PREVIEW: Alive v73 progress (Patreon)

Thanks to everyone that voted in the last poll!

These should be some of the changes to expect in v73:

TOP CHOICE: UPGRADE BODY ACTIONS

This was the most requested feature, so Alive v73 has a big update to the Body actions system as can be seen in the video. The new app will allow:

• presets - saving and loading custom presets. They look and work like any other vam presets

• randomization - this allows setting custom intervals for the power and speed of each action, as well as a time interval for how often the actions to randomize. When shuffle is enabled, the values will constantly changed between these intervals

RUNNER UP: FOLLOW ME COMMAND

This received many votes as well so I'll try to include it in in v73 also. You can see on my youtube channel a work in progress video from earlier this week. It should work with two characters too. They'll switch to one side of you or the other. I'm not really sure how useful this will be in practice yet. Lots of ideas seem cool in vam at first glance. But due to the lack of gameplay, of a framework of sorts to tie things together, many ideas fall short. Like first person or third person cameras to a big extent. Those in theory were supposed to be great for vam. But in practice, without a good reason to use them, they fall short a bit. I doubt many people use them often, I rarely do myself since I stopped working on Alive Home. VAM kind of lacks the context of such features to be really useful, for me anyway. But we'll see how well this works. I'm still working on it and I'm very curious myself to see it in action in VR and how it works there.

SENATORS CHOICE: EXPRESSIONS IMPROVEMENTS

V73 will include many updates for improved realism. There's some fixes to prevent exaggerated open mouths and exaggerated eye saccades and twitchy eyes. There's also changes to the vision system to allow attenuation to the head movement, to make gaze less robotic and offer more variation to it. There's also changes to the way the characters hold their heads, to try to make the head angles look more natural, as well as to offer more animation.

BVH ANIMATIONS

This was not planned but I ended up doing it while waiting for the vote results. I fixed a few bugs related to the animation system and added a few new things and the system now works more seamlessly, without the person teleporting the first time when playing an animation. There's also the first use of multithreading in Alive used when reading and processing the bvh animation files which can be pretty big. Normally VAM would freeze while waiting for a new animation to load. With this update the animations should load smoother. The plan is to incorporate animation in the character behavior, specifically as response to AI but maybe also as reaction to touch or some new UI commands.