Plugins Life

The Version 13 update helps with making the Gaze plugin more compatible with AcidBubbles Glance plugin. I have also added a demo scene that shows how Glance and Gaze can be used together to make characters look around randomly. See video below. Obviously the goal here is to use this kind of plugin setup in my DoubleTrouble scene.

Thanks to AcidBubbles for his fabulous Glance plugin and his patience with me demanding various bugfixes and changes

Changelog

• Gaze: Option to freely set any control or bone as LookAt and/or Reference target. The only exception is that the head/headControl on the character that runs the Gaze plugin can't be used. This is obviously because it's controlled by Gaze itself.
• Gaze: Implemented damping for various offsets: Eye Angle Vertical, Eye Angle Horizontal, Eye Position and LookAt Position
• Demo: Added a third demo scene, showing how to combine Glance with Gaze, with the help of IdlePoser as coordinator.

Dependencies

• For the demo scene package you need Life.13, IdlePoser.9, LogicBricks.6 and Glance.13. All these can be found on the Hub, meaning VaM can auto-download them for you.

Version 12 is now free!

My Gaze plugin, that is part of the Life package, always had trouble if the character was not upright. This bug was in there since the beginning when it was originally released as demo for my VaM ScriptEngine release back in 2018. Uh...that was the dark ages of VaM!

Anyway, I refactored a bit and the issue is fixed now! In addition you now optionally can select your own reference control node, if you need full control on where you want "up" to be. This defaults to the characters chestControl, which should be good enough in most cases and it is what was used before. Made a quick video of how this looks now:

Besides this I made some improvements on how you can swap parts of the modular code of the Life package for your own! It's still a bit struggle to create such a VAR, VaM does not recognize the reference to Life.12 on its own, so you have to add the reference manually in the meta.json file. I attached an example of a Life version that does not do mouth/lips animation, as this was something that was requested multiple times so other plugins can take control of that. Note that if you want to re-release major parts of Life in modified form, you have to wait for EarlyAccess to end and release under CC-BY-SA license.

Download

• https://hub.virtamate.com/resources/life.165/version/5118/download
  
• https://www.patreon.com/posts/life-v12-gaze-45711338
• This is an EarlyAccess release! Download will be available for free under CC BY-SA license after 2021-01-11. You are allowed to reference this package in your own VAR packages, even if they are paid or use a different license. Links to my Patreon are always appreciated.

Life 11 is now free!

As mentioned earlier, I spend this month on making my Life plugin compatible with LogicBricks. This is a huge step forward! For example you are no longer limited to control AnimationPatterns, you could also have Life control a Timeline animation, if you like that more. The old DriverThrustSFX sub-plugin has been replaced with DriverThrustTrigger, with gives you more control. Instead of a fixed set of sound effects (bed squeak, flesh slap, etc.) you can now trigger a LogicBrick and do whatever. That could be a RandomSound brick playing your own sounds, or something completely different, like a plugin controlling external devices, say my Connect plugin.

Preparations for all this obviously were already part of the recent LogicBricks releases. Life could have been one huge over-complicated plugin that can do all. That would imply some WTF level of UI, some plugins out there have that. Instead you now have a collection of more or less one-purpose plugins you can stick together like Lego bricks, hence LogicBricks. That hopefully makes it more understandable and manageable, yet at the same time more flexible.

The main demo scene has been updated accordingly. Before there was a scene specific StateMachine plugin controlling the intensity, thrust and some other parameters of the Life plugin. For non-coders this was a black box, not useful for any other scene. NOW there is a LogicBrick StateMachine plugin doing exactly the same as before....except now you can look at it, understand what it is doing, tweak the parameters, add more states and so on, no coding required. You can replicate the structure in your own scene and modify it for your needs.

Have a look at the diagram, it's also displayed in the scene itself, so you have it at hand when dissecting the scene.



Changelog

• BreathingCore: Making "OnChooseBreath" available as VaM Trigger so you can connect to a LogicBrick/StateMachine.
• DriverThrustTrigger: New sub-plugin replacing DriverThrustSFX. Way more options for you by exposing to VaM Triggers. E.g. connect to LogicBrick/RandomSound or my Connect plugin.
• Improved UI: Getting rid of annoying scrollboxes around info panels.
• Demo: Split demo scenes into separate VAR to avoid hard dependency on LogicBricks.
• Demo: Updated and reduced to just two demo scenes, SimpleBreathing and Thrust+SFX. This avoids cluttering the scene browser. Also better naming to not confuse new users not realizing this is a demo scene, should Meshed decide to include this version in VaM by default. (VaM currently ships with Life 10)

Download

• https://www.patreon.com/posts/life-11-more-via-44114309
• This is an EarlyAccess release! Download will be available for free under CC BY-SA license after 2020-12-06. You are allowed to reference this package in your own VAR packages, even if they are paid or use a different license. Links to my Patreon are always appreciated.

Minor fixes:

• Reset duplicate morphs used by old versions to avoid causing references to multiple versions of Life.
• Long months ago several people complained about low volume. I wasn't able to repro this back then, but since a few weeks I had this myself, despite nothing in VaM changed at the time. Might been caused by a Windows update?Anyway, I tweaked desktop default volume from 0.22 to 0.70...so it is now "normal" for me again.

Another tiny fix:

• Fixed silent exception / log spam issue with DriverThrustSFX when not all SFX audio sources are connected. Thx @ Meshed for reporting.

This is just a tiny maintenance update:

• Making sure breathing morphs are reset to default when disabling/removing the plugin. This is to avoid unnecessary dependencies to my Life VAR. Since Life is now used in the new VaM 1.20 default scene, this becomes more relevant, a lot of people people might use that scene as a basis for whatever they are doing.
• Fixing (invisible) error when "OnChooseBreath" broadcast message has no external plugin listening for it.
  • This broadcast is sent to all other plugins on the same Person atom every time just before Life needs to decide for a new audio file to play. So its the perfect time for example for a third-party scene controller plugin to tweak Life settings like Intensity.

IdlePoser version 4 just released! IdlePoser is a sub-component for Life, focusing on state-based idle animation. It will be integrated into the Life suite at a later point, but I keep both plugins separate for now due to the Free vs. EarlyAccess release. Find it here: https://hub.virtamate.com/resources/life-idleposer.203/

This is just a tiny free update for those of you who would like to add custom breathing audio. It is adding the breath debug tool mentioned in the custom audio tutorial. This allows hot-reloading the JSON database without having to rebuild the AssetBundle and manually queuing of specific audio files. Also fixes the rhythm damping setting in the Life01 scene.