume & distance
- FIX: fixed turn off all lights except headlights button skipping some lights
- NEW: added headlights permanent setting for shadows on/off
- NEW: added slider for headlights presets light range
- NEW: added setting to always turn off all lights except headlights when scene or plugin is loaded; other lights can still be used in scenes in this mode with toggles, like on/off lights for rooms or lights with ProximityLights plugin, but by default all light start as off for consistency when this is on
- FIX: fixed autoride commands wouldn't automatically stop when loading a scene that was saved while autoride was happening
- CHANGE: changed tongue command to not alter mouth open morphs, only stick the tongue out; can be paired with the mouth open command
- NEW: added reset all commands action - turns off all previously enabled commands, and added it to the new ui
- CHANGE: removed heartbeat animation for performance,to prevent browser having to repaint elements just for that
- CHANGE: changed desktop sidebar & fullscreen menu logic to be positioned closer to the camera to minimize object clipping in indoor scenes
- FIX: fixed silent errors happening because of shake detection when dragging things around causing performance drop
- FIX: small performance update for alive & scene data sent to the UI
- CHANGE: changed from InvokeRepeating to coroutines in Alive & Aeternum plugins for performance
- CHANGE: changed Vibe procedural animation moves to be smoother and less exaggerated
- CHANGE: added hands L/R indicators in hand posing
- NEW: 9 new procedural animation commands for chest, booty and hands
- CHANGE: updated sticky hands logic to prevent toggling on when hand commands are enabled and stop idle fist morphs
- FIX: fixed head still following player aroudn during BJ command
- NEW: Added AI generated text dialogue for commands: open vam panel, go to center, come to me, stop all actions
- CHANGE: On desktop sidebar mode increase render index for the sidebar to be above more of the object & gizmos in the scenes
- FIX: fixed lights position to be slightly behind head to prevent interference with UI
- FIX: set aelights atoms as hidden when created to keep atoms list cleaner
- CHANGE: modified aeternum & alive extra atoms to have the target gizmo (green square) hidden always to not get in the way & clutter the scene when hidden atoms is unlocked
- FIX: fixed Vam ui appearing on Start Screen & Aeternum UI loading when aeternum.cslist set as a default session plugin; it now prevents loading in the start scene and will start loading only when a normal scene gets loaded
- NEW: added click on anywhere to select atom for desktop, works with middle mouse button double click
- NEW: added more morphs to be used for expressions in the future from AshAuryn's AshAuryn.AshAuryn's_Assorted_Expression_Pack_with_75_Morphs.7 and AshAuryn.AshAuryn's_Tears_and_Pain_Pack.3
- FIX: added a fix for browser focus issue causing having to click outside the UI after clicking inside the UI so that the vam keybinding work again, now it detects when the mouse leaves the UI and clears the focus making things more intuitive
- FIX: fixed Think bubbles to be controller by Notifications setting instead of Dialogue setting (which is for speech bubble)
- FIX: fixed error appearing sometimes on shake controller features when starting with controllers in off position
- NEW: added switch sounds for shake controllers and sticky hand changing states
- NEW: added sound settings for UI sfx to disable them and change volume
- NEW: added basic api logic for Alive & aeternum plugins to allow faster and easier components building & 3rd party plugins to interact with them
- CHANGE: set Happy personality off by default, emotion state to be handled by different system automatically
- FIX: fixed eye sparkle something causing flashing eyes and increased variety for more sparkle, renamed Eye Reflection to Eye Sparkle in UI settings
- NEW: added new backend emotion system logic for a better centralized way of handling procedural face expressions to be used by multiple components

INSTRUCTIONS

- Alive.cslist  - classic plugin. this is the plugin that you add to Person atoms that you want to be more dynamic, have expressions, move around,etc.
- Aeternum.cslist - you can add this as a session plugin and the new UI will appear appear and allow for more customization & options for the scene and the person atoms that have the Alive plugin
- Plugins/SmartObjects.cslist - [optional] can be added to any atoms and allows enabling some attributes for those objects to add interaction with Alive (for models to look at object, sit on things, etc)

On desktop, F2 toggles the UI on and off. There's also a button for that in the normal vam UI of the plugin.
In VR the UI should appear by default as a watch on the right hand. You can change the hand and the size from the UI settings.

REQUIREMENTS

Alive is a local plugin and does not connect to the internet. However it uses the web browser atom to render the UI in it, so you need web browsers enabled if you want to use the new UI.

In User preferences Security these need to be enabled: Enabled plugins, Allow Plugin Network Access, Enable Web Browsers, Allow All Sites.

The last one I don't think works properly, or it has something to do with the fact that the UI is local and not a site. I think it can stay off and it will throw an error when first loading but will work as normal after that.

CREDITS

Ashauryn - morphs ( from AshAuryn.Expressions.2, AshAuryn.Pose_Tools.2 and AshAuryn.Sexpressions.2, AshAuryn.AshAuryn's_Female_Genitalia_Collection.2, AshAuryn.AshAuryn's_Assorted_Expression_Pack_with_75_Morphs.7, AshAuryn.AshAuryn's_Tears_and_Pain_Pack.3)
klphgz - poses ( from Crouching, Standing, Lying & Prone, Sitting packs)
Jackaroo - morphs ( from Jackaroo.JarModularExpressions.2)
kemenate - morphs (kemenate.Morphs.10)
geesp0t - spankings vr hand collision detection (Spankings Plugin Mod v3.6 on reddit)

MacGruber, VR Adult Fun, Acid Bubbles & other plugin makers whose work inspired me to make some of the features here and plugins in general.

DEPENDENCIES

- none

FILES

SPQR.SPQRAlive.38.var