Continuing Player Interactions Part 4

There were a bunch of stuff I did in the past few days. I brought back several behaviors back into the game as mods.

First, I brought back the wave mechanic. Currently she waves if you press F as usual but when VR is integrated, wave gesture triggers will instead trigger this animation. It's a mod so the user can modify it if they want to.

I also brought back follow mechanics. This one was a simple enough behaviour to port over as a mod since it is relatively basic. However there were some interesting challenges that it had. Here it is in action:

The problem with follow behaviors is that the character AIs must be absolutely capable of traversing the geography before the destination. This can be very easy to very hard depending on how they move. In many games like RTS games, the characters typically move to a destination in a linear fashion. A single soldier unit typically doesn't have to worry about physics obstacles or moving parts on a map. So this is usually an easy task for that kind of a character. However in Viva, the characters are animated physics ragdolls. Meaning they can be blocked by an infinite number of moving obstacle shapes. Here's an example of an issue I ran into and am in the process of solving:

The character was moving forward but its hand was stuck on a pillar pushing forward. It's very difficult to come up with a solution that can satisfy this and any other related obstacles because there's just so many different variations of how they can get stuck. It almost seems like the ways that they can get stuck are random. Randomness is the key to the approach I will do to solve this problem. Stochastic means randomly determined and being based on probability. Stochastic algorithms rely on randomness to solve a problem. So what I will do is create a form of stochastic wiggling that will make the character wiggle when they feel they are stuck. The wiggling will be random (turning body, moving arms, crouching a bit). This will ensure that there is a probability of getting itself unstuck from any kind of obstacle. More on this when I implement it for the next devpost.

Oh also headpats had brush away animations added. Characters do not have moods yet like in v0.8 and below (happy or angry) but they will be introduced soon. Here are the brush away animations in action:

Lastly, we have a new developer. His name is SubSpecs and he will be helping out with the new Networking module for multiplayer.

The plan for the next Beta release:

First I will complete a couple of important behaviors and then I will make a YouTube video for this coming month, March. I will release the 2nd build of the mod tools to Patrons and record a Tutorial video for basic modding instructions. The website API should be online by then as well.

Stay tuned!

P.S. Patreon has forced me into deleting older development posts because they deemed them to be sexual in nature. I had to delete 10 or so 2018/2019 development posts about the bathing mechanics. If you can I recommend switching to https://www.subscribestar.com/viva-project . Development will resume as usual in both sites.