Alright, first monthly post with the new site update! (Though this is on SubscribeStar so I guess that doesn't matter X.x) This month felt kinda sucky, I spent a lot of time trying new ideas, prototyping, and was hoping to put out some awesome releases to then get sick at the final week! Ugh, anyways, the start of this next month should have a few good releases and I have some major updates on project Data:EnCryptic's development!

I feel like I have something to say about these monthly updates every time I do one, sorry if this has become repetitive! Either way, wanted to quickly touch on my plans and how I want to re-format these. First, release timing. I think I'm going to continue aiming for the end of the month as I did for the last 2 now. Ultimately when I release these doesn't really matter but since making them more consistent would help I've marked it on my TODO app as the '28th' of each month but I may not always hit the target depending on what I'm working on (I prioritize actually working on projects over getting these write ups done X.x).

Last month I tried to keep up with the previous format where I tried to touch on everything I worked on over the month, but ultimately I feel like a lot of it was sort of short and didn't really feel satisfying to write. I did, however, really like how I approached the UniPalUI discussion and the poll results section as it sort of felt like that was the 'main topic' of the post. I think from now on, especially since I do individual posts for releases now, I am going to switch my monthly updates to actually having those 'main' topics now with a brief releases section that very quickly tries to summarize what I had worked on that month. I had originally planned to do individual blog posts on larger topics (like the data-structures post I've had on the back burner for a while now X.x) but I had the idea of maybe using monthly updates as a sort of 'rough' and unedited version of my thoughts/progress then taking those concepts and maybe making relevant ones into proper articles. So yeah, going to try this for a few months and see how things go! Don't forget, if you ever have any thoughts or comments you can always reach out either in the comments (if you're reading on SubscribeStar), or ping me with your ideas in our Discord!

Website Link : https://www.michaelpstanich.com/

The big release and focus this month (and the main topic of today's monthly post) was the initial release of my website redesign! And no, this isn't just a "look at my pretty work!" kind of site, but actually a proper release platform for all of my work! The old design was not only extremely outdated in its code-base (it still used jquery, and not even the newest versions! Q.Q), but it also wasn't really designed to handle more dynamic content releases and as a result it was mostly left as-is without updates. However, I went back and started completely from scratch to build a new website with 2 main goals, 1, make sure the site is more modular and easy to navigate to specific content a user may want to see, and 2, make sure uploading/changing/updating content on the site is fluid and easy so I can continue uploading all my works there. This means the site is now a proper source and link to all of my works with many projects being directly downloadable from the site itself! Also, all blog posts from 2024 are available to read in the new format and all future posts will be viewable on the site! (Note: Demi-God only posts may be modified to exclude their exclusive content. Sorry!) So let's go over the site and its use case for users, then we'll go over the backend and how I've approached the various challenges with making an easy-to-update site.

First though, it's worth mentioning that at the time of writing the website is still technically incomplete and has a few snags I still need to iron out from a user perspective. While the site is fully usable in its current state and much better than my old site (which you can still visit in its broken state at https://www.michaelpstanich.com/old/ for an undetermined amount of time), there's a lot of work to still complete and I plan my site to be just like any other project I have where updates/changes take place over time. So consider the current state of the site kind of like an Alpha/Beta phase. Usable but incomplete, expect changes over-time and the addition of more pages and content like a proper Games, Video, and Art Share pages! I also plan to add a lot more flair to the current system, stuff like the links at the top of pages are just place-holder until I finish implementing dynamic content blocks which will be much more visually interesting. My first focus, however, is getting the site to visually look correct on non-chromium (there's an issue in how I use Flex Boxes which doesn't work in all browser back-ends like firefox) and making the mobile presentation easier to navigate (the top nav-bar is far to small on mobile, I plan to make icon-based navigation as a secondary option similar to how the Discord/SubscribeStar buttons move to the side when navigating down the page).

One of the major issues with sharing work over platforms like Discord, or even linking on SubscribeStar, is the lack of context, and you can't always just link to a single platform to show all your work. I've tried other methods in the past to fix this issue such as merging all my shared content into single organized folders so people can navigate through various projects on source like GDrive or Mega, and also tried using GDocs to have a collective links doc that links to the various platforms for content. Neither solution is great and often people don't bother, but now there's the website! With my own site up and running with dynamic content, you can see my projects in easy to parse lists and read through their ReadMe files, download the file, find links to other sources, ect, all in one place! This also solves the problem of some platforms not allowing different types of content, this means I can post all my work in a single place and don't have to be coy or use round-about links to related stuff. Instead, it's all just linked directly on the site! (It's nice not having to worry about platform rules! ^-^) Additionally, the site now acts as an additional distribution source ensuring content is easy to find and acquire; if another platform goes down then the site is an easy option! (The site should also link to other sources as well if you'd prefer another platform)

Additionally, all blog posts will be pushed to the site with the intended formatting! This should provide an easy way to view any blog post or article in an uncensored/un-compromised form! I will be uploading blog posts to the site at the same time I publish to SubscribeStar and post the update on Discord, so content should stay up-to date as well.

Time for the actually interesting and nerdy part!..
Unless you're not into design and web dev stuff then this may be a bit boring (feel free to skip it Q.Q).

I feel my overall philosophy is very different than 'most' modern web devs these days. There's a bit of an epidemic with sites and web apps being overloaded with various frameworks, needless modules or 'dynamic content' libraries, and even worse all these 'modern' sites often feel extremely slow and take a TON or resources. My philosophy is simple however, I want to eliminate as many dependencies as possible, design and create a slim website which is fast and responsive, and finally make sure the design will hold for a long period of time regardless of industry changes. Additionally I wanted things to be easy to maintain this time around, which is something I failed at with my previous personal site design but I've learned a lot over the last decade! (I'm pretty sure its been longer than 10 years, my archives are pretty old for the original design files X.x)

With that in-mind it's probably no surprise how 'simple' the site is, and that's not just the front-end! But we'll get into backend stuff in a bit... Visually, I wanted the site to focus entirely on the content. I had some ideas for snazzy nav bar designs or more dynamic page sliders but it all detracted from the site's primary purpose, reading/interacting with/downloading the content contained within! This is where my old site design actually did well, content was front and center with a separated page design and here I've somewhat kept that same idea going. The page is separated into these content pages, each page is a vertical section that contains a single posting, Currently each page will just load a single posting but in the future when I finish some of the dynamic loading backend stuff you'll be able to click at the end of a content page to load another page and when I finish the video/art share pages this system will probably make a bit more sense from a user perspective.

I also reverted back to doing a dark-mode first design. I remember over a decade ago when I was designing the old site there was this push for single-page 'clean' designs and I really fell directly into that trap. While I feel the old design looked nice and clear, it certainly felt like it pushed against my branding in a way I was never a particular fan of. I tried to make it work though as my branding incorporated more color which I've carried over into the new design. To make content 'pop forward' I've used a 'black on black' background that's visible but unintrusive and allowed the content to bring itself to the front with white text and colored accents. I know, not exactly innovative, I've literally just described dark mode, but I like it ok? Really though, the prevalence of dark mode and a preference for white-on-black designs for reading is quite common these days and even I myself prefer it, so that's the design I went with. Speaking of colors, I slightly modified my previous branding colors to work much better in this dark mode environment and used faded colors instead of the more harsh deep colors found in other media like my YouTube branding. Personally I like these colors a bit more so I'll most likely shift other aspects of my branding in this direction as well when I get around to finalizing a logo redesign for instance.

But now for the nerdy code stuffs, which is where the effort really when in. I mentioned before I wanted to minimize dependencies and make sure things were 'fast', but I did allow myself some leaway. Firstly, for animating things I used the rather impressive anime.js (MIT license - https://animejs.com/) because doing all the animations manually would have been quite the time sync and anime.js does everything I need it to while also being tiny and fast. Secondly I used ZeroMD (ISC - https://zerodevx.github.io/zero-md/) for client-side markdown-to-html conversion. I had planned to do my own markdown conversion based on my own local scripts which were converting my previous postings but once I saw ZeroMD's performance and features I figured why do the same work twice? Seriously though, I recommend both of these, just make sure with ZeroMD if you take input markdown you'll NEED to sanitize said input since ZeroMD doesn't do that for you! (Since I'm only loading md files from the server I don't have to worry about this ^-^ though I did make sure I wasn't leaving myself vulnerable X.x)

Everything else though? Just straight vanilla Javascript and PHP. Yeah, I know, "so old-school" but hear me out, the site is simple and doesn't really require anything more complex. When building the front-end I tried to focus on tried and true tactics with creative uses of html/css that runs fast and doesn't require javascript for formatting. Since blog posts are still loaded through ZeroMD, which is javascript, I wouldn't say the site is usable without Javascript, but you can at least navigate to different pages! Pages are built in chunks using php files, the server (through PHP) builds up the dynamic content and delivers a static page with no requirement for constant activity or server pings/checks, then Javascript runs on the client to set up the additional flair like animations and converts the loaded .md post file to HTML after building the content page. This approach balances the load between the server and client to ensure the server is able to deliver pages quickly and the user has the least amount of wait between page changes. (I'm sure a faster server with more complex pages would probably prefer a more server-sided approach)

This is where things get interesting, at least in my eyes, and if you're a new to web dev just reading from curiosity then this could show you a really quick and easy way to set up a blog! I mentioned I use PHP to load dynamic content, but I never mentioned SQL, and that's because instead of using a database the structure of the server itself is the database instead! (sort-of)

When it comes to databases you need some sort of interface or system for entering additional data, but I wanted something I could "click and drag" for the simplest update and upload system ever. I 'could have' built my own system with SQL for uploading content, made my own interface, or just used a framework, but why do all that when we have directories? Simply put, I used different directories for content with an included JSON config file that defines any additional data which is quick and easy to fill, from here PHP is able to quickly iterate over the parent directory for the kind of content that needs to be pulled and finding the content requested. Additionally I named these content folders with the date they are uploaded so they are naturally sorted by post-date, finding the 'last directory' finds the newest content. This means when I need to upload to the site I just name the folder the current data (in format Year-Month-Day_count) and drag it into my FTP program. Boom, I built a click-and-drag update system! (After authentication of course X.x)

This isn't exactly a 'new' approach and there's plenty out there who already do this, but there is some fancy additions I've made to this system. Pages themselves are separated into 'modes' with each mode having their own directory with sub-directories being the content. For example, if we look at my 'modhack' mode directory (the directory for Video Game mods and hacks) I have each mod labeled with date_gamename_modname, then below is a standardized post.md, info.json, and 'dl' directory. The post.md is obviously the markdown that loads for that entry, the info.json stores the additional data like title, post dates, game name (I use this instead of the filename since I load the json anyways), and even has a 'path' variable in-case I change the content to another directory and need to re-direct, then the 'dl' directory is for the downloadable files which are automatically pulled by PHP to present on the page. This divided system means I can use both the mode and directory to determine what the content is and how to display it, as well as create optimizations where the server doesn't need to scan a massive directory for files, only pulling the directory relevant for the asked-for content.

(Note, I mention that since I use the date in the file name then things are already in order, however this will depend on your file system and which methods you use! Not all file systems will write files in numerical order so you'll need to test against your own server to see what happens when using something like readdir for speed or if you should enable sorting with something like glob or scandir)

Of course I'm not saying this is the 'best' way to do any of this, and it actually does have some drawbacks if you scale too large but for a simple blog it's quite robust! One things to keep in mind though, my server is using a fast NVME SSD which will load directories and files extremely quickly, but if you have a server with an HDD then this method could be slowed down by IO speeds, then you'll want to look into pre-compiling a list like having a master JSON file with all posts or something (this is how my old site handled this problem).

There's actually one last thing to mention about the backend and how it's set up, and that's SEO! A lot of dynamic content sites will have issues with crawlers not being able to find pages to index and this was the case with my old site. However, with this approach I've used the URI (the last part of the URL after the ?) to define what to load and made these links visible somewhere on the site itself so crawlers are able to find the content easily. This also helps with the actual directories themselves since they can crawl through a site-map and even catalog things like the post.md for further SEO optimizations. For some this may actually be a downside, especially with all the 'AI' scare going on right now, but for me I want content to show up in search results as soon as it's available and the new site has proven quite useful in this regard! Using the URI also allows you to use custom redirect systems or correct URLs, for example if someone enters the wrong domain I can try and guess what they wanted or just point them back to the homepage without having to use a redirect or configure a 404 page/redirect through the server config itself. Not a huge deal, but for me personally it gives me a lot of options I can take advantage of in the future!

And that's pretty much it!.. I have no idea how to close out this section. X.x
Uhm... visit the site maybe? (If you're not already on it >.<) https://www.michaelpstanich.com/

As stated in the intro segment, this month was a lot of prototyping and that wasn't entirely intentional. I did work on Data:EnCryptic (will hopefully have some announcements for that soon ^-^), Altermatic, and Project Sugar Cake the most but for all of them I tried some ideas and they nearly all didn't quite work out. For Data:EnCryptic I built a simple (text only) prototype for the game-loop and wasn't at all satisfied with how things were really going. I built a simple interface and had tiles for navigation and things just didn't click right, but I did play with some ideas and have some major changes in design that I'll be working on this next month, may even start over from the beginning in Godot since so much has to change. For Altermatic and Project Sugar Cake I've been a bit held up by developments in UniPalUI taking a good bit. I had a TON of ideas for UniPalUI and implemented a lot of different systems that ultimately didn't really work out. These systems were things like adding menu tabs for mods, creating more dynamic registers for page swaps, creating different menu types, ect. Ultimately though, all of them were just too much work and overcomplicated the actual usage of the mod without actually adding any additional functionality. So, I'm set a bit back, I did however figure out the path forward for Data:EnCryptic and I'm SUPER hype about it, and I've scoped back with UniPalUI and made an all-new backend which should perform better with better dynamic control so not all is a waste, it just means I didn't get to have a mod release this month.. Q.Q

Question : "Can you make a role in Discord to follow each project individually?"
Answer : So this was a request a while back, specifically they asked to have roles for Skyrim and Palworld separately since I now have popular mods in both games. I've thought about it quite a lot, initially I didn't do it because I was already forgetting to ping the existing role but as I got better at that I had to think about it more seriously. Now, I did make split roles, one to ping with and one without R18+ content so people that don't want to follow for R18+ stuff don't get pinged for it but otherwise I decided not to create individual roles and the reason probably fits well in the Q+A here. When you are signing up to follow for notifications on Discord there's a bit of a trade happening, you get the convenience of getting pings for updates while I get to show you other works you may not have been paying attention to. Not everyone is going to be a fan of this, I fully understand that and for those that really don't want to see anything else I recommend following on a platform said content is uploaded to (like LoversLab maybe?). But one of the angles for linking stuff in the discord is to provide some cross-over between my various projects and maybe show people something they didn't know they'd be interested in. We've already seen some cross-over between my Skyrim and Palworld projects, people discovering the other because they followed for one so this isn't just beneficial to myself but could also show you some awesome stuffs! But yeah, there ya go. ^-^

Statement : [insert something related to Pokemon models in discord]
Answer : It's no surprise that people who are interested in Palworld also happen to be interested in Pokemon. There is a problem however, Nintendo is danger. Since Palworld's launch we've seen people want to use Pokemon characters in Palworld, typically through model swaps, but Nintendo has been VERY aggressive in taking these down and causing a lot of issues for sites and communities. As a result we've had to create a rule that Pokemon models and mods can't be posted in the Discord to avoid us having any issues. Nintendo has stated they don't want Pokemon in Palworld and while I think they're dumb, they also hold ALL the power in this situation. Just thought some clearing up was in-oder here since I've had a lot of people asking me about it. Personally, I don't have any issue with people sharing these models and such privately, but we simply can't risk them being posted directly in the Discord since communities have been shut down for it. Honestly, I find it to be a scary precedent where Discord could cave to any company that requests servers be shut down and that SUPER sucks. There have been some people saying these mods "were lazy anyways" so nothing was lost, but honestly stuff like porting in models to a different game is a great gateway for someone to become a modeler or get interested in various other aspects. Nintendo has shut down entire communities just because they love their IP as well, which I always find sad. Of course I don't think the people who tried to paywall their poke-mods helped and is most likely why we're in the situation we are, but anyways, those are my thoughts on the situation if you were curious. >.<

Another monthly update! I've become super inconsistent with these (Sorry >.<) but I have been working hard and making sure to make releases regularly at least! This last 2 months had a heavy emphasis on Palworld mods with the release of Altermatic and a lot of work related to it. I'll be honest though, I did sort of spread myself thin so updates to individual projects did slow down. In this post we have poll results to talk about! Let's get into it!

SubscribeStar Poll Link : https://subscribestar.adult/posts/1403611

For those that may have missed it, Altermatic needed some UI implementation to really fullfil the most common requests. Stuff like being able to see and choose which swap a character should have, some sort of in-game system to see what swaps are actually registered, in-game options to change how things behave, ect. This is all possible of course but building and maintaining a complete UI with these kinds of features is a lot of work to do just for a single mod. However, SCake already had a placeholder UI with enough features to actually implement most of these requests, but Altermatic has to be standalone. That's where UniPalUI Comes in! For more details on why, check out the actual poll post!

The overall poll got a decent number of responses! (Primarily over on Discord, which was to be expected >.<) Thank you to everyone who participated! The point was to see if people thought it was worth the effort to make the new Unified UI (currently called UniPalUI) into it's own framework that other modders could tap into and use, as well as distribute as its own mod. Naturally SubscribeStar votes are a bit heavier since it's people dedicated to following my work to the point they're willing to contribute on SubscribeStar, so although activity was lower I put more weight on these results. SubscribeStar was 4 For, 0 Against, and 2 Uncertain. If we only account for or against, that's 100% for making UniPalUI its own framework, so the SubscribeStar vote is clearly a "Yes, make this another framework". Discord was a bit more divided but still had the majority say yes, with 39 For, 11 Against, and 25 Uncertain. Again accounting only For or Against that's 78% saying "Yes, make this another framework".

Of course this isn't just a numbers game, I need to also need to account for those which voted for uncertain. The way I feel about 'uncertain' is that the participant either didn't know what that would entail or didn't know whether the framework would be useful but didn't want to outright say no since they simply don't have enough confidence in that answer (or they simply didn't care, which is also perfectly valid lol). I did get a few comments/questions about the framework about how it would work and the amount of work required to make UniPalUI a framework rather than just keeping it exclusive, but I didn't get many comments regarding why people voted for their chosen option. As such, it's a bit difficult to know why people voted against or indifferent/uncertain. Either way, the majority still voted yes so... announcing...

With the poll results being a majority of "Yes, make this another framework" UniPalUI, the unified palworld UI being built for SCake and Altermatic will now be expanded and released as its own custom mod UI Framework! The idea of UniPalUI is to vastly simplify creating simple user interfaces for modifying options, making selections, handling inputs, and triggering custom interaction/input states with triggers to spawn custom widgets. I already had the plan to redesign the SCake UI and with Altermatic now in the mix I wanted to just merge the two UIs into one, hence the "Unified" in the name. The reasoning here is creating two standalone systems that do the same thing is a lot of extra work and requires double the maintenance, but by combining the UIs it simplifies implementation and will lead to more expanded features while also keeping the UI more consistent.

Although UniPalUI will be released as its own framework as well, both SCake and Altermatic will include UniPalUI for now to simplify installing either of those frameworks and reduce dependencies until either UniPalUI expands beyond the point where integration makes sense, or until it becomes much easier to handle dependencies. Also the naming kind of worked out here with how overwriting works as well. When loading up .pak files, UE5 goes in alphabetical order and it just so happens Altermatic, which is first, is less likely to get constant updates that require UI implementations, ProjectSugarCake will get frequent updates, then UniPalUI would be updated last in-case a standalone version has updates which other mods require that may not be included in either Altermatic or ProjectSugarCake. However, if we do start seeing the included UniPalUI start to cause issues we'll have to start requiring UniPalUI be installed properly, but I'd like to see how this goes first! =^-^=

Ok, but what's the actual plan? Well, for the immediate future, nothing yet. I want to release UniPalUI as a properly usable framework before I actually release anything so currently I want to build in all the features I will need for both SCake and Altermatic before I release UniPalUI as standalone. However, instead of building things in a very isolated way I am taking the extra time to make sure other mods can hook into the UniPalUI API and I'm using all the functions as if SCake and Altermatic were in no way related to UniPalUI (effectively acting and designing things as if SCake/Altermatic couldn't access internal UniPalUI functions, so limiting myself to the actual API). At the time of writing UniPalUI currently has mod registering, custom input handling with a register, and notification display (also have some basic menu implementation but it's not even close to complete, still converting SCake's menu to UniPalUI with additional features).

2 things to chat about before I move on, "How does UniPalUI actually work and how does it look?"

SCake's placeholder UI always worked based on a 'callbacks' system and I'm taking a very similar approach here with UniPalUI. Essentially instead of UniPalUI having menus loaded then just changing variables like other attempts as UI mods for Palworld, mods will 'register' with UniPalUI as its own entity and then register for 'callbacks' when certain events happen. The registered mod will then receive function calls with an attached FName and other parameters depending on the callback (input gives you the key press, hold time, ect.). These events will depend on what's registered, for example if the mod registered "whenever the K key is pressed" then a function will call on the mod when UniPalUI detects the K key is pressed, or if a UI is registered it'll report when an option is hovered, selected, altered, ect. Internally the way it works is using a UE5 Interface with custom functions. This allows UniPalUI to callback to mods without fear of crashes if the function/event isn't actually implemented and also allows you to implement the interface on any object that can run Blueprints that you'd want. For instance, I personally use an Actor Component as my input/UI handler for SCake and so the object I register with UniPalUI is said actor component that implements the interface and has all the function/event calls inside itself, which then communicates with the rest of SCake. Altermatic however just registered the ModActor itself since I don't need advanced handling, although both are different classes they both implement the interface so UniPalUI can callback to either one.

If you've never worked with Unreal Engine 4/5 before that all probably sounds a bit confusing, but don't worry, it's actually super simple! The greatest benefit to this system is that instead of having presets UniPalUI actually builds things at run-time! The general flow is, register a new mod menu in UniPalUI, when UniPalUI opens that mod menu it creates a callback to the mod and asks "hey, we entered the menu, what do you want to do?" At this point the mod creator can run any code they want, UniPalUI will have an API to add different buttons, graphics, whatever but you could in theory also just close UniPalUI's interface and open your own custom UI with your own input state if you wanted. This also allows you to create selection UIs, custom lists or radial menus, ect, something that isn't possible with other UI frameworks and something that is required for future SCake and Altermatic developments.

Visually UniPalUI will try and default to a look similar to Palworld's UI. I'll be implementing a lot of the same color choices and trying to blend in the UI a bit more but also keeping it simple and distinct enough that you know it's the mod menu. However once things are in-place I'd love to add more options to make the UI change dynamically based on the mod, such as creating API calls to create general themes and add graphics in more creative ways. Since UniPalUI runs entirely on callbacks and allows mod creators to run any code they want based on these callbacks anything is really possible, I just want to create a good basis for not only others to work off of, but also for myself! It's important to remember that all this work is stuff I wanted with SCake and Altermatic, so I will be someone focused on my own needs more than requests for this framework, but I'd still love to see people's ideas and I'll be keeping a requests list just like I do for my other projects!

(Also, arbitrary comparison to Skyrim's MCM mod which also uses a callbacks and API system, Though, UniPalUI doesn't run in a pause menu and instead runs along with the game allowing much more flexibility in usage!)

Got 2 quick life-style updates, how I'm going to tackle my inconsistency on the monthly updates and related to day job stuffs. When it came to doing the updates weekly I was fairly consistent and I 'generally' felt on target, however there wasn't really enough to write about per-week and it was eating up a lot of time, hence the switch to monthly updates with individual update posts for releases. However there's a bit of a struggle here because now that posts are so spread apart I get easily side-tracked and demotivated from doing it. It's a bit strange because once I start writing it's easy to keep going (sorry for these being so lengthy >.<). As a solution I'm looking into making a sort of 'activity log' along-side my usual change-log recording. This activity log would act as a better starting point for writing these blog posts and I'll have a sort of visual reference for "look at all the thingies I did!" I 'think' this'll help because a large part of that demotivation comes from feeling like I didn't do enough, so I'm trying to trick my little mammal brain into NOT thinking that.

As for the second life-style update, I'm currently looking for a new day job. I've stated before how I have been operating at a loss, trying my best to pick up some freelance gigs and small commissions but overall that work has been slowing down and hasn't been enough to cover my actually already fairly low living cost (well, low for where I live anyways). As a result I'm currently looking for a day job to help cover costs and hopefully make enough to save up and make another push for self sustainability. If you couldn't tell, my ultimate goal is to make a living doing my own creative works and projects like the ones you see here for a living, but I've still got a long road ahead till that happens. To be clear, this isn't a call for more support or anything, rather I'm making sure people know I may have less time for a while as I work a 'standard' job to help build up funds and this may slow down overall developments. I'm hopefully I'll still have the energy to work on stuff as usual but I can't ensure that'll happen.

Ok, so-like, there's a LOT that happened with my Palworld modding works over the last 2 months and I'm not even sure the best way to approach this post. So.. I'm going to give some short summaries and link to the relevant posts! (I probably need to update this formatting for actively developed projects that get their own update posts. Monthly update post format really only works for things that aren't already posted, ya know? X.x)

PSA Post : https://subscribestar.adult/posts/1372461

First I'll mention the public PSA I posted regarding Palworld's updated packaging method for IO Store. If you haven't followed Palworld modding much recently, the short of it is: PocketPair updated and kept said updated packaging method for the XBox versions of Palworld to use what's called IO Store, however Steam is now on the old package system after a minority of modders and users got overly hostile about the packaging change. What this ended with is now we have split packaging types so now if modders want their mods usable on both platforms we need to package our stuff twice and distribute both versions, it also divided a lot of modders given some tools work on one packaging type but not the other. Ultimately I advocated for everything to stay on IO Store since it is superior in pretty much every way, but instead now we have the worst possible solution, both. X.x

I wrote a PSA about how the community should move forward with this change and give some general recommendations to both users and modders.

Update Posts :
0.4DEV : https://subscribestar.adult/posts/1343595
0.4.2DEV : https://subscribestar.adult/posts/1375053

Ok, slightly fib I need to cover real quick. I set up a release package for 0.4.3DEV which was suppose to release this month but somehow forgot or didn't finish publishing so I accidentally skipped releasing an update in July, sorry about that! I've been posting test versions over in Discord so it's not like there's been nothing, but just wanted to apologize on that front because I did fully intend to release it but forgot somehow. >.< I would release it now but I started switching to UniPalUI and making some foundational changes so it'll be a little bit longer till the next proper update. June however saw some pretty great additions, firstly we have an updated loader since the original one broke with the Sakurajima update, adjust profiles are now a thing so you don't have to re-adjust every time an animation starts up, and a bunch of other stuffs (check the update posts).

If you're curious on what's next, since the last update post I've been switching the UI to using UniPalUI and I'm also working on changing the Adjustment Profile to use a new pairings system rather than being based on individual characters. Currently the adjust profile has an issue where if you try to match up with different sizes it doesn't properly account for all the other characters in the animation so they may not align with all combinations. I have a fix and it should be out in the next major update, though I will have to invalidate the adjust profiles again.. >.<

Update Posts :
Initial Release / 0.1DEV : https://subscribestar.adult/posts/1379475
0.2DEV : https://subscribestar.adult/posts/1379655
0.3DEV : https://subscribestar.adult/posts/1416867

Altermatic was a newly release mod for Palworld! This "Run-time Replacer Framework" allows swapping out assets at run-time allowing modders to create things like Character/Pal model replacers with relative ease while allowing both creators and users to customize how models are replaced in-game through JSON configuration files. After the major Sakurajima update the previous framework popular for this purpose, OK Framework, was officially considered abandoned and didn't work on Gamepass and the new IO Store format. At the time PocketPair hadn't moved Steam back to the old package method so replacers that used OK framework, something our community was relying on, completely stopped working. This lead to be fast tracking the development on my own implementation and it was a major focus this last month. One thing I've learned since releasing Altermatic is how much of a pain OK Framework was to work with and how much easier JSONs from Altermatic are. That said, Altermatic still has some shortcomings we're working to fix, it's still better than OK Framework in every possible way now, but modders are still slow to transition to using it.

The basics animation pack has been discontinued and I've started new animation packs called "Spirit's Naughty Human Anims" and "Spirit's Naughty Pal Anims" which covers Human only animations and Pal included animations respectively. Currently only the original solo female animation has been released along-side an update to SCake but I plan to try and get a few animations put together to give myself a break from coding and troubleshooting. I know someone requested some Lyleen animations so I'll most likely finish up my current progress on some Katress involved anims and move onto her, as well as make some more solo player anims if I have time. Future animation packs releases will get their own update posts and hopefully I'll be able to start including some previews soon! (I've switched all my video editing tools and I'm not diving in deep to figure that out at this moment, sorry X.x)

I already covered a bunch regarding this already so I won't chatter about it here. >.<

Back in early June after the monthly update I released a Dev preview branch of my 'personal site' ( https://www.michaelpstanich.com/dev/ ) so people could see what the new site would look like and I could gather feedback. Aaand then I proceeded not to update it. Typical me!~ Really though, I didn't update the site because I've still been working on some fundamental ideas for how to manage the entire site, main one being SEO and page handling. I started doing research into actually managing a database and creating my own workflow for handling blog posts so I don't have to manually add them to lists and instead just run a basic script. Unfortunately that slowly became low priority as another project, Altermatic specifically, had a massive spike in urgency. That said, with this update post I should have pushed a new update to the Dev branch of the site and so you can few the few changes I had made before splitting off and learning other things, not many changes but it's something (also comes with an age warning now >.<). Feel free to check it out and leave your feedback! Given I'm looking for a new day job I'll most likely make a big push on getting more done with the site this week and make the dev branch the main branch asap. (I'll probably make 'basic' versions of everything, a minimum viable product so-to-speak, that way I can show it to potential employers and start slowly implementing more advanced features as time goes on).

Also worth noting, I think the last time I mentioned the site I mentioned I was having trouble with the tools I was use to working with, but now I've fully transitioned to all new tools and have started getting comfortable with them! The major leap was starting to use VS Code for all my development stuffs and figuring out all the plugins/settings needed to get virtual servers working and have the feature complete experience I required to develop at any reasonable pace. Overall it's been a really positive experience! (actually having a lot of fun working on web-dev again after so long. >.<)

Unfortunately not a lot to show for this one. I had planned to hard-focus on the project for a bit but requests and support for SCake and Altermatic kept flowing in so I sort of slid Data:EnCryptic aside a bit. The biggest update I got is some stuff related to the data structure and some mechanical design stuffs, but I had planned to do a full blog post covering just those aspects. Honestly, kind of disappointed I didn't get all that much done with this project and really hope I can hard focus on it soon!

Another botch on my end, I have a stable release pretty much ready but hadn't taken the time yet to put it all together and get a release out. There's still a handful of issues I'd like to fix but didn't get enough time in to actually solve anything so they will most likely persist in the next stable release. (Note, I don't think the issues I'm worried about are actually caused by Succubus Heart but instead are either user error or caused by other mods, but I'd still like to figure out work around. Stuff like the mod not showing in the MCM for some users, issues with lock-ups with OStim, weird invul-issues caused by bad mod configurations, ect.)

Still working on the Neuma dataset while researching new developments. With everything else I'm working on I've been slowly falling behind on all the newest tech. Currently researching new auto-tagger and auto-captions using new models and LLMs to help drastically speed up dataset curation and processing for training. Since my hardware is local here we've had weather to deal with, with over 100F temps constantly it's been too hot to do any meaningful training. Oh, I don't know if I mentioned this before but I have also been working on auto-taggers for videos and have a bunch of new batch scripts for faster processing, which is nice! ^-^ (I'm using many of these batch scripts in other aspects too, such as the compression and meta-stripping scripts which I now run all my blog post images through to drastically reduce file sizes ranging from 20% to 70% space savings! Averages about 35~%)

> Palworld Mods <
R18+ Mod Folders (All Mods)
GDrive : https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1vYfgMom7UJs2OmJ5B4FGQTMYEOR0n9Vr
Mega : https://mega.nz/folder/9hZQ2IIR#Ou77tq4qQxw9UBQsozh6zg
Project Sugar Cake 0.4.2 DEV
Lover's Lab : https://www.loverslab.com/files/file/33158-project-sugar-cake-animation-and-stat-framework/
Altermatic 0.3 DEV
Lover's Lab : https://www.loverslab.com/files/file/34727-altermatic-runtime-replacer-framework/
Nexus Mods : https://www.nexusmods.com/palworld/mods/1626
Spirit's Anim Packs 0.1
Lover's Lab : https://www.loverslab.com/files/file/34653-spirits-scake-animations/

> Articles <
Palworld IO Store PSA : https://subscribestar.adult/posts/1372461

> Website <
Updates to : https://www.michaelpstanich.com/dev/

This was a long update post already and I think it'd be best if I spend some time working on projects, so I'll be skipping Q and A this week. Sorry! >.<

(This is a PSA for Palworld Modding Communities which will be posted in a few other places. If you're here from one of said places, Hi! Careful checking out my posts, they may contain NSFW content! =^.-=)

Well this has been a mess...

Over the last 2 days we've had some really confusing changes for Palworld modding, the large Sakurajima update was super exciting but it also came with a surprise! With the update, PocketPair changed the packaging format to use a superior format with something called "IO Store", this newer format allows for fast loading and better streaming for many platforms and is a huge benefit in other categories. The issue? When the game is set to use a different packaging type, other packages become incompatible. This means mods in the older .pak format were no longer compatible with the set of IO Store .pak types, and vice-versa, meaning only one package type can be used at once. This 'broke' all previous mods Palworld had released for it, thankfully updating mods is really easy (it's a tick-box in UE5, then you just re-package and distribute the new pak format) but the community got impatient and vial toward the devs, so they reverted the change in format, but only on Steam.... (aka, Steam on old format, XBox/Gamepass on the new format)

Now, this has been a mess, and it's been really confusing with inconsistent messaging. So I want to make a post here with recommendations for modders on how to properly adapt then go over the situation and try my best to explain things in more detail (like why a switch to io store was even done in the first place, explain how reverting is going to cause us more issues as time goes on, and then explain how you can help improve things as either a modder or user).

--- --- ---

Users/Player - Here's some recommendations on how to proceed from this point forward

Rec. 1 : HAVE SOME PATIENCE. Like, holy damn, just wait for mods to be updated before storming PocketPair with pitchforks, alright? (Note, this isn't directed toward my usual NSFW audience, you guys have all been really awesome and patient. This is more targeted toward the casual crowd that lost their minds within minutes of the update)

Rec. 1.1 : Building off that last point, shifts in the modding space for games that are updated over time is extremely common and it's perfectly normal! PocketPair should be making changes that are the best for them and the game and we shouldn't impede their efforts. Modders will get around to updating everything and replacements for older mods will naturally take the place of those that don't. This is all expected, it'll take some time but moving forward is a positive change. (I understand the frustration when stuff stops working, but chill, things'll get fixed ^-^)

Rec. 2 : Take caution when updating from now on. Disable automatic updates for your platform and wait for experienced users to test the waters and see what does/doesn't work if your mod set-up is important to you. If you are an experienced user or modder, make sure to back-up previous versions just in-case something breaks and you need to revert for either play or testing. Even games out of early access can get a random update years down the line that breaks things (Looking at you Capcom, why did you do this to RE? What did we do to deserve such punishment? WAS IT THE BOOBIE MODS??? Q.Q)

Rec. 3 : State your platform when reporting issues and, if a mod doesn't support your platform, kindly ask the modder to release a compatible version. Since we now have to support 2 different formats this means there could be differences between the 2 we're not aware of. It's always best practice to note your platform when reporting issues, but this makes it even more important. Additionally, typically when modders don't release a compatible version for multi-platform it's normally caused by a lack of knowledge or time. So be understanding and link to resources like this one so they can get a track on what's going on and what to do to make a compatible version!

--- --- ---

Modders - Here's some recommendations on how to proceed from this point forward

To ensure the best experience for everyone, we as modders should try to support all of the latest versions of Palworld that we can. Previously that was easy since both PC versions were on the same format, even though they were technically different builds the functions and code between them were still compatible so even script mods had no issue. However, (at least at the time of writing) now we have 2 versions that require different steps to support, Steam's PC release, and then the XBox build that includes the PC Gamepass and MS Store releases. This means we need to supply 2 versions of our mods packaged for each platform from this point forward unless PocketPair decides to revert their revert and moves both platforms to IO Store (or they harm everyone by moving the xbox build back to the old format, I'll explain later why this would be a bad thing). This doesn't apply to Lua or C++ mods since they are loaded by UE4SS in an unpackaged state, but for BP mods and replacers, we'll need 2 versions.

So, here's my recommendations for Palworld modders moving forward.
(Nearly all of these apply even if PocketPair moves to a single format, so consider these 'best practices' of a sort)

Rec. 1 : Backup versions before updating. This applies to both the game version and mod versions! Preferably you'd keep an archive of your mod releases so you can always revert or reference back if something goes wrong. In this specific case it was easy for us to just release the 'previous version' as the Steam compatible version if you had released an IO Store version. Should also be fairly well known that game updates can break mods, if you're not an experienced modder it may be best to wait for others to test the waters and for tools to be updated if required before updating.

Rec. 2 : Modders should move their entire workflow to involve the UE5 editor, preferably using the Palworld Modding Kit ( https://github.com/localcc/PalworldModdingKit ). You can find a guide to setting up the modding kit on the modding wiki ( https://pwmodding.wiki/docs/category/palworld-modding-kit ). It looks daunting at first, but don't worry, once things are set up it's rather simple. The reason for this is reliability and consistency. I've been telling modders in our community to set up and use UE5 for their mods since it allows a lot more advanced workflows and ensures their set-ups survive changes like this. (Also worth noting, UE5 is required for animation importing, which is a bit of a focus for our community...) If you're looking for another guide on this matter, you can check out my SCake animation importing guide (no NSFW images in the guide itself, don't worry - https://www.michaelpstanich.com/article/SCake_HowToMakeAnimsGuide ) For everyone that followed this advice the IO Store change was just a tickbox in the editor and a repackage, it took less than 10 minutes to push a new version out and was fairly painless, everyone should be shifting to workflows like this one to prevent breakage in the future.

Rec. 3 : Package a version for each format/platform which means 1 for Steam with the old format and 1 in the new IO Store format for XBox/Gamepass. If you set up UE5 and start using ChunkIDs to separate your mod packages properly then this should be relatively easily to do (just a pain on the release and docs front). As mentioned in the previous Rec. 2, UE5 has these tools built in and IO Store is just a checkbox within the packaging settings (Go to "Platform" in the top bar, then down to "Packaging Settings" as a quick access to packaging settings. The setting here is called "Use Io Store" which you'll package 1 time with and 1 time without). For my own workflow I separate things into incrementing ChunkIDs (ChunkID determines what pak-# the file goes into), then when you go to Platforms > Windows > Package you'll get an export with each package number, I copy that into a folder then toggle on Io Store and run the process again to copy into a different folder. (Annoying, but not difficult)

Rec. 4 : Include version compatibility in your ReadMe/Download Pages/Filenames. We can't really determine what will be compatible in the future, but for current versions try to ensure users know which version is for which platform. Personally I'm doing this at a file-name level where the archives for Steam will now prefix with (Steam) and XBox/Gamepass prefixes with (XBox-Gamepass), then all version compatible stuff (like, say, lua exclusive mods) will have no prefix. It'll take time to have everyone following these kinds of standards, but try to keep your community/followers posted on where compatibility is if its relevant to you.

Rec. 5 : Adopt open modding and collaboration! One of the major issues I noticed was a lack of communication in the modding community about what was happening and a lot of selfish hostility demanding things that didn't make a whole lot of sense, eventually leading to this worse-than-before situation. We as modders should be working together to get things working instead of pushing against one another and refusing any help, or refusing to help others. If we continue down this path and keep giving PocketPair these mixed signals then modding is going to be completely screwed. Ultimately, in this case, PocketPair listened to less-than-experience 'modders' that refused to adapt and listen to more experienced modders, and has made the modding scene much more complicated as a result. We need to start sharing standards and better knowledge with one another so that things like this are less likely to happen in the future and adaption is quicker. (Our community had already adopted this mentality and we were fully updated without any struggle, and again after the revert. These things matter and can make all of our lives much easier. If you're confused about a change, ask experienced modders about it and be patient, listen in and be ready to adapt. A great modder adapts, a bad modder gives up and refuses to change.)

--- --- ---

Explaining the situation

Ok, now lets actually explain the shift in package types and what's going on.

Why switch to Io Store?
Simple, it improves loading and streaming assets on a wide range of platforms/hardware. While for a lot of modern systems you won't notice a difference (especially if you're not hitting memory limits or have a lot of io bottlenecks) this has massive benefits to console specifically, especially XBox Series S. So the reason PocketPair made this change was to make overall improvements to Palworld for all platforms which should reduce load times and improve performance across the board. Of course there's other things they could do to improve these things, but it's such a massive win on console that there's no reason not to do it.

Ok... so why on PC where it's not as effective?
This most likely comes down to their development pipeline and because the XBox version IS the PC version. Well, for Gamepass/MS Store version at least. The XBox/Gamepass version of Palworld has always been a different build than the Steam version (at first it even had different features/content!). However, PocketPair has synced up their development and now they are most likely just different packaged versions/exports. PC DOES have benefits from IO Store, so it's not like it was a bad call, but in reality PocketPair most likely just synced up their 2 pipelines into a single process so both versions were effectively the same package but with different exports (for platform reasons). So since Io Store is a massive win for console, when they synced up the PC version just switched to the overall better IO Store package type for universal gains and easier development.

Makes sense. So why do we now have 2 versions?
This is where stuff gets complicated, because it has to do with the "have patience" statements I made earlier. In short, changing the package method meant that all older mods needed to be updated, so when people launched the update for the first time none of their mods worked! This lead to casuals and incompetent 'modders' to immediately complain to PocketPair, blaming them for the mods breaking while demanding a revert. And PocketPair caved... probably the best argument for "don't listen to your community" I've seen in quite a long while. As mentioned previously, the IO Store format is a massive win for consoles so they most likely couldn't revert the change on XBox to hit their performance targets and obligations, which directly affects the Gamepass/MS Store versions. So yeah, only the Steam version was reverted, and the community forced this issue onto itself.

Yeah but, at least old mods work, right?
Some do, some don't, really depends what's changed, and this only applies to the STEAM version, XBox/Gamepass is still screwed. The reality is that most mods need to be updated eventually anyways and there's shifts in the scene that would replace a lot of the earlier mods already, so reverting the change really doesn't do much for us in the long-term. This revert is short-sighted, both from the community and PocketPair. But still, it'll be nice to use the older mods that do still work. Keep in mind that only BP mods and replacers needed .pak files anyways, script mods through lua or C++ were never affected and instead all broke because of changes within the game (as they do over patches). The real concern here, however, is that PocketPair could bring back IO Store for Steam since it just makes sense to do so from a development perspective and for the long-term health of the game. When they do, not only will previous mods be broken, but also all those made after this revert, ultimately doing even MORE damage than if we just kept IO Store and modders adapted. In other words, we'll be right were we already were but even worse off.

--- --- ---

And that's what I want to help prevent!
I'm making this PSA to let people know what's happening and help educate users/modders, while also advocating that we start making dual packages now to prevent future issues and help people adapt. There is a silver lining here in that we have the chance to 'get use to' these better practices and packaging for IO Store without mods being 'completely' unusable, but that does only benefit Steam users. So, let's say Steam does switch back to IO Store packages, then we can just transition to using the IO Store versions already packages for XBox/Gamepass! This will help minimize potential loss of mods in the future and ensure everyone gets to access mods to the same capacity, a win-win! Of course, if the community had already adopted better practices to begin with then none of this would have been an issue, but we can't change the past, only work toward a better, more sustainable future!

A reminder to everyone, if you ever need help you can always try our community, The Broken Chatbox ( https://discord.gg/h3vB7S4FEw ) to ask for help! Also, be very careful which guides you follow! There's a lot of bad info out there written by people who have no clue what they're doing/talking about (especially on YouTube, I cringe every time >.<). Hopefully as time progresses we get some better guides with best practices and proper information, and I hope to help on this front when I get the time.

Either way, thanks modding community for intentionally stepping on a rusty nail, now let's work on the anti-biotics!

Ok, I sorta, maybe, accidentally skipped last month’s update post, kind of. As a result, I’ve got lots to write about here as it’s been a good while since I’d done one of these. To quickly explain the gap (which, I know, I probably don’t need to but the story is interesting? Maybe?) I was transitioning to doing the posts near the beginning of the month instead of the end as it would be easier to be more flexible with the release, since I could still have it be within the month even if it went over a couple days. I originally planned to write about data structures and stuff I’ve been working on for a game project, but instead of actually getting the update post out I spent time just, well, actually working on the project itself!~ Aaand next thing you know, it’s been 10 days, 20 days, a month… Yeah, just didn’t feel like writing I guess! (I was also trying to decide exactly what to do about a couple of other things, but I’ll talk about that later in the post)

Before we continue, just wanted to say Happy Pride Month! (I always forget when June comes around so no special plans X.x). Now let's color the streets as we stroll over this months update post with 2 months of talk! (Sorry in advance for the length... =^.-=)

A long while back I said I'd like to start working on a smaller side game project for a while and after making that announcement I came up with a concept, released an overview of what would be included, then promptly ditched everything I wrote because I came up with more ideas and better direction. Yeah, common theme with me, I know, but now I've started DEV on what will be the 'actually released' version of this small project!

The original small project was called "Crystal Grimoire: Soulless Evolution" which was suppose to be a test bed for concepts I was working on for my main large game project, currently labeled "Crystal Grimoire : Project Soul". However, as I worked on some concepts for it I felt doing something too similar to the main project was not only boring conceptually (who wants to build the same thing twice?) but also just uninteresting as a release plan. So, I merged those concepts back into the main project as I expanded writing on it and instead started taking small side-concepts that didn't work in the main game and started this new small concept.
(Note: Some docs and files that release may reference "Project AI Cards" which was the working title for Data:EnCryptic)

I'm not quite ready to show anything as I'm transitioning to start sharing assets between the 2 titles, to which I have a LOT of polishing to do, and I want to re-build my prototype and actually make a proper early version for supporters to try. But I did feel it was important to announce it here since this will be my primary focus this month with most of my available time sinking into it. The new project will be built using Godot 4.2 with plans to transition to Godot 4.3 when it's ready. Although I've been working with prototyping and learning in Godot 4.x for a good while now, my main project is still in godot 3.5 as many aspects break in the transition. So, with this transition I'm looking to also restart my main project build in 4.3 when that becomes available and use this as a chance to make something 'real' in Godot 4.x. (As a note, I've been using Beta builds for Godot for these experiments and finding bugs/issues a plenty, but since I plan to actually release something here I need to use a stable version which does make me a bit sad inside... Q.Q)

Real quick though, what even IS "Data:EnCryptic" exactly? Here's a quick run-down, though I'm intentionally leaving out details since the game is suppose to be a bit mysterious in its execution.

(Editor note, the original write calls this AI Ult.Clarity, but Clarity AI is an actual company I didn't know about at the time, so I probably need a new name Q.Q)

 > Palworld Mods (Project Sugar Cake) <

I discussed a lot about my plans with SCake and what I want to try to create along side it in the last update post for 0.3 DEV, so I'll keep this relatively short. Made some major progress since the last monthly update post with a ton of game-breaking research going on. I feel like I've torn Palworld inside-out by this point and have a lot of surface level knowledge for nearly every system which has been rather helpful, not just for my own work but also in helping direct others in places to look and suggestions on best practices. There's been a major slowdown in most areas for Palworld modding with everyone seemingly waiting for major updates, but in The Broken Chatbox we've been seeing more people join into the naughty side!

The last major updates to SCake have been focused on feature requests and I've now made the TODO public which I also use as my internal requests tracker (I don't know how interesting my internal doc systems are to read about so I'll skip that for now >.<). We now have animation switching, gender preferences, some cool new API features... Actually, that last bit is the most exciting! Or it's related at least... Because the biggest feature is more modders joining the fray and making content! Aside from models and animations, I've also talked to modders about creating a combat submission mod, a 'fluids' collection mod, a futa mod, and more! We have some exciting stuff in the works! If you're more curious on my personal plans for naughty Palworld mods, I recommend checking out the last SCake update post! - https://subscribestar.adult/posts/1280485

> Skyrim Mods (Succubus Heart) <

I've been ironing out some issues here and there to work on finally getting another Stable Release build out, this time with 'proper' OStim Standalone support! If I remember correctly, I reported in the last major Dev update post that with the help of the community most of the major OStim issues have been solved and I can happily say it's now in a spot where I'm comfortable putting it into a proper Stable release! That said, it's still incomplete with some features that simply won't ever be possible because of OStim's self-imposed limitations. Stuff like creature support and non-con wont ever be working 'officially' through OStim, though there's some reworking for combat submission at least.

But if stuff's ready why haven't I released a new version? That's because I've still got standing bug reports with some being pretty major, but I've not heard back in quite a while from those I was speaking to on the issue and few have responded to my request for additional details. So I'm stuck in a bit of a limbo state. The 3 major issues I'm concerned about potentially missing are... 1 ) The sudden serge in reports that the MCM isn't showing up on all version, no idea what caused this but I've got no meaningful data on this issue, 2 ) Some crashes/lockups are being reported relating to the Sexual Enrage spell, I suspect this is caused by some sort of mod conflict or UI mod (It's confirmed that this spell causes crashes on OStim, so a work-around was put in place but it doesn't always work), and 3 ) I received some reports that Succubus Heart can fail to start properly and scripts can lock up or stop functioning properly, just today I got a report that Orgasms were not being accounted for properly.

All these issues are rather confusing and I haven't been able to find solutions no matter how deep I dive, and given the limited return in bug reports I may just have to let them go for now and push a new release version with hopes that they are caused either by user error or the influx of potential users will give us the details required to fix them.

Either way, I've dedicated to a new release version this month, so that should be out soon!

> Phantasy Star Portable 2i Mod? <

I got a bit burnt out while working on my usual projects (it also didn't help that I basically scrapped that prototype I talked about earlier and started anew, which always has a bit of a moral hit) so I wanted to work on something unorthodox and different. That's where PSoP2i comes in! I enjoy going back to the PSU style games quite often, and Infinity has been one I go back to regularly. In-fact it's my most played game on my ROG Ally at the moment.. that thing has basically become an oversized PSP at this point... >.>

Either way, I decided to do some texture modding and research! I wasn't initially sure if I'd release anything but my research ended up being rather conclusive and I have some working 'lewd' texture mods I may release as an R18+ mod! The initial mod I just called "Anti-Skirt" as it just removes skirts from some NPCs as a texture mod test, but I also worked on trying to get a working nude mod and replacing other textures. Now, to be clear, my goal wasn't originally to make a lewd mod but it just happened to be something worth trying since the skirt removal was a very easy start (just like re-colors are) but nude textures tackles some of the most difficult challenges in texture modding this specific game.

So... yeah, that'll be releasing once I package stuff up and maybe work a bit more on it to polish up the nude mod aspect. There's some major limitations and a lot of details I'll discuss when I do release the mod as I plan to do a write up about my research. To summarize though, PSoP2i does some really unique things on the PSP because it's the same engine used for PSU, but adapted to work with the PSP's hardware. This create some really interesting problems but honestly it was really cool breaking into the data of the game back when I was making a 60fps patch for PSoP2, so this is a fun prospect for me, honestly! Just don't expect major updates to this mod, it's really just an "I need a distraction" kind of project.

In the future I'd like to attempt a 'graphics restoration' project since it shares many assets from PSU, but most have not been gracefully down-scaled for the PSP. There's already a started restoration texture pack but it never got finished, so I'd love to step in and do a bit more work while also applying some AI+Manual upscale work as more texturing practice.

> Website Redesign (michaelpstanich.com) <

Been a bit slow on this front as I’ve been focusing on other projects since I hit a bit of a road block. Essentially the tools I was using and have been using for my own web stuff for years has really fallen short for me as I try to transition to using new tools and frameworks, which has technically been true for a while but since I did so little web-deb for so long it wasn’t a huge issue. But, that is why my website was so out of date since things were difficult to manage and update, which needs to be fixed. So, I’ve been transitioning to new tools and figuring out better solutions for managing stuff. The most notable transition is that instead of using Brackets for my web coding I’m moving to VS Code while making a set of custom scripts to translate things over quickly and easily. My transition to VS Code has been rather nice but I’m still getting use to the workflow and figuring out more tools which has taken some time (especially since I’m trying to transition the majority of my coding/docs work to VS Code). 

One of the challenges I have is figuring out ways to make translating articles over quick and painless so that I don’t have to spend a bunch of time re-formatting stuff for each platform. Although now I’m transitioning to just releasing my write-ups on 2 platforms instead of 3, I do want to make it simple so I can write things once and be done. To help with this, I’ve started experimenting with various text scanning/replacement scripts and methods while also trying out a really awesome bit of software called “Pandoc”. Pandoc is a universal text file translator which allows you to quickly and automatically translate certain doc types from one file type to another, although it’s not perfect it’s been really useful! Currently my workflow has me writing in .docx as usual, then I run it through Pandoc to translate it into markdown, then using a visual markdown editor I clean up any errors before I translate it directly to HTML which then gets the header/footer stripped and replaced and a few div tags are re-formatted specifically for my site. This is obviously much better than having to either manually edit in tags or translating manually to Markdown, but the process is still rough and requires manual work.

To help with this I’ll most likely start transitioning to markdown for the initial write, which ‘should’ allow me to directly paste to platforms like SubscribeStar, or at the very least ensure that translating the doc type to something else is smooth and doesn’t require additional editing since I can make my own scripts to fill in the gaps. Doing so also means I can just make my own arguments and replacement scripts as well, removing the need for Pandoc in the long-term. The issue is portability and just my own consistency, I’m not use to markdown so it’s going to take a while for me to get use to it, and even this update post still isn’t written in markdown so… yeah… ya know what? Fine. The rest of this doc is being written in markdown on VS Code!

(Note : This doc started being written on June 6th, 2024. If it releases later than that you know I struggled X.x)

(Back from transitioning to VS Code, I have 30 pages of documentation and 14 json files open. Halp Mee!!! =X.x=)

Oh, I almost forgot to add a somewhat important note. I will most likely be releasing a partial site update soon which moves the current site to /old and having a place holder home page so I can start putting up hosting pages for content to DL/preview as well as give easy access to tutorials, updates, and guides I release.

> AI Related Stuffs <

Got a few projects going on in the AI space, but first just wanted to note I've been learning about local LLMs, not just translation LLMs like before but also using LLMs for potential role-play RPG prospects and creative writing assistance to help break writers block and create interesting problems to solve through. I played around with the idea of starting an experimental bot for our Discord - The Broken Chatbox - to play around with as a fun side project, but it's not currently viable with my set-up.

On the image generation front, I've started testing and merging for a follow up release to SpiritMix - Soft and Cutesy, which has been requested for quite a while. The new version will focus on trying to make scenes and body forms more consistent while updating some models in the mix with those found within SpiritMix - Poly Cube to help with anatomy and clarity. I'd also like to expand the NSFW capabilities as some had requested, since multi-character generation with the model in particular poses is really terrible in its current iteration, but that's secondary to actually reducing the 'default' lewdness of adult characters on the model (it really likes to show boobies >.<)

Finally, I've been testing training a new SD1.5 base model with our new "Neuma Source" dataset (WIP Name), a new curated dataset featuring 3.6m anime/toon/3D style images covering several non-real domains. There's a massive amount of work to be done here and I've become the only one working on the dataset for now (previous team disbanded after being threatened by CivitAI) but the goal is to build a future-looking dataset of curated images which removes undesired images/concepts, trims duplicates to ensure only high-quality versions are used, weights validated images more highly in training, and purging images which fall below an aesthetic quality threshold. Currently the process still requires a lot of manual work, so the process is very slow at the moment (given I don't have funding to continue I just work on it between other things when I have low energy.). I plan to release an article after a few months of testing/training on whatever methods we find and hopefully release a usable model.

Also worth noting, I have been paying attention to both SDXL and SD3 advancements, and also looked into other non-SAI models. However, SD1.5 has a lot of research with a lower bar to entry so it's a good testing ground for this sort of thing to start on. Depending on how difficult SD3 ends up being to train, I 'may' jump in if effective methods are found early, but for now it's on the back burner.

> Palworld Mods <
Project Sugar Cake 0.3 DEV

GDrive : https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1vYfgMom7UJs2OmJ5B4FGQTMYEOR0n9Vr
Mega : https://mega.nz/folder/9hZQ2IIR#Ou77tq4qQxw9UBQsozh6zg
Lover's Lab : https://www.loverslab.com/files/file/33158-project-sugar-cake-animation-and-stat-framework/

GDrive : https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1yqt2P0fu2JRsjOIcuD7kAa03JuQ3rvZw
Mega : https://mega.nz/folder/xgBQDJRQ#4ucsQDMkY1thmkfM6sjy5g
Lover's Lab : https://www.loverslab.com/files/file/6350-succubus-heart-se/

Statement : You're awesome, you're amazing, a true legend, "goated"?
Response : I don't even know what that last one is suppose to mean, but ok, I guess? Honestly I've been getting a lot of really positive feedback over the last few months and I'm really grateful for that. However, I also want to make a quick statement here as it is something I'm always concerned about. I don't want people to blindly follow what I do/say or just 'accept' anything I do. When I make changes or judgement you disagree with, I want everyone to know you can speak about your reasoning for disagreeing and we can have a discussion! One of my greatest fears in these kinds of situations is someone saying something like, "Oh, so-and-so is perfect" right before reality hits, none of us are perfect and I am prone to error just like anyone else.

Probably feels a bit weird for me to bring this up, but recently I had someone 'defending' some design decisions and some long-standing bugs within Succubus Heart. I never want to see people shut down other people's reasoning, instead I want us to all grow through discussion and reasoning, talk it through, think about what each person is saying, then make judgement based on that reasoning while keeping our responses within reason. I'll be the first to admit there are some failures in Succubus Heart that I wish I was able to fix, and while these kinds of things should never justify attacks or harassment toward creatives, that doesn't mean we should ignore the given issues. More importantly, if we start shutting down discussion that could be considered hostile by a few overly sensitive individuals, it could mean that an increasing number of people become afraid to speak up which acts to the detriment of not only that single project and the community, but to communication in general.

So in short, don't be afraid to speak up about potential issues you may have or see while displaying your reasoning. Always try to be civil and always try to be kind of course (which I know is difficult, we all falter in this aspect at times, especially if an issue goes on for too long and starts to extend beyond reason). But also acknowledge that not all disagreements are between 'right' and 'wrong', and sometimes it's just a difference in perspective. There are certainly harmful disagreements, especially when you start talking about ethics and social issues, but you won't dissuade people in a positive way by being hostile and refusing to even reason.

Sorry, end of my little rant I guess. Kind of became a bit of a soap box for a moment. >.<  

Just know, I don't want us to argue and hate one another, there's just so much of that in this world that we don't need it to infect every aspect of our lives. Instead, let's try to prop each-other up, not just by being kind but also by helping each other improve, and these kinds of discussions can help with that!

Question : Do you have a manager/organizer?
Answer : I felt like it was obvious with how often I fail to do releases properly or miss simple blog release schedules, but it was asked quite a few times. I suppose I must look much more organized from the outside looking in than internally where I'm constantly trying to wade through self-lit flames in the cramped space I call a brain. For real, I've struggled with maintaining organization for a long time but that also means I have a LOT of practice! So no, I don't have a manager/organizer/assistant/whatever.

I mean, firstly, I'm freakin' broke, so paying someone to do my sorting wouldn't really be viable, but also I'm a bit of a weirdo when it comes to self management. I have preferences to how I do things and when I work on projects I like having my own isolated systems to help since I know the ins and outs of said system. There's this issue I have where I really like to fully understand systems I work with, and if I had someone else managing things I would be missing those things, which I would really struggle with! That's not to say I haven't or can't work in teams, but it's so much different when you work in a team where you have specific aspects and duties you focus on and projects where you are the sole creative.

Another aspect is probably the writing stuffs? I was also asked by someone who asked if I had an assistant if I also wrote these articles. I've been practicing writing for a pretty long while, especially as I've done script writing for videos and technical papers, so yeah, I write these! ^-^  

For real though, I think that was a hidden compliment, even though it really just made me confused. I don't feel my writing is particularly good (especially these 1 shot blog write-ups which go out without any major editing, just spell check '@.@) but maybe it's just the quantity? In that regard, the quantity is because I just don't do editing most of the time and throw caution to the wind! (I get bitten by pigeons a lot, like a bread bit thrown off a roof >.>)

(Also available on my website : https://www.michaelpstanich.com/blogpost/2024-03-31_MarchMonthlyUpdate.html)

After 31 days of eating nothing but sugar cake, I can say that this certainly isn’t a sustainable diet! I’m been shaking non-stop, I can’t sleep, and I can see into the 9tth dimension! I’m definitely ok though, I’m sure this will all play out well into the future, just look, I can shake up a smoothy REALLY well now!~ No more tired arms, I just… shake… endlessly… (I my have a sugar overdose). BUT I MUST PREVAIL, THE POST MUST GO ON! The keys, so close together, but I have a backspace key, let’s get this going!!!

> The project of goodness that is a sugary Cake <
Project Sugar Cake 0.0.3DEV (Latest Release Links) :
GDrive : https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1vYfgMom7UJs2OmJ5B4FGQTMYEOR0n9Vr?usp=drive_link
LoversLab Dev Thread : https://www.loverslab.com/topic/225549-project-sugar-cake-sex-and-stat-framework-gameplay-mod/

I just couldn’t help myself spending nearly all my time on Project Sugar Cake! Well, ok, ‘most’ of my time on Sugar Cake, but still, some major progress this month! SCake saw the release of 0.0.3DEV this month which not only has the multi-actor animations from 0.0.2DEV (also new this month) but also a custom JSON parser to make importing animations easier than ever! Huge changes under the hood but finally SCake is at a point now where I can make smaller additions and fixes and after the UI base gets implemented then I can move to the smaller updates with quicker output rather than the longer drawn out update cycle we’ve had since the initial launch. Bigger news however, since SCake now has all the animation systems in place and easier importing quite a few animators (and people hoping to get into animating) have gained interest in making stuff for the project, and many of us have been collaborating over in the Discord to make it all happen! This is effectively the starting point for SCake where we’re seen animator support and the framework is properly usable, however that’s not to say SCake is even remotely close to ‘done’ as there’s still a lot of work to be done. Systems to finish, methods to polish, and an API to expand, there’s more work but now development can focus a bit more on extra features and polish since we’re past the ‘minimum viable product’ phase. Overall really excited!

(Also a huge shout out to everyone that’s been collaborating and being supportive over in our Discord! I hope we can continue to inspire more people to be creative and friendly!)

> How to make your sugar cake even more delicious <
How to set up and import animations for SCake guide) :
Website Link : https://www.michaelpstanich.com/article/SCake_HowToMakeAnimsGuide.html
GDrive Link : https://docs.google.com/document/d/19lh8IooHKKpmVTixP2scgWIVfZboUedNf2JDmJp5hsA/edit?usp=drive_link
LoversLab Link : https://www.loverslab.com/topic/228416-guide-scake-how-to-set-up-animating-and-import-animations-for-project-sugar-cake/

Although the method for importing animations for SCake has been vastly simplified with the introduction of the JSON parser (you just import your animations and montages in UE5 then use JSON to configure them, no scripting or blueprints required now!) getting everything set up and understanding how things work is still a bit of a learning curve. As such, to ensure we have a great resource to point people to (and so people that don’t want to communicate still have a resource to look to for help) I’ve created an in-depth tutorial starting from knowing nothing about Palworld modding, to importing animations for SCake and getting them going in-game! The guide in total is pretty long, however if you’re already experienced with Palworld modding a decent amount of the getting started stuff can be skipped or skimmed over. It may look long and demanding, but the processes are relatively simple, so if you’re interested I recommend giving it a look!
Additionally, this is the first article publishing to my site with the new formatting! I haven’t the generic stuff like the nav and footer, but this gives an idea of what articles will look like on the site going forward. If you get the chance to check it out on my site, please let me know your thoughts!

https://www.michaelpstanich.com/
I did a lot of research and internal development for the website (and a potential second web project, but I won’t bother talking more about that till I have something to show since it may never actually exist at this stage). Development on the site redesign for michaelpstanich.com has been a bit slower than I would have liked since I’ve been spending so much time on Project Sugar Cake, but I’m slowly nailing things down. One major leap this month was setting up format translation layers so that uploading, updating, and general maintenance of blog posts and articles is much simpler. With these new systems in place it should be a lot quicker and easier for me to start posting updates and articles over on the site without huge time investments. I still need to set up proper template systems, but I’m focusing on the main page and navigation for now. I will most likely be overhauling the main page with a temporary landing page that has links to all my modern stuffs and features a list for posts, while hosting the old site at michaelpstanich.com/old so it’s still accessible while I refresh everything and migrate any content I see desire-able. (I really want to get things set up enough that I can use my own site as a distribution source, Project Sugar Cake, several articles, and image posts do not currently meet my goal of 3 distribution platforms.)

I’ve fallen a bit behind on AI stuff lately given I’ve had my focus on much more creative projects lately, but I haven’t abandoned anything! This month I experimented more with how to continue with a custom trained model as I build a custom database for images. I.. can’t remember if I announced that project? Basically I’m still working on making AI models! Despite CivitAI staff trying to harass me and intimidate me into leaving the industry, I’ve not given into their vile behavior and still have ambitious goals! (seriously, I’ve had to block at least 30 Discord accounts from them constantly trying to harass me, it’s getting REALLY pathetic at this point.) I’ve also been making some moves to updating some existing AI models, although SD1.5 has been slowly falling out of favor with many moving to PonyXL and Animagine 3.1, many SD1.5 models still offer some incredible quality with unique styles and concepts not seen in XL models, and with my own models focusing on trying to be very different in style this holds especially true. SpiritMix - Soft and Cutesy will most likely be the next update in this regard as I’ve refined a lot of my systems since releasing that model, and have some additional mix knowledge/resources I think will improve the overall model to put it more in-line with my other output. Additionally I will be hosting my models on my own site as well, I have some concepts in my head but I’m currently investigating how to implement them before really refining the design.

Just wanted to leave a little note here about Succubus Heart! I had been planning to make some updates to Succubus Heart for a few weeks now, but I keep getting distracted and focusing on Project Sugar Cake, probably a bit too much in-fact. Just wanted to leave a note here that I’ll be pushing for an update soon and didn’t intend to go without one for so long, I know people are waiting! I’m really sorry about that! Although I do try to gauge interest for what projects I should focus on (with SCake having a huge amount of interest, especially when compared to Succubus Heart) I don’t do this with the intention of ignoring other projects. It’s really just that SCake is in early development and has a lot of fundamental features that need to be implemented, while Succubus Heart is, arguably, a fully featured mod that doesn’t ‘need’ updates to be usable. Either way, I still feel bad! >.<

> Palworld Mod : Project Sugar Cake <
Project Sugar Cake 0.0.3DEV :
 GDrive : https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1iAm8sPZO1t2aO2pKcBlWvxUNY1A2HsmU?usp=drive_link
LoversLab Dev Thread : https://www.loverslab.com/topic/225549-project-sugar-cake-sex-and-stat-framework-gameplay-mod

> Article : “SCake Guide : How to set up animating and import animations for Project Sugar Cake” <
Website Link : https://www.michaelpstanich.com/article/SCake_HowToMakeAnimsGuide.html
GDrive Link : https://docs.google.com/document/d/19lh8IooHKKpmVTixP2scgWIVfZboUedNf2JDmJp5hsA/edit?usp=drive_link
LoversLab Link : https://www.loverslab.com/topic/228416-guide-scake-how-to-set-up-animating-and-import-animations-for-project-sugar-cake/

Statement : Project Sugar Cake Related : “See you all in ‘5/10/15’ years when all this is actually released!”
Response : So this has been a re-occurring sentiment I’ve been seeing related to Project Sugar Cake, and it’s a bit disheartening. Now I’m not telling people to not expect long development time for stuff like this in a usual sense, and it’ll take a while to get animations rolling for all the combinations people may want, but to say we’ve made so little progress that it’ll take another 5+ years feels a bit mean spirited. SCake is released AND usable in its current form as is, and it’s been 2 months! We’re speeding through all this stuff in a VERY quick (and honestly kind of impressive) pace, and I’m very proud of the work I’ve been able to put in! I feel a lot of this feeling probably comes from people not realizing SCake is actually out however, I see a lot of comments about ‘when it releases’ or ‘whenever they finally put up the download’ but SCake has been downloadable since February? I’m wondering if people just assume it’s not available or if they’re getting projects confused? Either way, not really an ‘answer’ but more of a response so something I’ve found a bit puzzling, hopefully it’ll clear up eventually as currently it seems to be causing a lot of confusion, which could impact our appeal to animators since if they don’t think it’s available they may not be interested, when in reality SCake is functional and ready for animations!

Question : Project Sugar Cake Related : “Are you being paid to develop Project Sugar Cake?”
Answer : This question caught me off guard as I thought I was very upfront about the costs of the project, but let me re-iterate, Project Sugar Cake is supported entirely through donations (https://subscribestar.adult/michaelpstanich ^.-) and my own desire to develop the mod. I personally like taking on interesting projects and I saw Palworld as a potential candidate with “PSC” receiving the most interest out of all the projects I proposed. I also had a personal bias toward making Project Sugar Cake because I’ve been in the modding space a long time and have seen a very concerning pattern over the last couple of years where teams with ill intentions (or maybe those who are misguided) end up starting these kinds of projects but do so in a very closed off manner and end up shutting out other creatives from making similar content. The early Palworld modding scene was a disaster, quite honestly, and I saw that it was very likely the potential of Palworld modding in this category was going to be completely squandered by teams working in such a closed off and hostile manner. As such, a large part of my motivation is to offer a more open and community focused alternative, to show people that the modding scene doesn’t have to die off as some closed-off hostile wasteland, but instead we can encourage more collaboration and prop each other up to new heights!

Now, to be clear, it’s not like I wouldn’t like to receive more donations (making this kind of work my full-time job is a dream I’d love to accomplish) but I won’t push it on anyone. I put in the work to try and offer as much value as possible with the hopes that some day it may pay off, but if it doesn’t it’s not all that big of a deal. Life moves on, ya know? And if nothing else, I get some sick portfolio pieces!

Hey, as long as I get one of these out per-week, right?

I mean, that is the goal anyways, did I mention these wouldn’t be consistent? Either way, I went hard working on Project Sugar Cake and some other projects that had me feeling a bit burnt out so after SCake’s initial release I decided to force myself to take an entire day off of working on stuff, especially since I haven’t been feeling well for a few days (have a very annoying cough >.>) and I probably needed the sleep I finally got… But hey, I’m feeling better and can’t stop thinking about the next step for various projects! This week I thought I’d talk about Project Sugar Cake and the next step, since, ya know, we had an initial release version of Project Sugar Cake 0.0.1 DEV!!! I did have a big blog entry planned for this week related to recent events, but I’ve decided I’d wait on it since I already have a lot to cover today, so maybe next week? (which is only a few days away Q.Q)

I’m making some changes in how I approach model previews on various sites that host my trained / merged AI models and how I approach posting image/video related content. For models that are not explicitly for adults only concepts I am switching to not feature R18+ content in the previews directly and instead having those post separately (13+ / Suggestive content will still be actively put in previews, I just mean explicit nudity or sexual content). Future postings will also have 18+ content separated as well, which I’ve technically been doing for a bit now but that was just to test the waters and see how this new method is received. I’ll save some of the more in-depth reasons for this when I get around to doing the full blog posting related to some rather extreme behavior we’ve been seeing over the last couple of years getting increasingly worse, but I also felt it was better to approach posts this way to help better separate the duality in my content. It’s no secret that I like sexual stuffs, but separately also like cute stuffs, however these AI content sites do not provide adequate tools for users to separate these forms of content and I’ve witnessed an unfortunately large number of people try and blend them both together in an attempt to create ammunition for harassment and personal attacks. While I despise any individual that goes out of their way to target and harass individuals in this way (I hope they live the rest of their miserable lives as unloved as their comments), I also recognize some inconsistencies in how these sites deliver content could also create associations, even if unintended, and I was not really properly considering how these systems create negative impressions.

There’s still places where this kind of things still mesh in an undesirable way, like on my CivitAI profile page where if you look at ‘posts’ then R18+ content is displayed right next to cute content.

I tried to run some engagement tests and gauge how people reacted to different types of content when posted around each other, and I found that if any ‘inappropriate’ content is posted along-side ‘innocent’ content, a large number of people will associate that innocent content with inappropriate content. An example of this is if a user posts a cute chibi with a captain hat, then a user posts a sexualized image of a woman with large breasts, massive cleavage showing, and a sexual expression on her face. Before the second image is posted and seen the chibi image is well received and seen as cute, but after the second image is posted then the chibi is now seen as inappropriate content and often now sexualized by onlookers as well as any additional innocent images. I don’t personally seem to be affected by this much as I am generally able to break associations quite easily/quickly but I also notice I am in the minority here and most individuals don’t have the same kind of mental training in critique someone like myself would. Additionally I noticed people that are more interested in anime style themes also seem to be more resistant to this phenomenon and I think it’s the ability to separate reality and fantasy much easier than your average individual. Additionally I find it interesting how many communities seem to shift in this way, where sexualized content always seems to take a precedent over innocent content, even if it’s mostly innocent content the presence of any sexual content is not seen as out of place and inappropriate and instead ‘poisons’ all content posted around it. Many AI communities are currently struggling with this and it’s led to some (like CivitAI) to become incredibly hostile toward certain creators with even moderators on these platforms going out of their way to harass individuals because of this, which has nothing to do with the creators themselves but how these sites fail to separate content and properly inform their staff of these kinds of biases.

As hostile as this sounds, I also find it probably has a lot of do with general intelligence and who these people choose to surround themselves with, but I’ll save that specific discussion for when I make that blog post regarding extremist view points which we’ve seen on the rise lately. Regardless, I’ll be taking this into account more in the future, and while some will see this as my trying to adjust for idiots (which, honestly, it is) I also think being mindful and making an attempt gives a lot of counter-ammunition to these hateful cretins and makes them look even more deprived. So I guess it’s a selfish act in the end? Seriously though, fuck these people trying to harass and target others in all contexts.

This really won’t affect proper platforms I post to like Pixiv, which solved these issues ages ago and uses common sense in regards to both methods and moderation. Discord, for example, allows me to have multiple release channels which make it easy to separate these forms of content. I’d say this would be a band-aid fix until these AI platforms start enacting common sense, but they’ve all shown they are incapable of even basic understanding of social dynamics so I doubt we’ll see much, if any, positive change and instead these platforms are more likely to start banning certain types of content outright, blaming creators for the platform’s failures as usual. Some AI platforms are already taking this ban approach like PixAI banning all NSFW content and favoring innocent anime themes or CivitAI enacting the opposite and having moderators try to harass and intimidate creators of cute content off the platform with verbal abuse and excessive content removals of innocent content. (CivitAI even hosts rape and guro content, but creators are the problem for posting a cute chibi? Fuck off.)

Female solo animation test with sped up progression example at the end of the post! ^-^
(I still don't know how to put videos in the middle of a post X.x)

The initial release for SCake is finally here! Features full support for solo player animations and importing animations, also released a simple animation pack along-side the framework which currently only includes a single solo female animation but I will try and add a few more simple animations to the pack as time goes on.

Discord - https://discord.com/channels/236233595637858304/1069961251251302400/1209285311117529148
GDrive - https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1iAm8sPZO1t2aO2pKcBlWvxUNY1A2HsmU?usp=drive_link
LoversLab Dev Thread - https://www.loverslab.com/topic/225549-project-sugar-cake-sex-and-stat-framework-gameplay-mod

Huge progress was made this week, as Project Sugar Cake was finally able to get an initial release! While I’m quite hyped by this I also recognize just how much work is still left to do, and it’s a LOT. The initial release of SCake is very limited in functionality but it does feature the complete animation import process, which is honestly one of the biggest hurdles to getting this framework off the ground. This means anyone can make an animation and then import it into the game using SCake as the base framework for playback, but I still need to implement the full proper API and release an SDK for easy importing (while also finishing the string/json parser so importing is even easier). The big news here however, with a proper release out I can now focus on smaller updates to release more quickly and show progress much more quickly! I really hate the feeling of saying “hey, I’m working on this thing” but not having anything to really show for it, so for me personally this feels like a massive leap forward. It will also be easier to add features from here on out since I don’t have to focus on a bunch of different elements just to get things functional, instead I can just built on the foundation I spent the last few weeks building up, which will be a nice change!

First, let’s cover what actually went into getting this initial release out, then cover what comes next and how I plan to improve things in the future. The bases of Project Sugar Cake is to be a framework first that would allow other mods to add animations and hook into an API to start, modify, and react to animations played by the framework and common events. There’s other plans but this is the baseline that had to be functional before a release made any sense. So this first launch has a fully built and thought out Metadata system and animation method, an importing system for animations from external mods with API calls for when to register these animations, validation filters that check if animations are compatible or if the imported metadata is even valid, then finally we have a fully custom animation handler. The metadata system and all related data structures did have to be complete before release and that was a huge time sync, but validation and compatibility check systems are still only partially complete, though they do have methods in-place they just need to be ran through and properly tested which I didn’t have time for this time around. The animation handler is also only ‘mostly’ complete as it currently lacks position adjustment and AI systems which is why it currently only supports solo player animations in this 0.0.1 DEV version.

The custom animation handler BP, it’s only going to grow from here…

Additionally I had to break off all the rust on my 3D animation bones and quickly create a solo animation to even have something for people to properly use! While words about it have been pretty kind I’m not personally impressed by it, but hey, it’s a starting point! Hopefully we can get animators interested at some point, though this has been a rough ask lately, seems I may be making a few more animations in the future to showcase the framework’s capabilities and give users something to work with. One unfortunate aspect about the palworld modding community I, and many others, have noticed is that Palworld modding seems to be very segmented and very isolated/private. It feels rare for creators to truly collaborate in an open manner and help each other out or work together to get things moving along, and those that do seem to get into these closed off groups and shut everyone else out. It’s rather unfortunate, but I hope that I can help to open up the community more and offer a showcase for more open development while encouraging others to join the fray! (anyone interested in animating? ^.-)

But yes, what’s the next step? In the LL dev thread I posted a short road-map of sorts and am following that list for now, which when complete should have the animation side of the framework fully functional.
“
 1 ) Initial release with single player animation, animation import system functioning, triggered via hotkey
2 ) Fix validation systems to ensure compatible animations are called properly
3 ) Implement placeholder stat system without persistence to ensure climax systems work and can be used
4 ) Finish position correct system and implement Pal on Pal (or with player), triggered via hotkey
5 ) Release sample pal animation and proper SDK tutorial
6 ) Implement basic UI with some settings control
7 ) ???
 “
Step 1 is already complete, and 2/3 are partially complete as of this initial release, these 2 will be updated as required while I make my way down the rest of the list. Next I am going to be focused on the positioning and AI system to get multi-character animations working, then work on the validation processes to ensure the system takes multiple actors in-to account properly. Then it’s just releasing the SDK and tutorials for it proper, and then making a simple UI for players to start adjusting animations and settings which currently isn’t possible. Sounds simple enough but there’s a lot of work here to get done. Given how much work there is to get done still I haven’t really set down exactly what I’ll work on next but I will most likely take in feedback from the community when that time comes to figure out what’s next, since once these baseline features are complete the rest is gameplay systems that could be completed in any order without major requirements relying on these systems. The one exception here being persistence, like saving settings, animation adjustments, ect, but I will most likely tackle that when working on part 6 here. Either way, future is looking bright for the framework to be in a proper usable state sooner rather than later! Still, only major concern is getting people to actually make animations for Palworld.

I plan to take it a bit easy for the rest of this week to help prevent any burn-out, but still want to work on Project Sugar Cake and do some AI related works. Nothing really set in stone, having a bit of a late start to this week since SCake took a lot longer in places than expected so I ‘feel’ behind schedule, but also feel a bit exhausted from potentially overworking myself.

1 : Demi-God AI Pack 2
2 : Project Sugar Cake 0.0.2 DEV
3 : Succubus Heart DEV version release