Update Post - Succubus Heart 5.3.4 DEV [Skyrim Mod]

Worked on some requested additions/QOL/and fixes, also did a ton of testing and alterations for OStim specifically to help fix up some issues. This update comes with improvements to the multi-framework support, now allowing both SexLab and OStim to be used at the same time properly! (You can set what your preferred framework is in the Status MCM, while SexLab should select automatically if it's installed and is recommended you can toggle it to OStim and Succubus Heart will start OStim animations instead of SexLab ones). Still haven't finished the validator but more info will be in the SubscribeStar post if you're curious on more!

Download Links :
GDrive : https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1yqt2P0fu2JRsjOIcuD7kAa03JuQ3rvZw?usp=drive_link
Mega : https://mega.nz/folder/xgBQDJRQ#4ucsQDMkY1thmkfM6sjy5g

The adventures of trying to ‘fix’ OStim Support

One of the major struggles with supporting multiple frameworks has really just been me not fully understanding how OStim works on an internal level. SexLab is well established with a long history and a foundation that’s built fairly linearly, and I’ve been around that entire time so I’ve been able to slowly adjust over time as I learn and expand my own capabilities. But OStim has a very… uh.. ‘mixed’ past, filled with confusing changes, foundational changes, and the new OStim Standalone we use now is made by a new team with fresh ideas on how things should be done. This has made understanding and debugging specific issues with OStim difficult to debug and get right, I’ve had people report now issues while others have consistent game crashes and weird issues. But this was to be expected, but it has caused some issues. SexLab has its own issues to fix and over time I’ve been able to identify where those holes are and account for them, the issue is OStim not only has many of those same holes and requires the same fixes, but also has additional holes that are remarkably inconsistent! While working on this latest update we were able to find a bug that was only crashing my game every 1 out of 10 animation starts, I applied a work around and now it’s gone but for another user they still crash nearly every time (and when they don’t their game soft-locks).

This update was originally planned to have a custom ‘validator’ which validates if characters are valid for animations and if the situation allows it, but this inconsistency is why I held off and worked on other fixes instead. For SexLab they have a validator already, so I had always just used that with a handful of additional checks when required, but OStim has no such validation and this is what’s leading to the crashes and inconsistency issues I just wrote about. This means building an efficient validator is taking a lot more brain power than initially expected, I figured doing a quick replication of what SexLab does but optimized for Succubus Heart would be more than enough, but it actually failed for OStim checks and was inadequate. After this recent update I’ve determined there’s still a lot wrong with OStim on a foundational level which breaks when conditions are not as the dev team expected, which causes some problems given Succubus Heart is not really conventional.

My solution is to create 2 individual validators, this means I’ll work on an optimized validator for SexLab, then basically add an additional validator for OStim which will hopefully apply work-arounds as we find them until they are either fixed in OStim or a better solution is found. The issue is some of these fixes may not be applied by the OStim devs given their stances on certain types of content. SexLab is very open and compatible with whatever people really want to do, which is nice and allows Succubus Heart a lot of freedom such as full Soul Pets support with creatures, allowing in-combat animations, forcing aggressive/passive roles, ect. OStim however, not only blocks many of these functions but may even be forcing out-right crashes. This showed up while we were debugging Combat Seduction, which allows triggering animations in combat. SexLab animations play and work as expected, even allowing combat to continue if so desired, OStim on the other hand applied a ton of scripts and checks to then stop animations, lock character movement, and even crash the game (though I don’t know if the crashing is intentional or not). To ‘fix’ it I applied some combat stop functions and wait timers, but it doesn’t seem to work in every instance or game. So in the end, this just means OStim will always be buggy under certain circumstances, and this ‘may’ be by design. Logically I ‘should’ disable features that would lead to these causes, but for now I’ll leave them enabled for people that can get it to work properly and we’ll hopefully have a solution at some point!

All-in-all I guess that’s just a long-winded way of saying, OStim support will probably continue to have issues far into the future and I don’t think many of these issues are actually caused by Succubus Heart, but instead OStim itself. Hopefully we get some fixes in the future! (Remember, if you have any issues with Succubus Heart, please let me know! It’s because of bug reports and user support we’re able to find these issues and hopefully fix them! With more data we may figure out a proper solution!)