Hey guys.
AnimationPoser is discontinued.
The version I have now is 100% stable, with new features and so on, but I can't release for free something I burned myself out for 3 years to build. While I'm working on monetization strategies, that's a slow process and it will probably happen either outside vam or in a heavily modded vam, because vam provides very scarce advantages over unity other than the community content.
To be specific, vam has a gargantuan problem arising from the decision of making character customization and play mode the same thing. In games like the sims, skyrim, etc, character customization is a separate process. Investigating the core, virt-a-mate has an unbelievable amount of unnecessary game objects under the person atom, which make atoms ridiculously heavy (gigabyes of ram memory), while a daz character is not even 1/100 of that.
While I did have immense help from many people, the amount of work done by me personally is still not justifiable for a free release.
In many ways, AnimationPoser is bigger than VAM. There is nothing like this out there, it has become a motor system that bridges the gap between animation, automation and ai.
It is uncertain whether I'll ever release this in any way, but, if I'm not releasing it here, it is because I hope to release it eventually elsewere.
The thing is, this would make the VAM community at least 10 times bigger. Everybody, and this means everybody who never believed in this or understood this at all, would profit from this, except myself. In the exact moment I SHOWED, in practice, what this does, there would be no turning back. Everybody would get it, everybody would use it, everybody would profit from it. But that's not fair, there is no merit in seeing something working and then believe it; if people didn't believe in it when I conceived it and explained it. My merit is my idea. And this idea needs to be shown to a wider public, elsewhere, and in a way that I have ownership of my idea. It is bigger than vam, but I would be turning it over to vam as intellectual property.
This would be wild because the public for the technology I have built is tens or hundreds of times larger than the virt-a-mate public.
So one idea is I'll eventually create a different game. One with separate customization/play, one where you can have as many simultaneous characters as unity permits (thousands), and one focused on desktop instead of vr, animation/interaction/dialogue instead of soft body physics, etc. Something more adequate for say movie making.
IF I ever do this, I won't use any channel related to the hub or the discord to market that. It will be a different public.
This "abandonment" of the vam public was a hard decision and I took years to do it, but in retrospect I should have done that way sooner when it became clear that no one would pick up on the idea and that I would have to implement that myself. Back then I had no knowledge of unity, C#, vam development workflow/environment, anything, which is the reason for so many bugs and issues. Now I'm becoming a beast.
So, good news is that the proper, complete, technology has a chance of eventually seeing the light of day, and with all the supporting features necessary for a real "the sims"-like experience (in modded vam or otherwise). Bad news is that it won't be through this channel. But I'm sure smart/interested people will find it.
