FuroticVR
patreon
Update!
🕑 Added 2022-06-05 19:23:50 +0000 UTCHey guys,
I don't have a new build for you yet, but I wanted to give you a quick update on what I've been working on. A new build should be available later this month.
So, last month I got a distracted with another project that took a lot longer than expected, but that's over with and I'm now back to working full time on the game.
But in between working on that other project, I was still doing some research regarding game physics. Specifically, the ability for characters to react to touch.
Something I have thought about for a while is that, when I begin implementing more sex animations, which should be the next thing I focus on after this month's build, it won't feel very realistic if the characters you're intracting with don't physically react to your thrusts. At the same time, simulating all the motions involved physically rather than with animation would be an impossible task. So how do I handle this? Well, it turns out a tool I purchased a while back, Puppetmaster, may be the key to making this happen.
Puppetmaster is a plugin which basically allows you to bridge the gap between animation and physical simulaiton. It's often used for ragdolls, but can also be used to make the character physically react when you thrust into them. Their animation would continue to play, but IK would move their hips back while keeping their feet and hands planted, and then the hips would spring back to their original position after each thrust.
Unfortunately, as with everyhting else, there are a few kinks I need to work out. Nothing is ever so simple!
Specifically, for this to work, the characters need to have rigidbodies on all the limbs, and the limbs need convex colliders. But right now, I'm using a tool which generates concave colliders for the entire mesh. This tool can also generate convex colliders, but there in lies the problem. I've been using concave colliders because those closely match the shape of the body. which is necessary for the size changing mechanics. You can't for example climb inside the mouth if the head has a convex collider. And in a similar vein you can't climb on top of someone's dick if they don't have colliders enabled so that they can penetrate other characters.
So I've been doing a lot of thinking about how to work around these issues, and its going to be a bit complicated. But I think I can set it up so if you are below a certain size in relation to another character you get the concave colliders, otherwise you get the convex colliders, though that still presents problems if you say, want to put your fingers in the mouth or vag of a character which is the same size as you.
It might be possible to resolve those issues by adding bones for the jaw, and on either side of the vag so that the concave collider creator can generate seperate colliders for those areas but that in itself brings a whole host of other issues. For example, it would require those importing their own characters to rig them up in that manner, but nobody does that for VRChat avatars, they just use blend shapes... and I can't use blend shapes to generate the necessary colliders.
One possibility I've considered is perhaps having some kind of trigger volume around those areas which disables the convex colliders when an object enters that region. So for example, I could have a sphere trigger collider in the mouth which starts out small when its closed, and expands as it opens, and if your finger touches this trigger before it hits the convex head collider, then it could disable the convex head collider, and enable a concave collider instead, which would no longer be able to physically react to forces, but at least you'd be able to do mouthplay stuff.
Anyway, I'm just mentioning all this to give you an idea of how complex this problem is. If Unity could collide rigidbodies and do physiucs on convex colliders it would make all this so much simpler, but alas, it cannot and even if a third party physics solution existed which can do this, it would not be compatible with the Puppetmaster stuff. So I'm left using tricks like these to make it work.
The other thing I've been doing this month, which you can see in the screenshot above, is optimization.
A lot of folks have complained about the game's performance, so I have been working on trying to improve that. So I took the whole house into Blender, and went over it with a fine toothed comb and, well... I found some areas in which I could clearly improve things, but not nearly as many as I'd hoped.
The most obvious area for improvement was all the foundatons and the base of the fence went below ground and because their meshes are subdivided pretty heavily because they're rock, I went through and I deleted all the excess polygons which would never be visible to the player.
Aside from that... There wasn't a lot of room for improvement. Even when I looked at the props themselves, there weren't many areas I could really cut corners. I could make multiple LODs for the vases, but at best that would reduce the polycount for the scene by like 60K polys, which sounds like a lot, but the whole scene has 8M polygons to start with!
Also, all the props are individual objects rather than prefabs, so before I could even think about making a change like that I'd have to go back and replace all those prefabs. Which would take days... Unleess, I could automate it. And thankfully I have a script which will allow me to replace objects in a scene with a prefab, and with a few modifications it now even copies over the material I had assigned to the object in the scene, and its scale, so with one click I can set the scene up right for any particular prop I want to replace.
Still, as I said, using LODs alone isn't going to get me much in terms of performance.
However I have some other ideas. That side project I was working on taught me a trick where I can cast shadows from a less detailed invisible object, and because every real time shadow caster's polys are duplicated, that can result in significiant savings. But also right now I have all those vases and many of the other objects in the game set to cast shadows, even though they really don't need to. Outdoors, it makes sense to have the objects cast shadows onto the tables, but indoors the house itself is casting a shadow from the sun onto everything inside it, so nothing inside casts its own shadow unless it happens to fall in a sunbeam. I suspect that I will get some major performance benefits just by disabling all those shadows that you're not even seeing.
Lastly, I've been grouping all the objects in the world by the room they're in. I started doing this because I decided to close the doors to the upstairs bathroom and the room above the dining room because they had a lot of props that weren't really adding much value since I didn't see myself using them as sets. However I thought maybe I might change my mind, so rather than just delete everything I put them into a container object and hid that instead. This then got me thinking that I should do this for all the rooms. I'd tried using Unity's built in culling system a couple months ago, but it turns out its complete crap. So instead, I'm gonna write a script which I can stick on a trigger volume to show specific collections of objects based on where you are in the world. So, if you're in the upstairs hall, most of the stuff downstairs, and the stuff in the garage, will be hidden. This will probably take a week to set up, but its fairly easy to implement and should give much larger performance improvements than trying to create LODs for all the props which would take a month and see far smaller gains.
Other things I've been working on?
Well, I've been fixing the lightmapping in the world. It turns out that when you export from Blender normally the objects end up having a scale applied to them in Unity, and the lightmap UV generator does not like that. I was trying to add lightmapping to some of the cabinets and it would not let me increase the detail as much as I needed even though I clearly was not using the whole lightmap for the object by a long shot. There were also some ugly seams on the roof because there were polygons inside the roof that attached where the seams were, and the lightmapper was seeing those as a hole or something. I've been getting better at using Blender lately now that I've figured out how to hide all the objects I'm not currently working on and that there's a walk naviation mode like Unity has so its easier to get into those weird nooks and crannies to edit them. There's still a really annoying issue with the baseboards not being lightmapped properly though and I think it may have to do with Unity ignoring lightmaps for "degenerate polygons" which is any polygon which is too long and thin. I might need to subdivide those a bit to fix that. Otherwise, they'll have annoying black lines on them. But aside from that, the lightmaps are working way more reliably now in terms of setting the scale of them all to match and getting enough detail on things like cabinets for them to look good.
Finally, you may notice I redecorated the master bedroom. Eventually there's gonna be some hanky panky going on in there, but I was REALLY unhappy with how the room looked before. The room was cramped, the TV was over in a corner, there was a big couch which was never going to be used and was just wasting polygons, and if you were standing at the foot of the bed looking at it, you were staring right into the sun, and the view from the bed itself wasn't much nicer. Now you have a view out the windows, or at the TV, which I could have displaying a camera feed, or I could use to let you play videos by pasting a URL or local file path in there. Anyway, I'm much happier with the look of that room now, so the next scene I set up will probably be in there.
Oh, I almost forgot, I've also redecorated the downstairs a bit here and there. Mostly the dining areas. Basically I was looking for props I could delete to improve performance without impacting the appearance of the rooms too much. So in the dining room I removed a chair and pillow and a vase or two and rearranged things so it still looked nice, and then in the cabinets that hold the dishes and glasses I deleted bunch of those and rearranged things so those still look nice as well. Nicer actually. I also moved the chairs around a bit so the place would feel a little more disorganized and lived in rather than having them all placed perfectly.
Anyway, I think that about covers it for now. As I mentioned up top, I intend to have a new build available this month. It will most likely include only the performance enhancements I mentioned, but we'll see if I can toss anything else in there!
Comments
Furotic
I'm sorry if the game isn't running well for you, but I will be releasing an update in another day or two which should improve performance significantly, and another update will be coming later which will allow you to hide all the avatars but the one or two you select, and my testing has indicated that both of those together will bring the game from the 20-30fps range to over 100fps, on my PC at least. On your PC, what this means is a 3-5x performance improvement over whatever fps you were getting, hopefully. It's also not really fair to compare a game made in Unity by one guy to a game written in a custom engine made by a studio with hundreds of employees who have the time to optimize every single thing to death. I've done everything I can realistically do with this next build to improve performance. Objects not visible are culled, and I've changed up the method of rendering shadows to one which is more performant. I spent a month on these upgrades because people have been complaining about the performance, and I hope they're sufficient. As for a desktop build, I don't have any plans for that at the moment, because it would take a huge amount of time to implement. With VR, you can just pick up a dildo and use it on a character. With desktop, it's not that simple. You can't easily rotate your hand into the correct orientation, or thrust it back and forth. I'm sure you can imagine doing these things is easy with a mouse, but believe me I've played VRChat on desktop a few times to test my worlds and even picking up a magazine and reading it with keyboard and mouse is a nightmare. Unless a game is designed from the ground up to be played on a desktop by including say, custom animations of you picking up the dildo and inserting it when you click it and then switching to a mode where back and forth movement of the mouse thrusts it, then the user experience isn't going to be very good. But setting that stuff up basically means creating a whole seperate game with different interactions. At the very least it requires additional menus, and additional animations, which I simply don't have time to create right now. If the game were doing better on Patreon then I could potentially afford to hire help to implement stuff like that in the future. But for now it's not realistic. I need to focus on getting more adult content into the game to attract more Patreons. And then I can think about adding desktop support at some point down the line.
Xander
I would greatly appreciate a desktop build of this game because I feel as though I wasted $5 on an hour of pain and nausea. I do not have motion sickness and I have an oculus quest, I also have an incredible ACER laptop that runs GTAV like a dream but this game was a laggy mess for me and only caused problems and made me feel sick like never before. I could only walk less than a foot before I had to wait 5 minutes for it to load and then take 1 more step. I even closed ALL other programs and it did not help, the only thing that helped was closing the game. I thought it might have been a one time thing so I booted up a different vr game with MUCH more detail and it ran perfectly fine. Idk what is wrong with this game but I regret the $5.
Furotic
A slider for changing your size was the first thing I tried, but it didn't work well. It was difficult to map such a large range to short slider and allow for fine adjustments, and when you slid it, if you were growing or shrinking at the same time, it was glitchy and difficult to control so you'd end up zooming to max or minimum size inavdertently. Changing your size on release would have solved the glitching but then you wouldn't easily be able to tell how large or small you'd become. I suppose I could show the size multiplier below it in numerical form, but you still wouldn't really have finer control mapping such a large range to a slider. As for the pool, I think you'll find you can escape by teleporting onto the bear's tummy. And I'm aware that the colliders leave something to be desired, but collisions with moving objects are always going to be glitchy. I will continue to try to find the sweet spot, but game development is often about tradeoffs. We don't yet have a perfect physics solution which works in all scenarios., and the size changing stuff is adding another huge wrinkle to that. Though perhaps if I were to up the number of physics solver steps, it would help a bit? At the cost of some performance of course. I'll have to look into that and see if it improves things and at what price.
PainCakes
Some issues I have noticed, once you enter the pool there is no way out. Teleportation no longer functions properly. Once you are in your stuck, lol. Speaking of the pool, Our lady bear friend is difficult to maneuver around regardless of your size. If you are small teleportation around her stops working. If you are big the screen keeps resetting you to alternate positions if you try to get near. The overall collision physics around this particular area and character seem to have issues. Speaking of sizing! I genuinely believe it would be much better to have a size slider than a set standard in the future. Cant wait to see more updates and whats next!
