Skunkfrakker & Veelicious
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New Builds! Video! Option to get your OC in the next release..
🕑 Added 2020-11-03 21:41:00 +0000 UTCNew Builds! Video! Option to get your OC in the next release!
Hi Everyone!
Thanks very much for your patience over the last couple weeks! I've been working hard on Besti and various projects for you, and I apologize for not posting on here for a couple weeks. My cat Trouble died and it just destroyed me, so I threw myself into work and just made a bunch of stuff instead of communicating with anyone. Thanks for understanding.
Because the October stuff came out so late in the month I've decided to keep the October keys until the next major release of a program done in the Besti X engine comes out, so continue to use your October keys until then. There are 3 nearly-complete projects in Besti X so I'm hoping we'll see one of them in the next couple weeks.
So what did I make over the last two weeks? You probably saw it on the server on the 31st but here's a video going over all of it!
Everybody gets the video because I've been a crappy communicator lately <3
Click here to check it out! I'm still using the October intro because it only covers the stuff made up to October <3 I'll come up with a new one for this month shortly.
Coolest stuff is:
A preview animation of one of the new projects is in the Animation Station in Besti 9. This is going to be an interactive situation where you assist other characters go at it rather than participating in first person. I explain in the video :P This is something that will likely get a normal release as well as an extreme content version.
The contour-tracing system that makes your avatar hands stick and trace other objects is now in Besti X. You've been asking me forever to let you "pet" friends, and this is the system that will do that. Right now this only applies to VR, but it will be used for all camera interfaces. I put a few demonstrations of this system in the latest Besti X build, and in the Home environment I put a big weiner that you can interact with using the new system. The Extreme Content project, Equigon, and the as-of-yet-unnamed breeding simulator program were all waiting on this system, so now I can finally get those out the door <3
Overall body presence in Besti X has been improved significantly thanks to a new grabbing mechanism that fixes grabbed objects to your avatar instead of where your hands are in space. Basically if you have a short-armed character, you will now still look correct when holding objects/climbing/grabbing things because the attach point is on your avatar, now. Most of this is thanks to a new order of operations processor that lets me define in a super-granular way what happens on every frame.
A new tool for the Besti SDK specific to creating unique stories has been added. This tool assigns a scene-specific avatar to players that enter the scene. The idea here is that if you're creating some kind of interactive fanfic, you can make the player a specific character in that fiction. More needs to be done there (conversation system needs a tool) but it's getting there.
Equigon (the closest thing to being done in that it's only waiting on artwork from me) has an opportunity for your to get your OC in the game if you want to be a character in it. Go to this Google Sheets form right here and send in as many OCs as you can. The more the merrier!
My plan this week is to spend all day tomorrow answering emails, and then on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday switch over to finishing up one of the 3 huge projects that are almost ready for release. Thank you for your patience and for your support, and more asap.
Here's a full changelog for everything that came out on the 31st!
Besti 9.93
New Features
- A preview animation from an upcoming program where you help stallions breed with other characters is available in the Animation Station scene. I promise they're OK.
- Removed a minor censorship that Patreon made me put in.
Core Updates
- Reduced memory use during startup/removed a large CPU spike after startup. It was loading, checking, and then un-loading the friend system during a startup process, which isn't needed at that point. That check happens the first time you load a friend as it is so there's no need to do that twice.
Besti X Beta 19
- Further improved performance for avatars without fingers.
- Added the internal-side stuff to permit you to re-define grab attach points on a per-avatar basis. This will allow hands to grab objects differently if the avatar has unusual hands, and will allow character creators to define where objects rest in the hands of the character. I need to make the tools for this still but now it's there to have tools made for it.
- Pointers no longer collide with your real hands. This was never intended to happen and was interfering with the virtual scale system when you define yourself as a very small character.
- Defined a point in space to calculate the position of a character's mouth. We'll make a tool for defining this in the N-Entrance tool. For now though I just need a vector3 out of it.
- Added the ability to define a grabbable object as grabbable only by a specific controller. This is useful for situations where you have independent grab movement for a left and right hand (giant weiner for example) or a specifically handed object that you wish to deny the ability to pick up with one hand.
- Added a unique grab behavior for a character's moudth. Objects that can be mouth-grabbed automatically mouth-grab when they intersect with this point. At present this grabs objects that can not physically move and serves as a secondary type directional grab, but if people want to role play as a character without hands to grab with by choice we can add additional functionality to give you a mouth-grab button or something. I'll need feedback on that.
- Modified the hand interactors to be angled slightly differently. Object orientation wasn't matching the rotation properly between hands.
- Added some additional meta data to the hand location. It's impossible to do a normal vector direction calculation (vector3target-vector3source) when the points are identical. Now there's an always available "up" vector from the hands that I can use to code against.
- Updated the collision rules to ignore grabbable objects with distance grab when the menu is deployed.
- Wrote a new system: Sticky Surfaces. One of the most requested features and also one of the most complicated was a way to have VR users hands interact with mesh objects and characters in a sensible way. Because I can not physically stop a user's hand before it goes through a visible entity, I wrote a way to visually simulate that in a universal way. There are ways to do this simply -- using physics, for example -- but there are severe tradeoffs particularly for multiplayer arrangements, or in adding new/unknown behaviors. I needed instead a system that did it mathematically rather than tying into the overall physics system provided by Nvidia. I believe I have programmed a good and workable solution for this.
- Created a demonstration scene and added it to the built-in scenes in Besti.
- Created a Besti SDK tool to permit scene creators and character creators the ability to make sticky surfaces to use this system.
- Added an error-checking routine during compile that looks for potential problems with the setup of the sticky tool.
- Added an on-avatar attach point for grabbed objects. Instead of grabbing to your VR remote's location, items are grabbed to the correct location on the avatar. This will prevent grabbed objects from getting out of sync with your avatar if the avatar has short arms or unique hands (tentacles? really long hands?)
- Wrote an entirely new order-of-operations handler that processes all timed events. Besti X has way too many fucking systems to depend on the Unity order of operations processor. That's fine for one-off things but we have about 25 independent systems all firing, and they have a precise order in which they need to fire. Now the order of operations processor handles the exact timing of when everything does its thing. This SIGNIFICANTLY reduces CPU overhead, too, because previously everything was handling its own timing. I wasn't keeping a tally but it should have removed around 35 scripts. Sum total should see an almost 20% reduction in CPU usage along with improved stability and predictability of what code will actually do when I write it.
- Changed all tools that should be part of the order of operations processor to have the hook for the invocation event for the new order of operations processor. Some cases required significant overhauls to work this way but it is glorious.
- Added the in-scene processor for the Sticky Surface tool so it actually functions as intended without the creator needing to worry about PhysX systems.
- Added the in-scene processor for in-scene avatars
- Added an outrageous stallion dick to the home scene that I made for Equigon. Does it work? Try it and find out. I believe Omni suggested I set it up the way I did (This is for VR only right now)
Besti SDK Beta 19
- New tool: Sticky Surface. Make user avatar hands track to objects when they're near them.
- New tool: InSceneAvatar. Make a scene-specific, uncustomizable avatar that is automatically loaded onto players when they enter your scene.
- Performance improvements to make scenes work by default on Oculus Quest without modification. This is going to be modified in the future to be more intelligent, but for now, I just shifted things to use the Mobile shaders. The real release is going to use SRP but for now we can just do this.
- Added a number of example stations to the example scene.
- Modified some of the included Zinnia code to tolerate the order-of-operations processor.
- Investigated a reported issue that there was a problem doing head assignment on some avatar characters. Imported the character that was problematic and couldn't reproduce the issue, and it was actually kind of awesome seeing the end of my dragon muzzle where my nose should be. I'll follow up with that person but it seems to work as intended.
- Added a folder to hold compiled friends for use as in-scene characters. Compiled avatars and friends still go to where you specify they should go, but in-scene avatars go to the CompiledCharacters folder. This is how you will create scene-specific avatars and friends.
