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

Yep, it’s another week talking about Palworld modding! (Instead of talking animation, I would like to talk about why Palworld is an interesting game to mod and what gives it so much potential!)

Anyways… This week I have some more updates regarding Project Sugar Cake! Yeah, not a typo, I changed the name this week! I had plans to change the name upon proper release but hadn’t thought of anything I liked better than the cake concept so the mod is now officially known as Project Sugar Cake (SCake for short), changed with the perception of taste. Beside, the mod adds a bit more ‘sugar’ to your game, so it’s fitting!~ (Fun fact, I was naming it “sour cake” because ‘cake’ is a drop from lovander and required breeding material, while ‘sour’ refereed to the drama that was going in the Palworld modding community at the time, which acted as a motivating factor for me to make a more open framework!) Sadly though, I had some shifts in plans as well, I originally wanted to release one of my test versions with very basic animation playback and stripped features, just to get something out there for people to have and try out almost like a proof of concept mod, but honestly my test mod has become such a mess that cleaning it up and making it user friendly would have been a massive time sink. It’s only gotten worse since then too, just look at this monstrosity!

And that’s just the main blueprint and not the macros/functions and parser tests… I’ve been doing a lot of testing... >.<

Instead, I decided to start a proper Alpha version of Project Sugar Cake! At the time of writing, I’m currently working on refining the import and metadata system as well as working on data storage to ensure I can store and save animations that have already been registered and not need to register them every time the mod boots up. I also did a bit more research on AI and trying to create my own AI actions from scratch, though I got too tired and had to put that on pause for now, but I know it’s possible! I am really close to releasing something though, and I’m personally quite hype about it, just need to make sure I get import metadata right since changing it after people make import-able animation mods could be complicated. (I’d say it’ll release this week, but I’m still not sure what other hurdles I’ll run into, like yesterday I ran into a UE5 loading quirk with mods that set me behind a few hours since I had to figure out a fixed or work-around… so no promises, but I really hope it’s by the end of this next week! =^-^=)

What makes Palworld so compelling for mods, and how is all this crazy-ness possible?

It’s not uncommon for games to release these days and people ask “mods when?” right when they’ve released. I think it’s a bit difficult for the average player to understand what makes certain games mod-able and others not so much. Thankfully, Palworld is one that IS capable of hosting some fantastic mods and, as long as the devs keep up support for the game, could have a long lifespan because of it! And today, I thought I’d take a moment to talk about what makes Palworld compelling to mod, talk about some of the internal features of the game that allow more freedom than most, and talk about my own interests as well!
 
Open and Reactive Design.

The typical style of game that tends to get a thriving mod scene tends to be those with a more open and reactive design, think back to Skyrim and how there isn’t a main structure holding things in-place or forcing the game’s systems to behave a specific way; Instead systems are strung together to create an open experience where players can choose to do what they want when they want and developers use reactive design to accomplish this. As an example, let’s look at how the player progresses through Palworld, there’s a loose objective to ‘finish’ the towers, which are basically boss fights, but really the main progression loop is just the player exploring the world, catching pals, and building to their heart’s content. The game is non-linear, you can go and do whatever you’d like, and Palworld lets you do even more than most open world games! Skyrim is very similar, right from the start you can explore pretty much the entire map, explore dungeons, start quests, go swimming and drown in the cold depths of the endless seas… anything! This open design means that mods are not tied to strict game systems, structures, or design. Palworld benefits even more from this than most, the game’s design is simple but focused on making a fun experience, allowing mods the freedom to take up that torch and extend that fun to however they see fit without having to worry about restrictive systems or design. We get to create the experience we want, which is really compelling and opens a lot of doors! In contrast, this is why most linear games rarely get much mod support toward gameplay and instead focus entirely on model/texture replacements, but there’s also another reason that really helps Palworld.

Unreal Engine, and ‘blueprint editable’.

I’m sure we’ve all probably heard of Creation Engine and the accompanying mod tools, Creation Kit. Skyrim was able to excel because it basically opened up the entire game via the mod tools provided by Bethesda, they built the game in that reactive way I mentioned before where systems are not restricted or tied down and allow systems to react to each other dynamically, and although Palworld does not currently have official mod tools the developers did do us one massive favor. At release, Palworld provided a pdb file, which allowed reverse engineering of the C++ header files, and they marked nearly all their functions in-engine as “blueprint editable” which means we can use general Unreal Engine mod tools to hook into the game and use UE5 itself to mod the game! Palworld also doesn’t encrypt their files, which means a lot of the typical hurdles on breaking into the game and its systems has already been broken down for us! This is a massive plus and is why we’re able to do such crazy things with much less effort than most other games! Huge props to the devs for this, even though at the current moment they have removed the pdb file since cheaters started using that good faith to do harm… but still, I really appreciate them providing it at release!

But more on-topic, thanks to the awesome community surrounding Unreal Engine and the modding community there’s already some extremely advanced tools that allow modding UE5 games, combine that with Palworld’s open approach and we get a very rare opportunity, it’s extremely rare we get a game with this much modding potential! Since we can use UE5 to mod the game directly, and UE4SS exists (general mod loader and script extender style mod for Unreal Engine games), we can fully develop whatever we want using Blueprints, Unreal Engine 4/5’s visual scripting language as well as lua, and with some additional work we can use C++. It’s effectively like how we had Creation Kit for Skyrim, where we have the same power as the developers in making changes and content for the game with one major exception, we still need to reverse engineer the game and figure out how things work and what systems to change to get what we want. In the future I hope the devs release documentation and official mod tools to make a lot of this easier as well as maybe adjust their internal systems to better support modding, but for a game still in development and ‘Early Access’, this is all fantastic! I don’t know if I am getting my excitement across, but for those that have followed my work for a while you may remember that I have previous UE4 experience, so for me it’s almost nostalgic in a way, going back to Unreal Engine and blueprints, but it’s also been fun to learn all these new modding tools and getting to stretch my reverse engineering legs! Making cheats and hacks for games has always been fun for me, as well as creating and modding, so combining the two has been rather addicting. (Honestly, nearly all my free time has been burnt working on Project Sugar Cake, and I’m really enjoying it!)

My personal interest.

And that’s why I’ve really taken to Palworld modding, honestly. I see a lot of potential in the game not just as a game from the developers, but also as a game from the community. I’ve been in the modding scene for a very long time, starting out making UI mods for Ragnarok Online, and I’ve only seen a game with this much potential pop-up a handful of times, and unfortunately most of those times the modding scene never takes off because the game doesn’t get popular enough or just doesn’t get the support it needs to thrive. Palworld is the perfect modding storm, it’s a fun game that hit a large audience (so the net to catch potential modders is high), and it’s very open to mods. Once you combine in this potential with my personal enjoyment of tearing into game systems and making alterations, you get a very excited modder on your hands!~ It also helps that I do enjoy the game as is, I find the simplicity in the game’s mechanics enjoyable but also feel it has enough depth to keep my interest for extended periods of time. Palworld certainly needs work and has a long road till I think anyone would call it ‘complete’ but it hit it popular for a reason, it’s just a fun game. Typically, crafty survival games don’t really appeal to me much, I tend to get bored of games like Ark Survival Evolved (which has terrible devs, honestly >.>) and don’t really care for PvP focused experienced for these styles of games like Rust. Palworld has been different though, I’ve just been casually playing it solo, building bases and wondering the world catching pals and enjoying the systems, it’s refreshing, and I don’t think that’s just because you can catch monsters like a collection RPG; Palworld is just a game trying to be fun and enjoyable, no BS monetization, no abusive game mechanics, and no ‘online only’ requirements, it’s a game to be played and enjoyed, another thing becoming increasingly rare in the gaming space. (Indie games for the win, yeah?)

No releases this week, time kind of slipped away from me near the end of the week so I didn’t even get around to uploading any AI stuffs, just been so hard focused on Project Sugar Cake.. Q.Q

And that’s the work progress stuff, been working on Project Sugar Cake! I ‘think’ I have tested nearly everything required for the proper alpha release which I hope to get out this week, still need to test imports from a project set-up separate from my own to ensure imports work as expected and I would like to do more testing for collision and positioning regarding animations since I’ve changed how I handle animations since I tested slots and collision off functions (basically need to re-test, will probably do this when I have the proper system build for animation loading). Regarding work on the alpha, I’ve been working on refining the Metadata system for importing animations a ton, my goal is to only require animators to provide their animations as a requirement, then make all the extra metadata optional. Currently, the system requires paths to the animation montage assets themselves for each actor, then an intended compatibility list, which is massively trimmed down from when I first started working on metadata which had a ton of requirements I had to find fixes and automatic systems for. If you’re curious about the metadata I’ve uploaded a .txt that explains SCake’s animation system and shows metadata. If you’re curious on what metadata can be entered when importing animations, or just want to know how the system works I recommend checking it out!

Keep in mind, all this information could change before release! I am still actively updating this doc!
Sugar Cake – Metadata.txt in in my R18+ Palworld Mods folder - https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1iAm8sPZO1t2aO2pKcBlWvxUNY1A2HsmU?usp=drive_link

Note, it doesn’t display in monospace properly so the animation examples look strange, here’s a quick screenshot of the guide formatted correctly.

Oh, right, that’s also something I did this week, I completely overhauled how I was handling animations. Man, it’s been a busy week! >.<

I’m no longer planning to hijack or integrate with the game’s internal systems and instead am building my own animation system, which is probably for the best anyways since it should stay functional (outside workaround methods) between game updates. I’ve already tested a 3 path animation progression system but I haven’t written the alpha version’s handling yet. I think the design itself is rather sound, and better yet it’s very flexible and open to user configuration! I plan to allow users to alter all the metadata an behavior of animations though an integrated UI. More major is how SCake loads and presents animations, SCake is designed around the idea of “Animation Events” where users can select various animations and string them together through “stages” with configurable elements. Not only can animators implement their own Animation Events, but users will also be able to use animations imported into the game through the framework to create their own! There’s a lot of automation behind the scenes to get this all working, it takes all the customized input from the animation to string things together automatically without the need for additional user input. I also hope to implement a string-parser that I originally built for Project Akita (Aki-bashi) a while back so users could share animation events with just a simple copy-paste! Initially however I’ll only be supporting BP implemented integration just to limit potential issues for the first alpha release, then use the parser in the next major release.

Yeah, it’s going to be a lot of work, but it’s getting done and at a pretty smooth pace! Just have to be careful not to burn myself out, that would suck. >.<

Ok, figured out how I’m going to approach this section, I’m going to talk about my plans for the week, then present projects that are currently at the top of my “to-do” list in order of severity, only showing 3 entries not to get people’s hopes up if I don’t get to something lower on the list.

This week I hope plan to work mostly on Project Sugar Cake and try to get a release out as soon as possible. I feel I’m really close to said alpha release but there’s still a lot of work to be done so it could end up taking the whole week, but I hope things go smoothly so it’s less “I found another issue that breaks everything and needs fixing” and more “I wanted to polish this aspect and add this feature.” I also have a Demi-God pack planned already, I just didn’t produce the preview image stuff and package it for release since time slipped away from me as I got distracted with SCake. If I get time there’s some testing I’d like to do for Succubus Heart, a community member let me know of some potential issues regarding the Succubus Realm’s name which messes up save metadata (no effect on actual save data) and I think we have some good leads on another bug that’s been causing a rare few users some major issues (I’d really like to finally fix that bug >.<).

2 : Demi-God AI Pack 2

3 : Succubus Heart DEV version release

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... >.>

Hey there pal, another update for ya!

Yeah, all these intros are going to be cheesy from now on, be prepared! This was a rather strange week for me as I feel like I may have hit some burn out thanks to a couple of different issues stacking on-top of each other, but this isn’t a ‘drama post’ so let’s get into some updates and plans!

When I announced I was going to try entering the Pirate Software Game Jam I did specifically say I was trying solo so that I wouldn’t let anyone down if I didn’t end up with something, and, well, seems that was a good call. As mentioned last week I got sick and it heavily hampered my productivity, which had some pretty drastic effects on what I could actually get done. But I’m not here to make excuses, ultimately I failed to create anything I thought was worthy of releasing for the game jam, meaning I didn’t enter anything. I am somewhat upset at myself but hey, it is what it is! So here’s what went down, I failed to properly prioritize my time and didn’t really push to get things done, this was partially because of the sickness but even after recovering I still felt a bit hesitant to work on it. Ultimately that meant I wasn’t able to put in the hours it required. It happens, and what’s most important is it’s not like I have to throw that work away or anything, and that’s where the future plans are. I plan to keep it as a side project if I ever feel burnt out on current projects or run into some writers block, to use the existing concept and framework to have something ‘already outlined’ to work on that should be simple to progress. Maybe it’ll release, maybe it won’t, either way it does suck that I just outright failed at this and it’s clear I still have some self improvement to do when it comes to deadlines like this.

Ok, before we make assumptions like “Nah, Michael just played Palworld the whole week! That’s why they didn’t finish the game jam game!” No, I wish that was the case though! Anyways, I was reading up on the ‘drama’ surrounding Palworld (mainly just people trying to find reasons to be angry) and in the process learned more and more about the game. Ultimately, on Friday (Jan 26th) my interest was finally peaked and I decided to give it a shot. Well, it’s a fun game! Like, no joke, I enjoy it quite a bit even though it’s fairly basic and jank. But this did bring up a question, should I mod Palworld? I think palworld as a base game has enough legs if the developer does keep updating the game, but what I really see potential in is MODS! There is a mod-kit already available with access to in-game scripts via UE5 Blueprints which basically breaks the game almost completely up, and the developer (PocketPair) has stated full mod tools will be released eventually (sooner rather than later they claim, but we’ll see). Now people were asking me to mod Starfield but that hype kinda landed like a rock on a planet without any gravity, so maybe I could take that hype and ambition to another game like Palworld?

So… should I mod Palworld? What should I try investigating and what would people be interested in? I’ll be investigating the potential over the next few days/weeks and see if it’s something that I could really dig into. That is assuming the game’s hype and momentum doesn’t completely crash. (If you’d like to see me try and mod Palworld, please let me know through the usual channels! I’d love to hear any ideas you may have!)

Only image posts this week, can check out my Pixiv with a new AI touch up! (This touch up was quite extensive, and I learned some new techniques to help excel my AI work a bit more!) CivitAI profile also has some new image posts.
Pixiv Profile : https://www.pixiv.net/en/users/54955969
CivitAI Profile : https://civitai.com/user/michaelpstanich

This week felt like a bit of a waste, not only did the time on the Game Jam game not really work out, but I also had to deal with some random harassment and drama nonsense which just set me even farther behind. Either way, moving away from said game and putting it onto the side-projects pile, this week I got some bug reports for Succubus Heart I’d like to investigate and try to get some fixes and content in a new update this coming week. I also spent some times drawing and learning new AI touch up techniques, some of which will help me make better touch ups and I’m getting comfortable with drawing regularly again (which was something I really fell behind on and felt rusty as all hell). Given this I’m looking to try doing more drawing suggestions again and would like to make that another part of my regular projects, and I don’t just mean the sketching I was already doing for game dev but actually just drawing for the sake of it with a concept separated from any other project.

There are some projects I feel behind on that I’d like to get caught up however, first off is the CivitAI follow up article. I finally think I have enough data and direction for the follow up so I’m going to try working on that this week (May or may not finish it this week, we’ll see). But before that, I’d like to release a concept article which is very much related. One of the key forms of making different generation checkpoint models is merging, however the ethics around model merges has gotten really murky and confusing. In response to this I’ve spoken to a good number of model creators (some much more talented than I am) about potential solutions to this problem. My personal response is a new merge/training disclosure method that helps solve a lot of problems with disclosing certain information while also making it easy for users to understand and read, and this method along with a guide will release in an article. The article will effectively have 2 sections, first will be the method and how it works, the second explains the system, what it does and doesn’t solve, as well as speaking about general ethics of merging/training models and how we can collaborate together for a better overall environment. AI has a lot of ethical questions still, but I’d like to challenge some of these things head on and maybe we can all benefit from it in the end!

Demi-God Pack will release tomorrow if I don’t get too distracted, otherwise…
1 : Investigate bug reports for Succubus Heart and make an update
2 : Finish up my AI Merge Disclosure method and write up the article
3 : Begin the CivitAI follow-up article
4 : Investigate interest in Palworld modding (Maybe start if interest is high)

*cough* new model release *cough*
uhg… No, that’s not subtext or anything, I’ve just been coughing a lot this week! >.<

So yeah, this week kinda sucked as I ended up getting rather sick quickly entering Tuesday, which really drained the rather great start and excitement. That means I really didn’t accomplish nearly enough for myself this week, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t get something done! In the US there were severe weather conditions all over, and here was no exception. So, to counter the cold I decided to work a lot on AI for a few days. (using my PC as a little space heater! 2 bird, 1 device!) I went into it with the goal of working on a model merge that’s been giving me trouble, and that’s when I hit some major breakthroughs and was finally able to say it was ready to release! That model became “SpiritMix – Poly Cube” which is a 3D Anime Image Model / Checkpoint! It’s rather impressive and gave me some good motivation at the start of the week! Then I got sick, and spend the vast majority of my time sleeping and struggling to focus on projects. I’m still somewhat recovering, struggling to stay awake as I type this weekly update even, but I did have energy earlier today for a bit and I’m not coughing nearly as much! Hopefully it clears up soon... >.<

 > New AI Image Model – SpiritMix – Poly Cube (3D Anime) <

I’m actually really excited for this one! Anyone who’s spoken with me regarding AI image generation knows I’ve been doing a lot of research and work into learning and understanding models and how they work. This new model is a culmination of all I’ve learned so far, blending various techniques such as fine-tuning, block merging, and what I’ve started calling micro-merge corrections. Poly Cube is still a model merge (only fine-tune is the same fine-tune from previous models, since that was merged in) but it really is the kind of model to go beyond your typical merge. My other merges were also unique and/or complex in their own ways, but Poly Cube is a model with a lot of really cool features and results not really expected of SD1.5 base models. One of my favorite features is the ability to retain art style and noise consistency through raw latent upscaling, something I only discovered after already finding a release candidate! This means the model responds really well to upscaling and keeps visual consistency relatively easily while generating at a base resolution of 768x or even 1024x really well for SD1.5.

I’ve posted some samples over on Discord, and you can also see more through my normal image releases or on CivitAI!

Download Links :
HuggingFace : https://huggingface.co/michaelpstanich/SpiritMix-PolyCube
CivitAI : https://civitai.com/models/266244

Major set-back this week with being sick, so not much progress after the break-through I mentioned with Poly Cube. I spent a lot of time this week just messing with AI and some minor database type stuff, just couldn’t keep myself focused long enough to really get good work done once I started feeling the effects of whatever cold strain I got. The major victim here is the Game Jam project which I’ll have to cut-back quite a bit as things are barely rolling. I still don’t have a proper name for it, though I did come up with a couple ideas, but we’ll just keep using the project name, Corrupted Cube. (ironic naming given my model release name, but I assure you it was entirely coincidence, as I’ll explain! >.<)

Project : Corrupted Cube
I’ve had to pair back things quite a bit as I really didn’t dedicate the time required, but here’s the current plan. Corrupted Cube sees you playing a dishonored knight who is mislead into raiding a village under the king’s order along with several other knights. When entering the village they are told to kill monster in sight, as they are horrendous terrorists, the commander of the unit holding up a shining stone that glimmers with a faint yellow aura. From here, the knights slay the monsters that resided there, burning down structures, destroying every crop, and eventually breaking down the doors to the massive shrine that lay in the back of the village. The first one to enter is our knight, the one to reach for a mystical artifact that lay otherwise undisturbed in this dark shrine, and suddenly the truth meets his eyes. After seeing how the yellow gleam was a sight of deceit, this knight is now imbued with the powers of corruption, and swears to take revenge on the king to end this yellow glimmer once and for all.

Originally I had plans to create a small explorable map (2D JRPG style) but with time now even more limited and me questioning my capabilities to actually get things rolling how I want them I’m limiting scope. The central mechanic is the fighting gameplay which revolves around the knight ditching sword and shield and instead embracing the cube for combat. In combat the cube creates smaller cubes in a grid, the player selects cubes adjacent to corruption points to corrupt all cubes of the same color/shape (shapes are included for color blind accessibility). Each corrupted cube is counted toward an action count, when enough action points are gathered the knight can attack with different skills, the more corrupted cubes the player can manage the more powerful the skill. There’s some other mechanics here I will need to play with, but that’s the general idea, so for this project I am going to entirely focus on this idea. So the map is ditched and will instead just be a linear path between combat encounters with a light reset mechanic from death, where corruption is gained the farther the player gets and a small corruption map is expanded as the player gets stronger and expands their strengths as a light RPG mechanic. The idea is to spread the corruption far enough to reach the king and put an end to the glimmer that misguides so many.

Simple this week.
1 : Work on Game Jam game (Project Corrupted Cube)
2 : Touch up some AI images to release
3 : Finish setting up another Demi-God pack (didn’t do this last week >.<)

Another week, another being busy!

...

 Ok, that made no sense. Anyways, Got another weekly update post to go over, so no time for the foreplay nonsense!

> Game Jam Time??? <

Brief announcement, I will be joining the Pirate Software Game Jam! ( https://itch.io/jam/pirate )
I’m currently just working alone as I wasn’t sure if I wanted to try finding a group if I found I didn’t have time or desire to push forward, but I think it’ll be a good chance to stretch outside my currently running projects and release something small! The theme of this game jam is “It’s Spreading” and I already have a concept I’m working on, there’s other requirements and such but you can check the link for more details. Supporters will get access to builds once I have them available, then once it’s submitted the game will be free for everyone to give a try! The game jam is running from January 12th 2024 6:00 am to January 26th 2024 6:00pm (PDT I think?), wish me luck!

Side note, if anyone is interested in joining me on this venture and want to be on a team with me, I am more than open to accept! Just contact me on Discord as you usually would and we can chat about it! (The rules allow for teams of up-to 5 members in size)

> Update on the CivitAI situation regarding Clubs, Paywalls, Ect. <

Last week I had put out a large article talking about CivitAI and the release of a features they called Clubs, which was a thinly veiled paywall feature which has a large number of dangers attached for not just the AI community, but also creatives as a whole. I went over a lot in my article. ( Link here – SubscribeStar – https://subscribestar.adult/posts/1135370 / CivitAI – https://civitai.com/articles/3651/civitai-clubs-paywalls-pay-gates-and-the-dangers-they-propose ) Since then, after seeing the massive amount of feedback from all over the AI community, CivitAI took down the Clubs feature and put out a follow up article talking about future plans. ( Link – https://civitai.com/articles/3694 ) The article is long and has a lot of interesting ideas, I won’t be going over this article like I did the last, but I will be writing a follow up article soon speaking more about the community. I did, however, want to point out that CivitAI does seem to be on a much better track than before.

Full disclosure, after my article, Justine Maier (known on CivitAI as JustMaier) reached out and offered me a chance to speak with him, as he wanted to speak with me to understand my thoughts in more depth and get feedback on some of the future ideas they were preparing to present, and was even shown much of the article they released before it was ready to provide my own feedback. I’ve spoken in the past about how I’ve communicated with the Team at CivitAI directly before, but I still feel it’s important to mention as it could create a bias. The CivitAI posting of the previous article also has comments between Maier and I (completely public) about various issues regarding the systems, and if you’re interested in more from the CivitAI team themselves I’m not the only one they took the time to respond too. I did get permission to speak about this in my follow up article I will be working on soon.
 
To wrap up this little update, I just thought it was important to recognize that CivitAI was able to take feedback, realize the community’s concern, the mistakes they’ve made, and work toward correcting those issues in a very public way, if you haven’t given their new article a look or given your feedback, I highly recommend you do! It’s important that we praise companies when they are able to recognize the potential harms of their actions and are able to course correct to something better for everyone involved. Although it may be the bias I mentioned earlier, I don’t think the CivitAI team had any ill-intent in any of this, they were simply misguided by dangerous voices that very much exist and will continue to try and push us toward a worse place, but if we keep our voices heard and collaborate on issues like this, we can keep this space a fun and welcoming one for the foreseeable future. This, will be what my follow-up article tackles. I hope you end up reading it when it comes out!

> “Out of Disk Space” <

So… this happened. I won’t get into much detail (maybe I’ll reveal the full details of the projects that caused this in a later weekly post) but it did end up taking an unfortunate amount of my time away this week. In-short, I’ve been building datasets and have a lot of AI model work going on that has started stretching my storage limits quite extensively. However, I currently operate at a loss, so I can’t just go out and buy some expensive storage solutions, as much as I’d really love to. Q.Q But yeah, without boring everyone’s ears off, I had to figure out some new storage strategies for my current hardware and really cut-back on my data hoarding habits. I’m experimenting with new data management tactics and if it all works out maybe that’s a future article in the works? Guess we’ll find out if 2 weeks from now I’m still complaining about having no more storage space! >.<

> Skyrim Mod – Succubus Heart 5.3.3 DEV (With Basic OStim Support!) <

DL Link : https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1yqt2P0fu2JRsjOIcuD7kAa03JuQ3rvZw?usp=drive_link

Succubus Heart got a massive update this week with a new Framework detection and switch feature! Currently it supports SexLab and OStim Standalone, though it could theoretically support more if that was ever required. The catch? I don’t know much about OStim so I’m struggling to test stuff… However, if you’re an OStim Standalone user and would like to help out please feel free to join the discord and give the new Succubus Heart 5.3.3 DEV a try! This also comes with other features and upgrades of course, changelogs in the usual place!

 OStim limits I’m already aware of…

This week was kind of a mess and I hardly followed my original plans, but hey, that’s life I guess. ^-^’
 Ultimately, this week was dedicated mostly to getting Succubus Heart with OStim support working properly and researching more into the LLM translation workflow I spoke about 2 weeks ago. I originally only planned to get a dev environment set up for OStim but it was really nagging me so I braved it and asked the OStim community for help. This, along with support from our awesome community, helped me get over the last few hurdles to getting things running and working properly! So yeah, as mentioned, Succubus Heart now supports OStim! But… it’s not all rainbows and sunshine. I originally planned to make a script and translation sheet system for Succubus Heart to re-compile in various languages while working with the community to refine translations starting as LLM output. However, my attempts at this script didn’t really work out like I thought it would for technical reasons (has to do with character set handling in psc files and how they are compiled) so I instead had to go a much more complex route for me, which is using xTranslate and learning how to export a sample translation so people can build upon it. This is probably where I should have started, but it’s still not ideal, Succubus Heart uses a LOT of custom strings and builds them over time with item names and such, so going into xTranslate blind isn’t a good experience, but hopefully I can figure out a way to make this more consistent. (Investigating a way to make my proposed translation script thingy but for xTranslate instead) For those unaware, xTranslate is a translation tool specifically built for Creation Engine games, so this method won’t carry over to other projects unfortunately

Other than that, aside from a-typical communication stuffs I mentioned earlier, I had to shift focus onto my storage situation. While I was working on Succubus Heart I was also shifting around databases, reorganizing files, finding/deleting duplicates, and doing general maintenance. Despite my Skyrim install being on a fast as hell M.2 Nvme SSD, it still takes ages to load up, same with CK, so it left a lot of small windows for work to get done. I also, probably against my best interests, to rewrite the booba article from scratch and will be working on that in small amounts. Another random tangent, it got super cold here (-8 f degrees was the low yesterday) and this house wasn’t really built for this so I decided to work on one of my model merges as an excuse to use my hardware as a bit of a space heater! Was productive too! I found some new merge chains that I think will lead one of my merges to the finish line, hope to try and see if it all works this week then iron out final issues while testing!

Also worked on some AI image touch-up stuffs with the intention of posting to Pixiv like I mentioned, but I’m slow, so it didn’t happen. X.x

Going to focus rather heavily on the Game Jam stuff and finishing some plans from last week while shifting focus.