Monthly Report: July (and 50-100$ commission) (Patreon)

It's 23:50 here locally...so technically its still July! As you probably saw, I just released the second LogicBricks StateMachine tutorial. That should get you covered on the advanced features of that plugin. I expect that I will need two similar tutorials for IdlePoser (Basics + Advanced) until I can really cover the details of how IdlePoser and StateMachine interact with each other in the DoubleTrouble scene.

However, as a side project, I was looking at PC components for upgrading my old machine. That made me browse through various forum threads on the Hub discussing FPS in VaM. Everyone is posting random FPS values, but barely anybody shares which exact settings and scene was used. But those differences can make huge difference, if they are not identical comparing performance is really pointless. But it would be really helpful when deciding whether you want to spend some extra 100€ on that faster RAM module, different CPU, etc.

So therefore, as intermediate project before continuing with more tutorials, I want to build a proper "official benchmark" scene. This scene would use a number of yet to write plugins to enforce that you use particular graphics & physics settings, ensure that your machine is properly warmed up before starting to make time measurements, as a warm system might throttle down power usage and be slower. Of course it should write the results, used resolution and so on to a nice text file so you can easily post the data in forums and other places. Essentially it should function in a similar way than build-in benchmarks of popular games, except its a scene you launch.

I don't have the capacity at the moment to build another high-end quality scene, while at the same time writing those needed plugins, so I'm looking at using an existing scene made somebody else. This could be paying a creator to "free" an existing paid scene or even be a commission. Depending on delivered quality and what needs to be done, something around 50-100$ via Patreon would be reasonable. That's not much, but I mean its mostly free advertising your content and lots of people will download this. Possibly we can convince MeshedVR to donate to the cause as well, but of course that's not for me to decide.

The requirements as I see them are the following:

• Generally well-build quality scene, representative of VaM.
• Two fully animated characters that touch each other. That means several controls being animated as well as several morphs, at least facial expressions and breathing. Intention is to get the physics engine to do some work.
• About 1-2 minute of animation with some camera movement including medium and  close-up distances. Ideally in a way that it is watchable in VR without getting motion-sick, so slow and continuous movement. The scene will run multiple times during the benchmark, possibly going through different quality settings, etc.
• I guess sound, clothing, hair and nice environment / prop assets are expected as well.
• Content should be reasonably "mainstream". We want as many people as possible to run this. Maybe it does not even need to contain any nudity.
• Ideally the scene should not contain anything random, so exactly the opposite of what I'm usually doing in my scenes ;) The reason is that the scene of course needs to behave identical every time you run it...so you get the same reproducible performance results.
• The scene should only need a small number of dependencies. ALL of them need to be available for free as hub-hosted VAR package. The scene itself, after adding my benchmark plugins, will be uploaded to the Hub for free as well. We want as little hurdle to run this on your machine as possible.
• No warnings or error messages.
• No license violations, obviously.

If you have suggestions which scene would fit this description, want to suggest your own scene or negotiate commission conditions, please contact me. Discord or Hub preferred. Please do not waste my time by not having read/understood above requirements. If you think you can cobble something together in 2 hours, don't bother either, you can't.

Important: Do not start doing major work before contacting me first! Having 5 different people working on things without any coordination does not help anyone.

Cheers, MacGruber