I forgot to blog several times in a row now so I’ll try to be brief.

Problems cropped up with the jacket rig and I had to fix them, I also rewrote the skin system entirely (for the 3rd time). On the upside, the flat chest version is finished, I managed to trim some unnecessary polygons too and the metal parts can now be tinted independently 🙂

Oh yeah I also finished the latex textures 🙂

That was quick I guess…

I still have to finish the final versions and upload em. Next step: Latex (some would say ‘finally’).

A quick update to show that I haven’t been idle today 🙂

I’ve only leatherised the body and, to be honest, I am TEMPTED to stay at that and have the strapwork use materials & tint. Less textures overall and I could use more efficiency in my texture usage.

I don’t know. I think it looks interesting and elaborate?

I’ve spent the entire day getting the canvas set ready for release and getting all the little texture glitches out. I added specular maps and individual color settings for the base, straps and collar trim. Specular gloss and intensity can also be set per section, but that will be for the applier HUDs to use, which I haven’t made yet.

I also wasted a good hour tonight making the “classic” instructions/warning sticker you usually see on those.

I rewrote the jacket entirely during the friday afternoon to move optimize the memory usage. Darien gave me a few ideas I should test on the core TouchBound code later.

I haven’t recorded sound new sound effects in a long time. It took me several tries but I got some pretty convincing struggling and strapping sounds.

I’ve also made a set of animations for the different struggling minigames. They DO make struggling a little harder because of how the avatar move and I might possibly dial the difficulty down as a result.

Tomorrow: little code tweaks and I’m going to start working on the final materials (final canvas, but also leather nd latex with nylon straps 🙂

Sooo… Mashing a button didn’t feel like it provided any skill or reward really (who would have thought?).

Then I came up with a way to spice it up: Now you have to hit a specific key each stroke to move the struggling progress forward, hit the wrong key and you get a time malus. After some testing, I also added a “prediction” that displays what the next keystrokes will be, so you can actually hit the keys a little earlier and essentially “ride” the latency.

The first version had the prediction separate from the “current key” but having them both together feels a lot more readable.

Now I need to bribe a few skilled DDR players to establish a benchmark of what the average difficulty should be.

Memory is still dangerously low on the main script but this is all offloaded to the main module so I’m not too worried.

Yes I make horrible puns.

I have the base of a struggle mechanic, and ran out of memory twice on the main script. Not worrying at all…

Currently it plays like a button masher: hit pagedown rapidly to struggle against your bonds, you fail if you do not reach the goal before getting exhausted, or if you move (or someone moves you). If you succeed you loosen up the straps one “notch” and can struggle again after a brief resting period.

Balancing this is a bit difficult as it turns out and I might make the mashing a bit more complicated… Maybe something about hitting a specific key and if you mess up, you gain more exhaustion? I don’t know yet… I’m also gonna need to make a few animations&sounds to really “sell it”.

Oh yeah it’s using hovertexts for progress bars.

Yes, again! It’s annoying, but what’s even more annoying is bugs in products!

• Added: Word substitution filter.
• Fixed: a conditioner activation bug.
• The wearer impersonation now looks better and uses viewer URI to make the names clickable.
• Added: “Cedille c” to the microscript filter.
• Fixed: mute filter wouldn’t use the normal text impersonation method.
• Removed one prim.

Today was another round of debugging, improving, refactoring performed on your friend the chat conditioner, I still need to do more testing before releasing a patch but the 3 people who actually use it should be quite happy.

The reason for me jumping to this, is that before starting on the jacket I left the TouchBound codebase in an “open heart surgery” state and the last patch that I released for the conditioner introduced new shiny bugs, so I wanted to set this stuff straight before starting the jacket core code proper.

I spent the past two days cleaning up the model and tweaking the rigging some more, I think I’m done at this point. I could probably spend 6 more months on this and get it absolutely perfect but well… the law of diminishing returns is showing its ugly head.

Unless a glaring problem occurs, I just uploaded what I consider the “final” female version.

Now for the coding: I already wrote a fairly meaty texture applier/state changer system for it that allows me to swap between the different model parts and hide the unused ones. I’m trying a new approach of using alpha masking instead of setting things to 100% transparent, it appears to use less resources.