📰 AETERNUM NEWS: May 24th, 2025 (Patreon)

ADDONKIT COMING SOON

There should be a very big update coming to VAM2 Beta soon. This I think might be the one of the most important updates for it. The Beta1.1 update should introduce the AddonKit, which will allow modders to start pouring in content for it.

I hope that all people interested in vam will be supportive and helpful towards the dev team during this big release. Modders have strayed off somewhat from the mothership, some more than others, and they don't interact much around the official places. It's been like this for a long time and it's not getting much better. Modders I doubt will change any soon, people are busy with building their stuff. So I think it's up to the players to be more active in the community.

There's also the fact that the active community influences how development might go and in what direction. Maybe because there were mostly just modders active around VAM1 in the past, you see VAM2 today go towards something aimed at modders specifically, rather than at players. With that in mind, I think that being active, sparking discussions about the subjects you're interested in, showing support and encouragement for the things you like, could influence things and shine a light on different parts of VAM - besides just the modding aspect of it - like gameplay mechanics, maps, object customization and so on.

INZOI MODKIT DELAYED

I know a few people here I talked to like InZOI very much. Myself I haven't played it much, but I do keep a close eye on it. I'm waiting on the ModKit to see how that goes and in what ways it will change the game. Expectations are very high, a sandbox like InZOI with a powerful modkit could be something huge, I definitely see the potential too. The modkit was expected to be released this month but unfortunately got delayed yesterday.

One clarification they made is very good news for modding. They said that mods will work both on the cloud (on CurseForge) and those will get installed through an ingame mod browser. But there will also be classic mods that work as standalone files that you put in a Mods folder. This should allow modders to build bigger and more complex mods and we might see a lot of that here on patreon. Cloud mods are clean and nice, and free which is ideal, but the truth is that the real big mods, those that go long-term with the updates and push for huge features, often get made only if there's some monetization involved.

There won't be scripting included yet but they said that it is in the works too (expected at the end of the year). The first modkit release should include tools to customize objects, tools and examples on how to create hair styles, objects and interactions. My understanding is that the interactions will be based on JSON files and will allow connecting things in the game. That might mean something like VAM's triggers to an extent but in a more 'session' /global way, rather than isolated to specific scenes. Basically it could allow modders to enrich and expand the game world of InZOI and add new stuff in a very easy way.

Scripting, which is expected later this year, will be the part that will be essential to what InZOI will become. There has already been an experimental bootleg VR mod on day 1 so I think we will see a lot in that direction of VR too. I'm excited about it because this could be a sort of mix of Sims with VAM's triggers and moddability. Both Sims and VAM had a lot of modding going on but some big limitations. Sims is very hard to mod, modding is accessible to very few and graphics are outdated. Vam has no game world, nothing much to do and to build on top of. InZOI seems to be going for the right pieces for what could be a feature-rich gameworld driven by mods. So it's definitely something worth keeping an eye on next month when they release the modkit.

LARGE MODDING PROJECT HITS BIG SETBACK

A few days ago, the largest VAM modding project for the last half of a decade, and the largest in vam history, got their patreon page suspended. I don't know the details and because of that I don't want to speculate or comment too much on the event itself. Hopefully they will get their page back up soon. But it is a very sad event, and one that will effect the vam modding scene in quite a few ways I imagine. Things have been gloomy around VAM for a while now and this doesn't help lighten up the mood. I think it will be demotivating for many creators to see this happen. It is for me too.

Information so far is that the project will continue as before but it's definitely a huge setback for them. Even with all the support and advertising they receive, it's going to be a big challenge to keep things going the same way as before.

NEW WAVE OF PLUGIN MAKERS WORKING HARD

Around the vam2 alpha release, there was an influx of new creators joining in and doing plugins. That's around when I joined too, I think a month or so after the vam2 alpha. Now, around the vam2 beta release, we're seeing a new wave of developers taking over and pushing VAM further. This is very exciting to see and I salute them for their work and efforts. The truth is that people have barely scratched the surface of what's possible with code in VAM and the sky is the limit. It's exciting to see all the new functionality that people add.

I think this trend will continue as we'll get more and more VAM2 updates. People will get more and more excited by the advancements and get into experimenting with more development themselves as well. I don't want to namedrop or get into analysing new plugins now, it's a lot to cover. But some of these new plugins are very powerful and bring a lot to VAM. So I'll keep an eye on them and try to adapt some of my work to make sure it stays compatible.

This is a first look at something new I experimented with for the AliveUI yesterday: Clothes Favorites System!

This new tab takes the favorite clothes presets and lists them in a new panel for quick access. It works with VAM's built-in favorite system:

No pagination added so far, it's just the first 30 or so fav items.