WIP: MY NEW ALIVE UI (VAM1 MOD) (Patreon)

I've been experimenting with some new things for VAM1. I'm a bit confused with what's going on around VAM and I'm not very excited of being a vam modder these days. But it's very easy for me to do vam stuff, many of you want more vam stuff, there's a lack of vam features and excitement, so I'll try to deliver on some new things for the hardcore virtamate players here.

I'll try to release a new ALIVE plugin but it will not be a direct continuation of ALIVE81 as that approach with a browser UI is not working anymore in latest VAM versions.

This will have a different kind of UI. I figured out how to make Unity UIs better so I'll try to make the entire vam person UI more cohesive.

It's not going to be for everybody! I dropped the default person menu buttons ( point 6 area in the image below). Everyone is used to those buttons, they've been like that for almost a decade now, and this is a huge change:

Instead, I built a new tabs system, similar to the old ALIVE UI as you can observe above.

1 - These are the main tabs, or categories. I grouped things to keep panels more tidy. For example VAM had Female morphs, Male Morphs, and Morph Presets. 3 buttons in the classic person buttons UI. Here there's one button, for the morphs categories.

2 - These are the tabs for each category. Clothing for example has "Clothing items" and "Clothing Presets". Morphs has Male Morphs, Female Morphs and Morph Presets tabs.

3 - These are the active effects applied to the models. Effects are a redesign of the Upgrades system, which are small independent plugins at their core that do various effects on the person. The UI will be a bit different than the AEM Upgrades one.

4 - This is a title I added for the UI panels, to know what is the name of the current panel (like the title in the classic person buttons)

5 - This it the person name, redesigned to fit the new layout

6 - I'm not sure yet what I'll do with the extra space left from the old buttons. I can't move the entire UI more to the left on desktop because some plugin makers do custom UI in the bottom left corner and don't want to break their stuff. I could move just the top side of the UI more towards the margin of the screen, giving more space for the game, but that too might break some plugins that add stuff around the vam UI. An alternative is to add some new custom UI there in that empty space to not let it go to waste for nothing, like quick posing, quick camera, a quick person controller selector. For now I'll probably keep it as it is to keep things simple

The way this new plugin works is that you add Alive as a plugin on the person. When it's added, the UI changes. If you remove it, the UI reverts to VAM classic. Some effects/modules that are part of Alive will appear as separate plugins like in the image above, similar to AEM Upgrades. By default the plugin won't start with any components, so it can be used just for the UI and in combinations with other plugins. Lifelike behaviors can be activated as effects. And combinations of effects can be saved as presets (the save tab in the image above).

This new structure should allow extending the vam person features in a more balanced and organized way. For example there's a hair section now that has 2 tabs: VAM's classic hair options panel and the hair presets panel:

I'll be able to add here new tabs that do operations for hair. For example a panel where to quickly select between persistent hair colors. I'll be able to add a new panel for piercings in the clothing section. Maybe tattoos or makeup in the skin section. For clothes I might do something like the old outfits system, or just a clothes preset quick explorer, and it will be next to the vam clothing panel, easy to find and use, rather than in a separate UI somewhere. So everything is grouped together in a way that's easier to use and more like the old Alive UI, but in a way that encapsulates VAM's default UI panels too.