stationmaster

Progress Update: New Character Engine

Added 2024-01-10 23:02:54 +0000 UTC

Thanks for your patience all! This update has a lot of AI techniques that I haven't seen anywhere else, which means it has involved a ton of trips back to the drawing board. It's coming together now though, enough that these screenshots should be pretty close to what goes into the final game. Part combination, character animation, and facial expressions are working the way they will in the final build (though my task list still has something like thirty tweaks to images and rigging that need to happen). It's now mostly a matter of cleaning up that stuff at the edges, and creating more content to add to the rotation (things like matching faces for the people you get from the old events, the rest of the animations/sex positions, and a clothing system).

I'm incredibly excited about it though, and I think the screenshots give a good idea as to why. It's not done yet (and I still don't have a concrete ETA), but I don't think there will be any more major surprises. Some random tidbits:

There is so much variety that you will never see two identical characters unless you intentionally make them that way.
All of the events involving people already on your station have been replaced with completely rewritten ones in the visual novel-y style of the last two patches. They now have a lot more to do with the character's unique background, and are generally more interesting.
Jiggle physics survived the transition to 2D, and are more pronounced than ever.
This has been the most complex patch to SM2 by a wide margin, but has created a minimum of horrifying abominations (though there was recently a bug that caused hair to grow out of some characters' eyes).