A Companion Program for Gravure Studio?

In a previous post, I had spoken about features I wanted to add to Gravure Studio, separated by two categories. One being features that're in my wheelhouse, and can and will be added as a matter of course when I finish them, and the second being features that would require some outside expertise to assist me. 

However, at the time I posted the article, I had neglected to mention that two people were already in the process of helping me. They've been experimenting with the code of the game using cheat engine to access memory sectors, modifying addresses and measuring the results. This is a very tedious and at times difficult process as it's not dissimilar to reverse engineering, something we must do without access to source code or a formal SDK. 

doadoa and ｃｄｂｄ graciously answered an open ended call in my Discord for help searching for an address that would toggle the visibility flag for mesh groups. To reword that in laymen's terms, it's what I use to make topless, malfunctions, bottomless, etc.. Think of mesh groups like a piece of clothing, a body part, etc...

While that specific endeavor hasn't yielded fruits yet, they did find the general memory sector for mesh groups, rather than the specific flag I was looking for to toggle them, and much to my surprise these can be toggled in real time without having to go through a load screen!

These two intrepid explorers have been experimenting a lot, adjusting breast physics values, adjusting material properties and bone position/scaling on the fly, adjusting light parameters on the fly, etc. I look forward to finding a way to incorporate these findings. 

Now, if we had the source code to Autolink, these features could be automatically injected into DOA5 and bound to hotkeys without the need of an external program or manually editing addresses in cheat engine, but alas, the author of Autolink has fallen out of touch with DOA5 modding, and despite my persistence I haven't been able to get a hold of him.

However, in spite of this, it might be a better long term solution for us to make a companion program. This will afford advanced users more control than pressing buttons on your keyboard and hearing a corresponding beep (that's not to say we're in any way getting rid of that for existing features), and ultimately rather than hoping in vein for Autolink source code that may never come, we can apply our knowledge from tinkering with memory addresses now and start giving Gravure Studio users more control over the mod, and possibly create an interface that will allow me to implement features I otherwise couldn't up until this point.

The Camera

My first order of business will be simple: more camera controls. There are two camera options that're missing from the default DOA5 controls. Perspective/FOV and camera rotation respectively.

FOV in particular is extremely important for framing a good looking shot. Generally speaking you want a very low value for closeups and a high value for wide shots. Since as I said before you can't control this value directly, you might have noticed that sometimes a shot looks very weird when you pan out the camera.

Now, if you're not that familiar with photography, perspective et all, this shot might not consciously stand out to you, but take for example this shot instead.

Again, this might not be a big deal to you, but a discerning eye will want to have control over this camera value, and I plan to add it to a companion program that will have hotkeys you can set to adjust these values yourself, or just use the ones I set. I adjusted the up and down arrow keys to automatically adjust the perspective value along with the camera zoom so that you won't have to think about it, but if you want to adjust the perspective along I also set it to adjust with page up and page down.

Poof! Clothes begone!

As most of you are likely aware, there are only a few toggles I have at my disposal for clothes. One, much like the base DOA5, piggybacks off of the hairstyle option, and the other similarly piggybacks off of Glasses. Changing these values allows me to toggle on and off mesh groups, or in the case of hairstyle swap out an object entirely. 

With cheat engine however I can set hotkeys at my own leisure, or simply allow people to sift through a menu of values at their own discretion. The latter certainly wouldn't be as convenient as an in game menu item or a button, but I think advanced users would appreciate this ability to take creative photos. 

Either way, thanks to the help of the aforementioned doadoa and ｃｄｂｄ, they've managed to point me in the direction of where the mesh flags are in memory, and now I can start bookmarking addresses, labeling them and creating a framework for cool little features, like being able to press a button and have their clothes pop off in real time, or strip off individual bits of clothing and accessories you otherwise couldn't!

This is, as you can imagine, very tedious work, as I will effectively have to start toggling binary values over and over again for all nearly 200 costumes in the game, but ultimate I think this is worth the time, because if we eventually get the source code for Autolink, these addresses will come in handy for more than just what I have in mind for the current moment.

I'd rather not say what I'm planning for this, because I'm not sure how much of it will come to fruition, so I will just leave it at that and get to work. As usual, I'm always working on improving the greater DOAHDM project, and I hope you will consider supporting me if you haven't already! That's an update on what I'm working on for now! Bye!