I got distracted.

No, like really REALLY distracted! It was Palworld’s fault! Or, more accurately, modding palworld’s fault. So last week I had a couple of plans with an article to finish, some writing to do, maybe release a Demi-God pack. But, alas, after I got feedback and suggestions on what to work on for a Palworld mod I got inspired and motivated, and by motivated I mean “a bit obsessed.” Anyways, got a write up of my modding experience with Palworld, announcing a new project and some really interesting tidbits about my progress!

I guess this is somewhat of a bit announcement? Last week I asked for feedback both from our Discord community and over on Lover’s Lab, while also patrolling the internet looking for suggestions on what kind of project I should work on for Palworld. And, well, it’s a bit of a big one with a rather interesting reason behind it. Project Sour Cake is a work-in-progress Sex and Stats Framework for Palworld! Yeah, I know, sounds like a lot of work, and yeah, it will be! But I’m determined, now even more than ever, and let me explain a bit. The modern creatives scene is in a very poor spot right now, there’s constantly people chasing that next thing for clout, money, and status, and we saw it hit really hard and fast with Palworld. Within’ a day of release there were people already making large promises for walled off mods of grand scale. I was a bit late to the scene, I was skeptical if Palworld would even be any good, but when I did jump in I got to see the heat of this drama at its peak. I’ve now seen 4 other ‘animation frameworks’ be promised, however, unlike the open and caring types of modders we’ve seen in the past who are open about their project and collaborating with the community. All 4 of these projects are closed off with creators either being secretive or just outright refusing to speak about it, and they won’t collaborate with the community, both in terms of sharing information but also taking in feedback and ideas. So, that’s where I come in, I am going to be developing Project Sour Cake as a more open and friendly project, one where I both take feedback from the community, and collaborate with the community, so we end up with not just a framework, but a better modding scene overall. Of course, at this moment there’s no actual framework out yet, and it’s possible one of these more closed off sources provides a better experience right away, but I’m confident that if I get the chance to really develop Project Sour Cake, we can make something unlike the rest.

Interest Gauge Thread on LL - https://www.loverslab.com/topic/225286-modding-palworld-ideas-and-proposal-direction-decided-still-taking-suggestionsfeedback/
Project Announcement Thread on LL - https://www.loverslab.com/topic/225549-project-sour-cake-sex-and-stat-framework-gameplay-mod/

Sounds all peachy right? Unfortunately it’s not always so bright, I have made major progress but that doesn’t mean getting a framework going is going to be easy! I have a bit of a story to tell here, with some good news, and some bad. This round of news is about importing custom/unique animations! (Looking for animators by the way, if you’re interested please contact me!)

The good news? I got custom animations imported into the game without major issues!~
[Example video of an Arm-Wave test at the bottom of the post, couldn't figure out how to move it in the blog >.<]

The bad news? It’s a massive pain to set up manually, and will continue to be a thorn in our sides until mod tools improve.

Let me start with where my issues started and we’ll work through it. There’s a couple of warnings you get when you start modding certain parts of Palworld, and a rather prevalent one here is “don’t edit the Skeleton, and don’t include a Skeleton with your mod.” This is a pretty big deal, we know custom skeletons are important for the future of great animations and frameworks, so what’s the hold up? Unfortunately, it has to do with some very deeply ingrained choices from PocketPair (the devs of Palworld) and how UE5 works. We, as modders, do not currently have the tools to export the fully compressed Skeleton created within UE5 from the devs, I’ll touch on this in a second, but instead we just have to extract a skeleton from another asset, specifically a Skeleton Mesh. These skeletons seem alright at first glance, as they are specifically designed for the mesh they are attached to, so you can extract it and get your mesh animating just fine, but unfortunately once you try to import it into the game, things go wrong. You’ll start seeing your character spin and deform in ways you never thought imaginable, corrupted and bugginess that would make the OG Skyrim devs blush! It’s not a good time, and the solution is hard to find.

What was the choice that caused this ruckus? UE5 has a feature where it compresses Skeleton and Animation data into simplified data for the sake of memory and performance. It’s a great feature, it means you can have really complex objects with tons of animation bones without massive performance issues! The problem? The devs abused the HELL out of it. How does it work and why is it a problem here? Since we can’t actually extract this compressed skeleton, it means we can’t get the proper indexing order of different bones, and it just so happens that UE4/5 uses that indexing to reference animations and skeleton bones once you’re actually in-game. This means you could load up an animation and it’ll reference bones as normal in the editor, but once you load it in-game it breaks because the index order of the bones has changed. This doesn’t affect every character in the game mind you, but it does affect a rather large number and gets worse the deeper you look. An additional feature that this compression feature allows is shared skeleton data across similar meshes, typically using re-targeted animations. Palworld uses a ton of these for the “human” type characters, meaning there are 1211 bones in the ‘human’ skeleton! Now, to the Dev’s credit, that must have been no small feat putting bones in for literally anything that could move, but damn is this going to make our lives harder.

So why does this happen? When you are working on these kinds of projects you typically have a starting point and then build on that starting point. Standard stuff, right? But here’s the problem, since the developers were going to be updating things as development went along it also meant that as new characters/objects/needs arised through development they had to add additional bones to the compressed skeleton. Every time they needed to add a new character, boom, new bones! New hair shape, new back pack with an extra flap to apply physics too? Oh, but what about that cap on the merchant, that needs to wave! All honorable additions, however ever time they made those additions, if the devs didn’t completely re-import all their skeletons then they would have a mis-match of the index order I mentioned earlier and their animations would break! To fix this, UE5 automatically puts the new bones at the bottom of the indexing order, pre-baked animations outside of the game will still reference specific bones, but UE5 notes that new order when cooking/packaging a game project. This means the indexing order is no longer based on bone hierarchy, but instead arbitrary based on whatever order the developer’s added things. Since we don’t have access to those original skeleton assets, and we can’t directly export the hierarchy with proper indexing, it means our exports of that skeleton data mis-match. With meshes we can just exclude the skeleton and never have to worry about it, remember, before things are baked/packaged into a game everything is still referenced by name instead, so it all works great, but in-game we’re working with assets out of our control. This also affects our ability to add new bones to meshes as well, but that’s unfortunately outside my wheelhouse at the moment, but we (the modding community) are starting to look for solutions and making progress!

Ok, but how do we fix it? The short answer? We don’t. Sound grim, but let me explain, because we don’t have to actually fix it. There’s 3 solutions currently for animations, first is find a way to export and use those compressed skeletons. With those skeletons we’d have the proper index and access to all the bones without any tricks or foolery. Second, we bake every model with a new skeleton and export+import every base game animation for our new skeleton overloard. Or, and this is my solution, we create re-sorted versions of these skeletons with mesh set-ups using a variety of tricks. This is the preferred method as it doesn’t conflict with the game and allows the best compatibility with future mods! However, it’s not exactly ‘easy’ to get going, to do this you need to extract the proper bone index order from the original skeleton file, then replicate that order within every exported mesh you work with in regards to animations. For the human model most things can be animated from a single skeleton, so although it has 1211 bones, most are not actually related to the body at all, so we just fill in the gaps and re-parent bones until the index matches. It’s tedious, but it works! The major drawback here is that there are over 100 individual meshes with different skeletons, so that’s going to take a long while to get set-up. There’s also another minor issue, the exporter which we typically use, Fmodel, interprets UE5 ‘sockets’ as bones as well, so those need to be removed since they are not part of the bone index order. Oh, and one last thing, we want to avoid editing those gap-filling bones and leave them without animation data unless you want to go through and mesh+weight paint for it on every model that lacks them. Yeah, fun stuff. (If you need help or want to know my method, feel free to contact me on Discord ^-^)

Plan, got one? For now, I want to see what the community comes up with while I manually work out some of these models into animate-able .blend files and collaborate with interested animators. (which, if you are someone that would like to animate scenes for Palworld, I would appreciate the help! ^-^) The collaborative members of the Palworld modding community have made modding for the game speed at an insane pace, so I’m sure we’ll have a solution eventually, but for me I will move my focus onto actually getting the framework up-and-going to get more animators interested and start putting more focus on the issue. Hopefully, with those efforts, we can get something that works for everyone! I will, however, be making an animator’s guide and publishing it, preferably on the Palworld modding wiki, to help future Palworld explorers!

Short story, how did I find it? Was rather silly actually. When I started modding Palworld I jumped right into the coding aspect, I had already gauged interest on what people wanted to I had a goal, but this meant I did skip some of the basic steps other people were taking. This meant when I tried to get animations going I had to then go back and fix a ton of things with just exporting/importing content to/from the game. But ultimately what tipped me off was noticing that when I did a wave-arm test (T-pose character with arms moving up and down, easy animation test to do quickly) the left arm was animating correctly even after the rest of the mesh exploded and went terribly wrong. This told me the front order was correct, and it wasn’t long before I noticed in the UE5 editor that the bone index order was incorrect. This lead me to doing research on UE5 and its handling, I also remembered a user on the modding discord, who goes by the name “Shifty” had mentioned something about bone index when adding bones to meshes. Their information helped accelerate my own research and I found the solution after some more digging into the game-files and understanding more about UE5 animations.

Anyways, write up over, quite the story, but now we have working animations! My next goal is to get some basic AI stuff working and to create a ‘solo player’ animation to have something to actually release and get public! (hopefully I can get this done by the end of the week?)

> Succubus Heart 5.3.1 Release
Just a bug-fix update, fixed a menu error and BDSM Rating being calculated incorrectly. It was requested so I took time between Palworld modding to get out an update. Still would have liked to work on some other bugs but didn’t make much progress on my little time working on it. (oh well >.<)
Download Link : https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1yqt2P0fu2JRsjOIcuD7kAa03JuQ3rvZw?usp=drive_link

I did a huge write up above, so I’ll be brief here. Basically just worked on Palworld modding the whole week after starting mid-tuesday, have had a LOT of progress. Basically been reverse-engineering the game, finding functions for the framework and learning a lot about the internals of the game. Honestly, with my current knowledge we could get a basic framework up and going, it’s just going to take time to build it, and of course we’re going to run into bugs/issues along the way for sure.

I was using this section to talk about what I planned for the week, but I think I’m just going to list projects I am actively working on in-order of things I intend them to release in? I don’t really know how to do this section well yet. >.<
1 : Release a very stripped-down and basic version of Project Sour Cake. (hopefully to start some interested from animators)
2 : Release a dang Demi-God pack.
3 : Finish AI Merge Disclosure article
4 : Work on Update for Succubus Heart
5 : Begin the CivitAI follow-up article
5 seems like a lot, but I never followed the weekly plan anyways... >.>