HMA Combat Update: Pregnancy and Animation

I decided that it would be nice to finally have character portraits showing up during combat as an option, so i started to implement that!

This quickly led down a rabbit hole of "what if I tweaked pregnancies just a tiny bit, you know, just for certain areas.

The basic idea would be to have stuff like the waterways allow you to explore while getting pregnant with and giving birth to slimes repeatedly, or perhaps an area with a fertility spell or curse that does that with human/nekomata ones, or an imp's cave that does the same for imp pregnancies....

Basically, certain areas would have you give birth within minutes(mostly restricted to certain ones like slimes that make sense), but the moment you stepped outside it would resume normal pregnancy processing.

And... it worked! Mostly! It's still a very much "In progress" thing, but I managed to set the test dungeon up to save/load your pregnancy state at entry, and then as you explore if you're impregnated it will have time pass for the pregnancy at the rate of roughly 1 day every 30 seconds or so, meaning faster gestating monsters like slimes take about 3-4 minutes, while longer ones like humans would be closer to 10 minutes!

This bust image display works for the most part, and even runs events and changes it based on character state for pregnancy!

... But it exposed some of the glaring issues I had with running bust images in general.

They're currently made by laying the base body, followed by curse/blessing tattoos, followed by a faceset (different expressions run here), then front hair (because otherwise the face will clip in certain areas and it looks wrong), followed by clothing (generally one piece for each stage of pregnancy)

This works... mostly, but exposes some glaring weaknesses with the system in general running it like this.

For one, it can't really be animated, not in this piecemeal style that I'm using at the moment.

For another, it flickers, particularly when you're changing equipment (it will often flicker the entire set off if you unequip your clothes even for just a moment) but also when opening and closing menus (as it replaces each part layer by layer) or when your stats are changed (as the game has to unequip stuff for a split-second to calculate proper stat values)

So now I'm looking into plugins to run live2d animations. I couldn't get it working before, but after a few searches I found a plugin by MrSlip777 that seems to do it!

(Image shown - New Olivia milking animations from Horny Mage Chronicles- Will be added to Horny Mage Academy after the combat update at some point!)

(Originally it was going to be the new mating press animation, also coming soon to Horny Mage Academy! but I found the model files for the milking animation faster and, as it was just a test, I didn't continue digging)

I've got displaying models to work, but the animation isn't quite set up yet. I'm sure I'll figure it out soon but for now here's what it looks like in the code!

 

So... Not a lot of combat was worked on this update, unfortunately!

It's a lot of work on bust images and animation plugins, but the end result, if it works out properly, will be a faster, more efficient workflow for adding animations to the game, as well as more smooth and robust animations added in general! (and some nicer bust images to boot!)