📰 NEWS: vote results, new Alive UI updates, other stuff (Patreon)

POLL RESULTS

I was a bit sad to see that so few people interested to see more development go into Aeternum Studio:

I for one thought AES looked pretty promising after a month or so! Genesis9 models alone...

But I understand the vote at the end of the day. There's so much content for VAM that it's hard to not want more tools and features to put that content to good use. I'll still try to update AES here and there I hope but it will be something smaller and a bit simpler.

ALIVE UI WIP

The new UI for Alive works pretty well so far. It looks nice in the video but it's confusing at the moment when actually using it. It requires relearning the vam menu somewhat and that is not great, it would be an obstacle for many people. It's something I'm trying to make better somehow, maybe with tooltips. Many VAM players know the menu buttons by muscle memory by now, as do I. With this, you're for a while "where is this? where is that?". Because of this, I'm also trying to add more features (new tabs extending the UI) to make it more worthwhile to use and to learn this UI.

There are some bugs now, as you can see in the video with the popups for example when turning options off. But I hope with these fixed and with some extra features, it will look and work pretty well and make the VAM experience better. The effects popups I hope will offer more in the future, like options or actions directly in them as a quick way to do things.

This will be a sort of unified project of multiple things I've worked on: the upgrades system, alivecore and the alive logic in general, some of the UI experiments I've been doing recently for plugins UIs as well. This new UI you've seen earlier today for AnimeMode was built as an experiment for that. In the Alive UI, I want to have hair colors for example as a tab next to the hair items. To have a makeup tab with makeup options next to skin tabs. These UIs will look somewhat similar to AnimeMore, with images as buttons, like:

but with makeup, tattoos, piercings, hair colors and accessories .

Moving some of these features in specialized panels will also clean up the Effects (old Upgrades) panel, which is a bit messy now. There won't be any hair color effects scattered there anymore for example, because there will be a clean specialized panel where you can pick the hair color, similar to the image above.

OTHER STUFF

I'll try to post here soon some other things that are more varied, not just VAM, so you'll see some other stuff too possibly here and there. I'll try to make small updates to AES too when possible, maybe it will be just a tech demo, an Alive expressions standalone with next-gen graphics. Don't freak out if you see me post things other than VAM! I just don't want to get this project to be stuck as just a vam thing. But I will try to get some cool VAM stuff done here as many of you expect. I have premium assets and mocap animations to help me build lots of things but I didn't get to put them to use yet. I have for example very cool catwalk mocap animations and I always wanted to do a dynamic fashion show experience. Basically you have a group of outfits, or maybe pieces of outfits. A group of models. Then, in a dynamic scene, you get a fashion show experience with randomized models and outfits - and flashier stuff like lights, colors, effects and so on. It would be always unique and very customizable. For me that would be one of the best experiences in VAM probably since it has so much replay value. So there's some stuff like that which I hope to do soon that's more fun and that adds infinite replay-value.

Now that I got a bit better at doing UIs in VAM directly, I might try to create some new kind of tools also that make using vam a bit easier. Maybe like a fancier add atom functionality, with images, with more atoms, something the Alive UI used to have in the earlier days.And there's some stuff that I wanted to do for a long time to improve posing. I miss the old Alive person teleporter (flag thing in early versions) and that is something that I want to bring back in a better form, but I'll probably do it as a general atom mover rather than an Alive feature. As well as something new that in a way would be to extend VAM's controllers (the red green blue gizmos) and give them a menu next to them from where you can select quick poses and maybe some other actions (on/off/comply). For example for the hands, you'd select a hand, and with a click or two you could switch between various hand poses for that hand. I think that kind of system could replace the old alive posing & motions too. If you'd want the hip to go up and down, you'd just select the hip and click on something from the menu next to it. The main controller would allow switching body poses.

And there's the whole virtual camgirl chat experience that I've been wanting to do for a long time, both in AES and in VAM. That is something I'm very interested in to do, but that's quite a bit of work to pull off.

These are some of the other things I think I will look more into soon here in regard to vam, besides trying to get Alive back on tracks. If you have other ideas, things you wanted in vam for a long time, not just plugins, but features or experiences in general, let me know here or in the DMs.