everlaster

Development status

Added 2024-03-15 10:02:13 +0000 UTC

New UXPlus module: Alternate Plugins List

I've been working on this new module a few days, it's been quite a slog to get it to the state shown in the screenshot and there's still many problems to solve. But I've learned a lot. Modifying the VAM user interface at runtime is hard, the main issue being that all changes to the UI need to be reversible so that the default UI is restored when the feature or UXPlus itself is disabled. I'm not importing any custom UI prefabs from Unity and creating a new UI from scratch, I'm resizing and modifying the existing elements that VAM creates.

Features

Compact plugins list that fits up to 7.5 plugin panels in one scroll view, compared to just 4.5 plugin panels in the default design - should be much more comfortable to manage large numbers of plugins
"Reload" stores the plugin's parameters in memory before triggering the actual reload, and "Restore pre-reload" allows you to restore those parameters at any time after reloading - reloading will no longer be a headache with plugins where a lot of parameters have been modified!
Fixed width - if the vertical scroll bar appears, it won't cause the elements to resize
Add Plugin button automatically opens the plugin file browser instead of just creating a new blank plugin that you need to scroll to (this will be a configuration option)
TODO: Support all plugin lists rather than just the session plugins list
TODO: Implement generic plugin/script specific Preset Management
TODO: Investigate if it's possible to add a filter text input field on the top, and filter the shown plugin panels, e.g. search "Timeline" and hide everything else
TODO: Investigate possibility of adding a package icon next to plugin path for plugins loaded from var (hover over and navigate to package manager, similar to e.g. clothing items)

About Preset Management

This will make it possible to manage individual plugin presets of any plugin - it will no longer be necessary for a plugin to have its own custom preset save/load system when using UXPlus. It will also be possible to set user defaults for any plugin.

In the screenshot this is shown as a button on the top row, however this will probably moved to the sub script level. It needs to be possible for different scripts within an overall plugin to have their own preset management (for example, preset management for BootyMagic and TittyMagic separately as opposed to Naturalis overall).

I'm going to try to harness VAM's existing preset management for this but if that turns out to be too difficult to do, I can create a simple custom system. VAM's preset management UI is somewhat overcomplicated anyway.

Scene Event Triggers

This is another small utility plugin, it's almost complete. It's an experimental session plugin that allows you to hook into "on scene loaded", "on before scene saved" and "on scene saved" events and create triggers for them that execute with any scene that has the parameters that you're triggering.

"On scene loaded": trigger something you want to happen immediately after a scene is loaded. Example: always merge load a plugin preset to an atom or to scene plugins.
"On before scene save": when you always want to store some value in the saved scene file. Example: set "Person" atom to be enabled before saving a scene.
"On scene saved": This executes immediately after the scene was saved. Anything you trigger here doesn't persist in the save file. Not sure what you'd use this for :)

I'm not expecting this to be anything revolutionary, it's just currently not possible to hook into these events and adding that possibility is relatively easy.

It would also make sense for this plugin to be possible to add to the scene plugins or to an atom so the trigger actions are specific to that scene.

Other stuff

I would love to work on the clothing indentation plugin, but at the moment it's just not a priority. I will announce if/when I start working on it again! (See the proof of concept post from June 2023.)

I had the idea of an asset preloader plugin that loads all asset, clothing, textures etc. referenced in a scene file, and then loads the scene itself, ensuring that the assets are in memory or cached for faster loading during scene playback. Do you think this would be useful? This could be a possible side project once I'm done with other side projects.

Naturalis

Regarding the joint angle based morphs system I talked about, I'm leaning towards releasing it as a separate plugin after all. The reason is that I want to get it out to free users sooner rather than later so that the community has the opportunity to start creating and using custom morphs that adjust with joint angles, and to use the plugin as a dependency in looks. Naturalis 1.4 will only become free when 1.5 is done, and that is so far in the future that it doesn't really make sense for this system to be part of that timeline.

I've also made some progress on PussyMagic, but nothing to show just yet.

For the next WIP update, I will try to put together a report on custom morphs.

With all of these projects ongoing, it's likely that it will take a good while to develop Naturalis v1.4. Perhaps twice as long as v1.3 took just going by feel. However, it should be possible to complete PussyMagic indepedenently of the morph related improvements. As a very rough and uncertain timeline, expect something like this: