WIP Custom Character Model Support

I am, once again, sorry for posting so little! There has been a lot going on, lately, and while I've continued to work on the game, I simply didn't have a lot to show for it. So, about time I share some updates!

Eurofurence 27

Earlier this month was Eurofurence 27, for the first time here in Hamburg, my home town!

I had a great time and, what I can say, having a furry convention around the corner to where you live is pretty damn convenient.

Hanging out with Hoop, Manikobunneh, and KTqtpi: The weather was ridiculously sunny, so I got the chance to wear every single floral pattern T-shirt I own.

I didn't do good job showing off the game, at the convention, but this time I wanted to focus on hanging out with friends and having a good time!

My next planned convention will be NordicFuzzCon in Malmö, Sweden, again: And this time I want to put more effort into handing out a bunch of Pawperty Damage stickers. So if you're planning to come to Sweden, next February, come grab some!

Custom Character Model Support

Now, back to business. Being able to import custom characters has been one of the most requested features for the game since day one; and for the longest time I've been reluctant to make any definite promises, because I knew that a lot of work would have to go into making it happen... Suffice to say, I'm pretty confident now that it's going to work, haha.

Step 1: Rework setup/animations for standard humanoid characters

The four default Pawperty Damage characters use a non-standard humanoid animation rig, which is a problem when you want to swap them out with whatever character model: While the basic skeletal structure is the same (foot, hip, chest, head, etc.), my characters are digitigrade, rather than plantigrade. This means rig and animations can't simply be applied to a normal human model... So I had to re-work a whole bunch of my animations, to make them work with generic humanoid characters.

I've grabbed some free models from the Unity Asset Store to test my animations and character setup:

Look, I now have both kinds of video game characters: Half-naked sci-fi lady and generic buff dude.

I've also tested with a character model from Friends vs Friends—not only were their developers kind enough to upload the game's character rigs to itch.io for free, but it's a really fun game, too!

Step 2: Allow for additional configuration

To make a character work in the game, there need to be a number of things that have to be set up, such as hit boxes.

I've done my best to make this process as automatic as possible, so hopefully results for new character models will be okay, out-of-the-box.

But some things may require tweaking. Stuff like...

• What's a car's position in the character's hand, when held?
• Where is the character mouth, when taking a bite?
• Does the character's overall size/scale need adjustments?

To allow for some tweaking/corrections, there's a number of values that can be played around with in a JSON configuration file, for each custom character.

At the moment, that configuration might look something like this:

Some of those values are pretty straight-forward, such as the character's biography or the overall scale—other values will be tricky to figure out, such as the different position offsets.

I'll have to see how this goes, exactly... Worst case I'll have to create some in-game tool to allow folks to set up custom character models, so it doesn't end up being frustrating guesswork.

Step 3: Disable high scores and achievements

In the screenshot above, you'll see an icon at the bottom left of the character which means "high scores and achievements are disabled when playing with this character."

This is necessary, because custom character models can affect the game balancing: A character might have ridiculous proportions, giant fists, etc.—so, to keep things fair, some feature will be disabled when playing custom characters.

Step 4: ...VRM?

So, all of this is looking pretty promising, already!

There's still a whole bunch of things still missing. Most importantly, support for VRM files.

VRM is a standardized file format for character models and is used, for instance, by VRChat.

By allowing players to import VRM models into Pawperty Damage, they'd be able to import existing avatars/models, which would definitely make everyone's lives a lot easier!

Thanks for your Support!

I hope the custom character features will go into beta, soon; it depends on how long the VRM implementation will take me, really: When it's looking good, I'll make another announcement and post more progress updates!