After fighting with it for a while, I finally have the desired result and my dialog system appears to be working. I'm particularly giddy about the text crawl effect I've successful added. While it hardly adds much, it behaves just like a dialog in RPGs/VNs and can be fast forwarded with an extra click. Not nearly as intrusive as it sounds and looks pretty neat; take my word for it at least for now.
I mentioned that my next focus would be the screens, but thinking about the stable screen required that I finalize the majority of the properties cow girls have. In particular, I was stuck on the new implementation of the cow girl statistics. I need to carefully plan how I store this information so that it can easily be serialized for both saving and loading. When it comes to the physical stats of cow girl such as weight, bust, hips, etc it isn't safe to just save out the literal numbers as the growth system can be adjusted in newer versions breaking older data. I'm still in the designing stage, but I intend to reduce the system one that uses a few "magic numbers" and a total calorie count to calculate out the intended dimensions of the cow girl. The magic numbers will quantify the separate dimensions of the cow girl and when multiplied out with the total calories will produce the given dimensions. That way, if I change the way numbers are produced, the cow girls should remain proportional to the way they are intended (which should still allow for some craziness).
With this bit of extra abstraction, it should be a simple matter to allow options for either imperial or metric measurements. Hopefully this pleases the many non-American players out there. If any of you find my explanation confusing, don't worry, it sounds a bit funny to me too. I'm sure I'll have a formula figured out and I can toss it up for the mathematically inclined to look at.
Slowly things are coming together. These next few milestones are taking me right towards a proper release. I hope to have the activity and growth systems in as well first pass of the farm system implemented for that release. I'll get the chat mapper stuff in afterwards so it may not be too much longer. Hang in there.
Sounds awesome, eagerly waiting for an alpha release~
ReplyDeleteGlad to see that this has really taken an upswing in movement. 0.12 is getting stale.
ReplyDeleteWOAH so excited
ReplyDeleteFor my own game I store mass of each body part and the character's height. From this it is possible (though, I'd warn, quite hard) to determine physical measurements (which I do in metric units), and from there to localised measurements (metric, imperial, us).
ReplyDeleteBoobs are a particular problem. First you have to work out how wide the char is across the upper part of their torso. Then work out their volume from the mass (taking into account any milk, inflation etc). Then you need a couple of different ways to calculate the dimensions from the volume and base diameter of each breast: one for "normal" sized breasts, and one for when they've gotten so big they are wider than the torso. From there you can get bust and under-bust measurements, and just have to implement the dozen or so different country-specific ways of specifying a bra size.
A separate set of variables determines how new mass is laid down, allowing things to be modified by potions and so on. Initialising them to sensible values proved to be a pain in the arse. My current work around is to specify the characters physical dimensions at two sizes (thin and fat if you like) and have the code do the calculations in reverse to work out the change in mass of each part.
What your game do you mean, dingotush? Seems like transformation game to me which is perfect :-) How can I play it?
DeleteWith apologies to Tick Tock for polluting his blog with other games, mine, at a very early stage, is here:
Deletehttp://www.konig.demon.co.uk/fur/plump/gamefx.html
If you select the size tab, and then change the flag top-right, the units are changed to be appropriate to the player's country. Some of this code is the earliest I wrote, and harks back to playing Tick Tock's Fantasy Feeder!
Thanks for your input dingotush! I recall trying your game out some time ago, have you had any updates of late?
DeleteI've pondered the weight issue some more and I might use something similar to a sum of all "Mass for each body part." If I understand you correct, this would be similar to how you have each body part storing separate amounts of mass. I may try to simplify things by ignoring variable height and chest width below the breast. I'm still toying with it.
I'm curious by what you meant by "specify the characters physical dimensions at two sizes." Are you trying to establish the max and min range of a character's dimensions and interpolate the in-between?
I actually managed an update mid week, tidying up some of the UI, and adding more interaction with the other characters. You might need to shift-reload the page to see the new version which reports V0.04.
DeleteIn the first cut of the code I had the character's initial size, and then the proportion of the new mass to apply to each body part - this seemed the most obvious thing to do. However, tuning the proportion variables so that you didn't end up with stupidly shaped characters was tricky to do - partly because there aren't any intuitive values for the variables (if a girl gains 20lbs, how much of that goes on her thigh?), and partly because reducing one implicitly raised the others. I set up a couple of characters this way, but it was highly iterative and frustrating; a squeezing toothpaste into the tube job.
So I changed the way I thought about it. It's relatively easy to get physical measurements of actual people - those were the targets I was trying to tune for before. Given two sets of data points (one androgynous, one particularly busty say) the code can work out how the volume/mass of each part has changed and therefore what those proportion variables should have been to create that result. I can then create the character with the androgynous starting point, and the derived proportion variables knowing that if they gain the right amount of weight they'd look like the busty shaped character. They can still gain more, and be bigger still, while still remaining vaguely proportional in their hypertrophic excess!
As an example here's the definition of the fox character in the game:
The "stats" section provides the androgynous initial shape. All the values are ones you could "measure" off a photo if you wished. With the height of the character and a simple body model I work out the mass of each body part.
The "fatter" shape is then applied and the distribution of mass in each part is recomputed. The difference between the thin and fat mass of each part is used to set the proportion variable for each part.
I haven't needed to input the mass of either shape, which is a good thing as this is hard info to acquire.
The character is then set back to the thin version, and finally the initial mass is applied according to the proportion variables. You need some weight for a female shape.
Bother, the XML got eaten. Here it is with braces instead!
Delete{character
id="velour"
name="Velour"
height="1750"
initialMass="52000"
sex="female"
species="fox"
}
{stats
chestWidthMm="220"
bustExtnMm="30"
waistWidthMm="300"
bellyExtnMm="10"
buttExtnMm="30"
thighDiaMm="120"
}
{fatter
chestWidthMm="350"
bustExtnMm="200"
waistWidthMm="450"
bellyExtnMm="100"
buttExtnMm="200"
thighDiaMm="280"
}
...