🔨WIP: AliveCore 10 (Patreon)

This is a quick preview of AliveCore 10 that I'm working on and that should be coming soon. Some of this AliveCore functionality I plan to merge with the new Alive UI and it will be part of that directly. There will likely be just one Alive project, so AliveCore will get some more core features as it moves towards that and I clean up and refactor the code a little, then attention will shift to Alive after that merge.

🔊 VOICE & SOUNDS

AliveCore 10 has now a builtin voice pack. It's based on my previous female1 pack but heavily optimized for faster load & reduced size. It sounds a little muffy but it's only a quarter of the size of the original pack. This will simplify getting voices working and offer a base for getting models to talk and react more in AliveCore, without having to worry about dependencies.

It also comes with sounds: breathing, kissing, skin touches. There are also more situations where the models will speak, to add more immersion. After kissing, for example, models will sometimes say things. There are speech reaction on touches too but only on desktop for now, on mouse click. In VR I'll have to try to make them just for the VR hands to avoid issues in VAM with models colliding with too many things.

💌 APPELLATIVES

It's possible now to select 3 appellatives, for how the model to address you, out of dozens of options. These will be used a lot more by the models down the line, but they're used already a bit in v10. You can make the model address you as X or J or any letter for something personalized, or have them use more common appellatives or endearing terms when addressing you. Each of these have many variations, so the model will pronounce things differently to reduce repetition. This system aims to increase immersion by letting models talk more to you rather than at you. For each of these appellatives, models also know how to (mildly) yell the appellatives as well as use them as questions.

😊 EXPRESSIONS

There's new expressions, fixes and adjustments to the face animations too to try to make things a bit better. There's some fixes to prevent exaggerated eye position when looking upwards and to the sides. Fixes for lips when kissing. There's also rare events where the models will do more assymetrical expressions, like this for example:

Here the right side of the face in the image has snarl morph assymmetry (eyes slightly more closed, lip slightly more open), which makes the face look more natural and interesting. The model can't stay like that for too long or do it too often though because it would look unnatural. But when it's happening on rare occasions, behaviors like these I think bring the model even more to life. AC10 comes with a few rare behaviors like this that aim to add more nuance to the existing animations.

🕹️ UI

The AliveCore UI is a bit slow now when switching some tabs due to large numbers of options, especially for voice sounds. I'm looking at the moment in ways to try to make that better. I didn't have time to revamp the AliveCore UI in general, it's not great and it's been like this for a while now. I hope to replace it soon with something more modern like some of my newer plugins but that might be part of Alive directly when that will take over some of the work in AliveCore.