Continuing Feature Parity Part 9

I will be having a Twitch.tv/sgthale custom mod workshop to get people started next weekend July 11th Sunday @ 11AM PST.

Apologies for the late devpost. It has been a very busy week. Also 4th of July is coming. Anyways on to the update!

Regardless I have been working every day on v0.9. Here's where I am at with the cooking:

The backbone for cooking has been complete and supports very simple recipes. I also brought back in some old animations for the characters. First, there were some AI features that were implemented.

Characters in v0.9 are entirely physics driven. This means that it can be difficult to navigate a highly complicated scene with lots of walls and obstacles. Therefore I decided to designate certain areas where items can be placed/dropped with areas called "Zones":

Zones are flat surfaces that tell the AI that she can place items on the surface. It also tells them that it is skinny enough to have items on it be reachable. This means that the AI now has a way to tell apart tables. At the moment the map will come with it's own zones but users will be able to designate their own zones when custom maps in v0.95 comes out.

If there is an item on the table, the character will navigate to the table and pick up an item. In this case Kokkoro picks up the mortar and pestle. This logic is part of a mod I made that allows a character to do simple cooking. Animations are still WIP.

The difficult part about actually picking things up is that the arms too have to traverse the physics world. As in, as the arm moves over the table, it may inadvertently bump over other props. One solution I worked out to reduce the amount of bumping is to slow down the pick up animation.

Another difficult part is the fact that many character models have different size arms and torsos. For example, it may work fine for a similarly sized character like Kyaru:

However, other very small characters at the moment cannot reach over the table and will accidentally push themselves away from the table.

The solution for this will require another animation that shows the character raising the arm high above and then reaching over for the item.

I also stress tested very tall characters. Like Nico:

Some of the characters shown above don't have eyes or fingers animated because I haven't gotten around to setting up their fingers or eyes, so don't worry about that part.

Now for the recipe system.

The previous Viva builds had only 1 recipe, the jelly pastries. The recipe for that was the following:

1.) Grind wheat into flour

2.) Pour flour into bowl

3.) Crack 3 eggs into batter

4.) Mix until pastries appear

5.) Put them into the oven

6.) Voila

The recipe system will allow you to combine different amounts of flour and eggs. Meaning that different amounts of flour or eggs will make different things, cakes, cookies, or another kind of pastry. Programmatically it will be in an array. Like so:

3 eggs, 1 flour will spawn the item "pastry"

1 egg, 1 flour will spawn the item "cookie"

If you aren't a programmer, don't worry about this part. You'll be able to just download the mods without having to program yourself. The point of this is that you'll be able to make recipes spawn anything (maybe even other characters). Speaking of programming, I will be having a Twitch mod workshop to get people started next weekend July 11th Sunday @ 11AM PST.

I should have some more fun .gifs showing off a character making a complete recipe in the next devpost.

Stay tuned! But also, Happy 4th.