More save game work and some imp animating
That's almost everything working (in my brief testing) for the save system! NPCs and their transformations, containers contents and lock state, doors being locked or open, gatherable plants, mining resource points, planted crops, dropped inventory items, and placed inventory items.
Items also have a respawn time stamp for things to reset or restock. So for gatherable plants they're set to take a day before they can be gathered again. Merchant inventories should also restock after a few days.
There's still a pile of work left with the save system to polish it and test things out. It's mostly based on volumes that keep track of all the actors within that volume. Which means there's some setup involved when adding a new interior or an exterior space. There's also a polish pass I need to do to set specific volumes to only save specific actors. Like taking reference from Skyrim interior dungeon spaces will save items and NPC spawns for a few days but then completely reset. I think I have all of the scripting hooks to support that but I would still need to hook things up and test them out. Oh, and I need to hook up the save + load in the menu system. Right now for my testing it's just set to hotkeys.
And I've been chipping away at the imp animations! So far it's just a handful more of her tease / idle scenes and once these are wrapped up I'll start on the spicier animations.
Comments (6)
So, there's this comic called Batman: the widening gyre. Not that good of a comic, truth be told, but it had this one image of poison ivy(the character), hoisted up by her own vines. Here's the link(https://www.reddit.com/r/ComicNude/comments/pkg48b/the_seductive_pamela_lilian_isley_poison_ivy/#lightbox) Anyways, I was thinking that maybe you could do something similar with some succubae. Imagine, in the deep woods, the succubae have adapted to their environment. In lieu of other humanoids to frolic with, they've instead turn nature into their plaything. This corruption is spreading, and it is up to the player to set this right. What do you think?
lol, I can dig it. I just need to get to the plant dungeon content and then I can start getting into stuff like this. But that's a ways in the future still so feel free to remind me once I get to that point!
Something I was think about recently was cutscenes, though I don't know if you intend to implement them. I was thinking of Wasteland 3's "Talking heads". In these scenes, the player would speak to an NPC with a fully animated head, and anything could happen during these scenes. Here's a link to a few examples: Wasteland 3 - Big Trouble in Little Vegas (Faran Brygo Cinematic Dialogue)(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEROQUaAxMY) Wasteland 3 - Fishlips encounter - companion skills & perks. (Supreme Jerk difficulty.) Wasteland 3 - Arresting Victory & Patriarch's Reaction (With Jail Dialogue) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLysl3UpJTs) Something else I wanted to mention is the camera during player to NPC dialogue. I heard once on a podcast that talked about how shit Starfield was that one of the many mistakes Starfield made was that, while talking to a NPC, that the NPC should never look directly at the camera. At least in Starfield, the NPCs don't often blink, thus creating an uncanny valley unease. They said that Baldurs Gate 3 did it better by never having the NPC look directly at the camera. What do you think?
There's a lot of stuff to get all this working. It kind of looks like they did full performances for these scenes - so voice acting after all the dialogue is written, then full body and face animations. I was thinking of doing preset idle animations that I could fire off with dialogue lines (I'm sort of doing this kind of thing during dialogue scenes already) https://www.artstation.com/artwork/8wLXoG This gives a bit of character to the dialogue and is only a few seconds of animation per cycle. Which is a lot lot less work than lip syncing and dialogue acting. It's always a balancing act since I don't have a budget and I'm working solo :) As for camera stuff and looking straight at the camera. I dunno it's sort of a convention now with Bethesda games and it's never really bothered me. I think the difference in medium between film (where this rule comes from) and video games is interpreted differently enough by the audience that it isn't a make or break thing. Also in Feign the player has control over the camera view itself, whether they're in 3rd person or first person, and even then during dialogue or scenes they can usually adjust the camera position whenever they want to. I think I only lock the camera during scripted scenes in 1st person right now. and lol, don't get me started on critiquing Starfield... there's a lot there.
So, I had this idea for a bar, Pub, whatever you wanna call it. It was inspired by Alan Wake 2 walk in song house, or whatever the building's called. Here's the link: Ahti sings Yoton Yo on stage Scene - Alan Wake 2 PS5(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_GrOXt7444) I have absolutely no idea if this is within your abilities to pull off, but I think it'd be really cool. More specifically, I was thinking of a bar where on the outside you hear muffled music on the outside, and unmuffled music on the inside. This bar in particular would have a stage for scheduled musical performances, which the player could catch if arriving at the ordained hour. During these times, the bar is packed full of drinkers, and their mood is determined by the song being played. For a cheerful song, they are full of merriment. For a glum and dramatic song, they are rather dour. The township is still during these times, since the citizens have mostly gone to listen and partake in the event. The kind of music that I had in mind was something akin to "A K.Rool Pub Crawl" (King K.Rool / Ship Deck 2) - Sebastian Mårtensson ft. Christopher Woo(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxx9UqvalII). At least, in terms of instruments being used. What do you think?
That would be really cool! The downside is that requires someone that can sing and the animations and everything to support that in game. So it would really need me to have the resources to hire on a singer that was willing to do all of the voice work or if things go well in the future maybe someone created it as a mod? Like if someone that's can sing or do voice acting wanted to create that and just needed me to add that scripting hooks I could see that possibly working. But yeah, there was that scene in Fallout 4 that they sort of tried to do the nightclub singer but it was really kind of shallow and it would be really cool to see fully developed.