Completed the new Pararip sex animation. Check it out below.

I won't be sharing all of these, of course. Most of them will be a surprise for when you're in game. But it should give an idea of a baseline for what I'm going for here. I say baseline cause as this is the first one, it's gonna be the worst. 

With that done, I've started working on the infrastructure around running this animation. The data structures, the code invoking it, etc. etc. 

All of this will be ready for next week's release. Look forward to it!

Most of this week was given over to the new Morph Target control system. This involved some experimentation as I had to figure out what would work and what wouldn't. Eventually found something that I'm not 100% happy with it but literally can't get better without rewriting some parts of the Unreal Engine itself. And unfortunately, ended up wasting some time on a misunderstanding. I thought the Morph Target value wasn't being set, because whenever I made a change to it, nothing happened. It was, but Unreal doesnt trigger them in real time when you're not, like, playing the game. 

Once I figured out how to deal with that, I could start on the new Pararip Sex animation. I'm about halfway done with it, because I'm also making tweaks to the Control Rigs to deal with issues as I'm coming across them. The first one of these will always be the most painful.

It'll be done next week and I can move on to something else. Probably data systems for mutation into new crops.

Half the week was given over to testing and bug fixes. There were quite a few that had accumulated since I last did this, so it was good to knock them out. I've snuck a bug fix release in, replacing the downloads in the paid posts with the new version.

I've also started work on the new crop animation system. To this end, I added a lot of detail to the Pararip crop so it can handle the flexibility I want out of it. More bones in the tentacles, more vertices to handle those bones. I have the Control Rig for the Pararip in place, so next will be reanimating the Pararip sex animation directly in Unreal, and avoid a lot of unpleasantness that I've had to deal with animating multiple entities at once in Blender.

Should be fun.

Writing up the changelog for this month's release and I'm like, damn, that's a lot of stuff! A lot of it is barely tested, but still. I'll be doing some more rigorous testing of that code next month, as well as refactoring how crop sex animations are done with lessons I've learned since I first implemented it uh... two years ago.

That refactor is what's blocking new crops from getting introduced to the game. I don't want to be adding new crop animations only to throw them out when I refactor that whole system. And since part of the impetus for this refactoring is to implement the crossbreeding into new species mechanic, that is also one of the goals for the next month.

Thanks for the support!

All done with the seed dispensary. 

As seen here, seeds of various traits are separated into separate entries, and hovering over a seed, or selecting a seed for planting, will display that seed's stats. Planting from here also works as well, so the whole loop is working again with the new setup.

I've achieved my main goal for this month, so the rest will be visual upgrades and bug fixes.