Some fun stuff! (Patreon)

We've been polishing the NPC performance test, we're still on track to release it to Patrons at end of month. Thanks to everyone who's emailed saying they'd like to take part, we have some nice varying hardware so should get some good numbers!

Here's a little clip we made for Twitter of what you can expect - 

https://twitter.com/VirtualNovel/status/825371924322725888

Anndd, we've made numerous improvements to our 2Ds in the past couple of weeks - here's the start of what we hope is going to be quite a powerful behavior engine, to make for really engaging 3D 2Ds. 

https://twitter.com/VirtualNovel/status/825378051064225792 

At the moment, NPCs will cycle through looking at you and other nearby NPCs (and your motion controllers if you wave them around). We had something similar in the last performance demo patrons took part in, but it was mostly 'baked' behavior - this system now uses behavior trees which can potentially be modified by mood variables, to make an NPC do things like actively avoid looking at you for example. NPCs also know if they're being looked at by you or by other NPCs, so we can do some cool things like making shy NPCs blush when you or another NPC look at them, and it will hopefully result in some quite subtle nuances in 2Ds' reactions to you and their peers.

In pursuit of our goal to be able to afford many NPCs, we've also spent a lot of time optimizing their cost on your CPUs and graphics cards.

NPC behavior is affected by their LOD system, meaning that the further away from a character you are, the less complex their computations are. This is great for performance as branches of their AI -- like the look-at system -- can be halted after a certain distance, along with stuff like their mesh resolution (poly count) becoming reduced, and features like bounce physics becoming disabled. 

To finish up, here's some HR snaps of Virtual Novel's NPC randomizer at work! We're looking forward to adding more animations, hair pieces and variations so that the characters become even more unique...

...and we'll try to remember to maybe make some males at some point ¯\_(ツ)_/¯  

As always, thanks for all your support! Check your inboxes (probably on the 31st, but maybe sooner) for your Patreon exclusive links to the NPC stress test, and have a great weekend everyone!