What did you expect?
The companies behind the toys are selling those shit over 150 bucks. It would be a problem that independent devs like us would put to shame the "native" apps in weeks. You seem to know the Handy: are you not shocked that their own plateform does not handle the bluetooth mode? You can only use their tools IF you're using the wifi mode. And in a couple of months, faptap.net arrives with a proper wifi + bluetooth system.
This is a conscious thing. They do not want to loose the potential control over their hardware. And eventually keep selling services : )
Sorry! all the modes BUT animation patterns are predictive. From what I gathered in the code (since I initially repacked the VAMLaunch plugin), the animation pattern is an absolute control.
The problem is, AP are not interesting from a scene perspective.
If you ask me: Timeline control. But "simple". I dug in that months ago and contacted Acid to find a potential lead, but the system was so annoying that I dropped the ball. Timeline does not allow you to know what is the next key. This is only assumption on my end, but I'm pretty sure funscript works that way:
- When hitting a keyframe, the system look up the next frame and computes the duration and position.
- Animates movement
- When hitting next frame, looks up... etc etc
I tried to think of a way to emulate that in Timeline without success, by using a pure simple "float" track which would allow you to author a parallel timeline to the character animation which would be a mirror of the motion... with potential more detail like stutters/vibration (that are handled quite well by the handy for instance).
If you were able to pull that off, then it's starting to look like something far more interesting.
Creators would have to do the character animation AND the toy animation, but the final user experience would be far more compelling.
You made me laugh a few times there, thanks for that. And to be clear about my own abilities -- I can't consider myself a real dev. I'm self-taught, have a lot of holes in my knowledge, and I go through phases of learning how to code followed by periods where I don't touch it. It would be more accurate to say I'm PseudoDev. If I had the ability to work with a REAL dev I could move mountains. At least I like to pretend thinking that
The history lesson was appreciated, as was the perspective. It all makes sense, and all I can respond with is I agree 100%.
Just like in the world of video games, I suppose, the "mod community" and open source community is where the real fun begins.
onwards: you said this, "The problem is, AP are not interesting from a scene perspective."
What makes any mocap interesting to me -- whether its VAM's cooked in animation capture, or the fancier technologies that the mocap creators use, or funscripts as I've been playing with -- what makes it interesting is the authentic, organic actions. The fingerprint of a human nervous system moving muscles, the intentional movements, the accidentally movements, the ones that happen without intent.
THAT is what makes a mocap dataset interesting. And while I agree that a simple, two-dimensional encoding (as seen in a simple funscript file) is not as interesting, it's when you combine it with other things that -- IMHO -- make it compelling.
I've experimented with having a set of random 'cowgirl' funscripts (I took 8 of them) from faptap. All named "cg/1", "cg/2", etc.
Combined with the ability to place the person in different poses each with associated different idle motions, varied expression generators, etc., it's been pretty amazing.
So -- given that the APs are *not* predictive, but absolute... does that maybe change your mind (out of curiosity)?
>>I tried to think of a way to emulate that in Timeline without success, by using a pure simple "float" track which would allow you to author a parallel timeline to the character animation which would be a mirror of the motion... with potential more detail like stutters/vibration (that are handled quite well by the handy for instance).
For this, I *think* this is explaining what I've set up with the VariableTrigger value driving the AP directly, which in turn drives the character animation. The stutters are all there, and another nice thing you can do is create a set of 3 custom sliders; two for each of the AP steps, so you can tweak the up and down separately, and a third that lets you bring both up and down with the same values.
Imagine layering onto that a randomized range of values for those sliders, and you can basically create a completely organic, unpredictable (and therefore exciting) infinite experience that falls within a desired range of user parameters.
