PLUGIN UPDATE: Alive v51 (files) (Patreon)

I wasn't planning on having such a massive update. But I got a bit stuck trying to figure out hand movement/rotation and didn't want to not deliver on the Poll results nor settle with the no-hands body rotation which to me looked bad. So I just kept grinding and solving other issues in the meantime and things stacked up. I don't plan on doing this with every update though, they'll likely be like before, weekly.

There's lots of changes and I have to test the update more over the next days, there might be some minor update, but so far it looked ok and I want it to share it with people that want to try it out and experiment with some new things.



NEW IN V51

- new vision (gaze) system - models can now turn around their whole upper body. The models will also rotate along with their hands instead of keeping them stuck in thin air
- new lively emotions - models have now more face micro expressions. The default settings might be a bit too low for some that want more visible effects, I'm still looking for some good default values.
- old & new personality traits - old personality traits can be enabled/disabled from the new UI now (bottom bar > face ). There's also 4 new personality traits. Screamer I left out due to moving away from the voices assetbundle, voices are now TTS. Tongue kisser I left out for now because I plan on changing kissing as a whole to make it a bit better and it would get in the way
- VAM Screenshots  & AI CAM - the AI Cam , now Cam, can also be used just to take VAM screenshots with custom width and height. There's also a quick photo button.
- Alive Events - for advanced users and DIY enthusiasts, in the .var in the Plugins/ folder there's a new plugin AliveEvents.cslist that can be used to do triggers with Alive. Technically it should be possible to do everything that the UI can, plus a few extra triggers. Takes a bit of getting used to but it's very powerful and allows doing some things that weren't possible with Alive before, or with VAM in general. Like triggering text-to-speech dialogue.
- Scene Buttons app - for people that like making scenes with lots of buttons, this can be used to get the buttons inside the UI, to have them organized in a simple way. It's possible to customize the buttons with CSS and virtually build a custom UI inside the Alive UI. That UI is specific to the scene. When you load that scene, the scene buttons app will have the buttons just as they were saved.
- Performance settings - added a few more settings that allow turning off permanently glutes, breasts or tongue physics. Lights performance settings are now under Performance too. IMPORTANT: Lights are the main cause of performance issues a lot of people are facing with Alive. Lights in VAM are costly for performance. More than 3 lights in a scene are not recommended. If you turn on Alive Headlights, that's +2 lights to the scene. So if you turn on headlights you need to be careful at that and you might have to turn off some of the other lights. You can also just enable "Headlights only" to force only the Alive headlights to be on in any scene. Turning off "Headlight shadows" will also help performance. Turnining on "One headlight only" will help even more with performance, but at the cost of making the light look less good. If you only turn on the headlights on default settings on top of existing light rigs you might have that might have 3-4 lights already, that's going to be a big performance hit.

CHANGELOG V51

• FIX: fixed error message appearing sometimes on Alive initialization on male person atoms
• NEW: added unity lines helper for UX tools and debugging objects positions and orientations
• NEW: added sticky head/hip parent mode and set as default - hands have less resistance when glued to head/hip than with phyiscs link. More info and toggle to set it to old mode in People Settings > VAM+
• CHANGE: Alive vanilla plugin UI added reload plugin after clearing cache
• CHANGE: Alive vanilla plugin UI added welcome instructions with the basics for people new to the plugin and notes on some common problems
• FIX: fixed UI unnecessary repetitive event uiConfirmPersonAdded triggered after all person events
• CHANGE: moved & grouped person features to make things more intuitive: body app - body related actions, head app - head related actions, actions app - person status & interaction
• FIX: fixed UI minimize/maximize button appearing in VR
• FIX: improved UI loading speed, light changing speed
• FIX: fixed problems and error messages when removing Person atoms
• CHANGE: cleaned up old api url references from Services description, now urls automated
• FIX: fixed UI problem sometimes when loading a different scene that was saved with the UI open, causing "Load error" message to appear; added failed loading check and reload for other fringe cases where the UI might fail to load
• CHANGE: changed cloning atoms to clone also the position & rotation of the parent atom; disabled object cloning for person atoms to prevent physics explosion bug
• NEW: added shortcut Insert to clone selected atom, Delete to remove selected atom
• NEW: added new Effects app for visual & game world effect
• NEW: added new persistent timescale setting Effects app, similar to vam's native Time Scale feature but with more range
• FIX: fixed mainmenu on/off during screenshots delay
• NEW: added new persistent world scale setting in Effects app
• NEW: added new Triggers app, log of recent Alive UI Events and copy functionality, custom triggers tab, help section
• CHANGE: added double click on person avatar in bottom bar functionality to open vam person settings, removed old bottom bar button for settings
• CHANGE: hide vam UI when selecting no person from the bottom bar if vam person settings are active
• CHANGE: fixed and readded Run in background option in Performance settings, making vam freeze when the window is not focused
• CHANGE: removed person remove button from bottom UI, person dismiss to be set as a separate action
• CHANGE: added logic to disable Life Gaze in vam default scene when detected as active & Alive is active to prevent conflicts & user actions needed in the most basic use case & plugin test scenario (add plugin + test default vam scene)
• FIX: fixed pose change duration slider forcing 3s intervals
• NEW: Person > Body > Modelling added body part toggles for the auto modelling functionality
• NEW: Person > Body > Modelling added min & max duration sliders
• NEW: Person > Body > Modelling added chance percent settings for body parts to change pose to add more variety to auto poses
• FIX: fixed AI Cam app help tab not working
• FIX: fixed AI Cam screenshots filenames so that ai, vam & controlnet files have the same timestamp in the filename and start the same
• FIX: remove console log events notification messages for the UI when not in debugmode to reduce number of writes and flooding vam's debug log file
• NEW: added VR 1st person mode player height offset slider (general settings > VR)
• NEW: added Person > Head > Personality toggles for custom expressions behavior based on personality traits, toggles are similar to old alive checkboxes for happy,sad etc
• NEW: added body actions: feet job, lfoot rub, rfoot rub
• FIX: toned down spank morphs some were too exaggerated
• CHANGE: set auto tongue physics as Enabled by default to improve performance & prevent tongue physics causing problems to expressions
• FIX: performance fix replaced settings components in person atoms with singular settings system running for the UI side of the plugin
• NEW: added new settings to force on/off glutes physics and breasts physics in General Settings > Performance
• NEW: added UI pretty tables support
• CHANGE: androids list changed to new table format
• NEW: added Alive Settings > Vision tab for gaze settings, added toggle to turn on/off vision (gaze) on characters
• NEW: added new Vision system to replace old automatic gaze functionality, characters now move upper body too towards the target
• NEW: added logic for hands to follow chest position and rotation on idle movement instead of staying fixed, option added to Alive setings > Vision
• CHANGE: changed body idle hand movement to get disabled when vision hand movement is active to prevent overlapping; cooldown to prevent vam 'elastic' controller rotation from affecting hands
• CHANGE: Reorganized top menu icons, added characters tab; reorganized bottom menu
• NEW: added settings toggle for vision chest & hip to follow target
• NEW: Cam added button for quick capture, useful for capturing frames for AI gifs/videos
• FIX: Cam fixed vam preview screenshots to be the same width/height as the AI images
• NEW: Cam added new mode to take just plain VAM photos too with custom width height, new mode set as default, renamed from AI Cam to Cam app
• CHANGE: Updated Text Audio Tool to have a config file where language, STT model used and local voice speech rate can be changed
• CHANGE: Chat added time to messages and date separator
• NEW: added person effects system to keep track and inform the UI about person temporary effects & states to outline in one place what's going on with the character; just gum chewing for now for testing & no interaction directly from the bar to stop it yet
• NEW: added buttons app that loads buttons that have the AliveButtons.cslist plugin from the scene in the UI
• CHANGE: adjusted mouth breathing morph to make it less exaggerated
• NEW: added 4 new personality traits: Cute, Annoyed, Scared and Satisfied
• NEW: added new Lively Eyes, Mouth, Brows features for more expressive micro expressions
• NEW: new settings in alive settings for lively expressions to turn on/off new system and customize it
• NEW: added new blinking system & blinking frequency setting in UI (alive settings)
• NEW: added performance tongue physics toggle - permanently toggle tongue phyiscs on/off on vam models
• CHANGE: removed Tpose autocorrect to avoid bugs with new hand auto movement; hands can be dropped in any pose from body > position > drop hands
• FIX: fixed audio not working properly on multiple person atoms
• FIX: fixed AI Cam loop notification error when services images AI gets turned off
• FIX: fixed active personality toggles not updating on revisited app (TY!)

CREDITS & INSTRUCTIONS
Alive on Virt-A-Mate Hub

FILE
SPQR.SPQRAlive.51.var