Here is a brief overview of the features I want to include in the next project. This would be for the base “growth engine” so nothing specific to any game. I am interested to hear what other features people would want in the next project, so feel free to comment below on what you want.
Also small update to the game just uploaded. In debug stats you can now modify any NPC's levels.
Will be included
Character creator
Expanded pattern system: This I already have working in another project. Its a lot cleaner system that supports 2 colors per pattern, along with flipping, mirroring, and opacity. Also there wont be some of the weird issues like outlines and colors being off in the future.
Full body patterns/textures: Not having every character be smooth. Unfortunately this was poor planning on my part, the models for the game do not have a single unifying UV channel across all of them so if I were to include maps for fur and scales, it would always cut off or have to merge weirdly. I think I underestimated just how efficiently textures could be sampled.
More in depth personality system: having it affect more than just idle/walk cycles like playing animations at random.
More in depth accessory system: Another thing that I have worked on my own, now they can have their own settings/offsets/colors and even their own accessories. So you can have things like jewelry on tails.
Growth
Better looking at higher sizes: I would like to redo the scaling system to use curves instead of formulas, that way it makes it easier to translate directly from the modeling software and I would only need to find the bone scale at some values that look good and interpolate between them.
Morph targets that can combine a lot better: Right now combined more targets like fat and muscle will combine to one then subtract from the two that make them up. This gets really inconsistent with models that are combining multiple like the chest, instead I want to make them additive so fat and muscle with 1 and then the combined would be applied on top of that.
Editable sequences: The option to make your own growth sequences by combining poses, preferences for the type of growth animations you want, and being able to change things like camera angles.
Growth remapping: Change what attribute grows what, so things like tails or feet could be grown instead
More camera options: being able to do things like set a static camera for growth or switch between several different cameras for each animation
Proper in game bug reporting: Bug reports were a bit of a mess with this since I took them basically anywhere and a lot of the times they would clog up the comments, often with multiple reports of the same bug or with those that I was already aware of and had fixed. So next time bug reports will be in game, that way I can even collect more information to help solve issues like version number and save game data.
A more in depth debug system. To both help people diagnose/circumvent glitches along with just having a bit of fun
Want to be included
Features that while I may not be 100% confident in my ability to implement I would still want to give it a try or features that are a bit lower priority.
Character creator
Special body types like naga and taur: this would be pretty complicated, it would be essentially like having an entire other skeletal mesh with its own animation system that would need to sync to your character. I don’t think it would be impossible, however its going to be a lot of work to get it looking right.
Fur: I should be able to implement this pretty easily in the next version of unreal, and if that doesn't work i have been working on my own fur shader which will hopefully look good after I work on it a bit more.
Humans: I know most of my followers are furries but I have had requests for humans. I would like to try next time to include humans, they would be a bit of a challenge because the skeleton for their head would have to be different but I would like to aim for as much character diversity as I can. I am also terrible at modeling human faces, but if the worst comes to it theres probably a hundred different base heads out there I could use.
Iks implementation for morph targets: Essentially what that means is having NPCs be able to touch either themselves or others without it clipping. I have tried quite a few different methods over the years, none of them have worked or they would be too much work and easily break with changes in models. I know of one method I still haven’t tried that I am fairly certain will work but its somewhat complicated.
In game character submission: Instead of having to do it through the discord like now you would be able to hit an in game button to include all the info to have it appear in game.
Automated testing: This is one of those things the game would basically have to be built with in mind, especially if I wanted to eliminate randomness, but theoretically it would mean I could more easily bugfix.
Wish to be included
Features that I have very little confidence in my ability to implement but it would be cool if I could.
Multiplayer support: I have the smallest knowledge of multiplayer and I know its a giant pain to implement. However unreal makes it a bit easier so I don’t think it would be impossible, especially from some simple sort of peer to peer version of it. I do want to learn more about it over the break and I can probably bring in another dev to help with it if I need to.
VR support: I do not currently have a rig to test with, I’m not even sure if I have the space, but it seems like a fun thing to try to implement.
More supported clothes: Currently the issue with clothing and accessories is that morph targets will make you clip horrendously through them. I have tried some things to automatically copy them from other meshes but they haven’t worked.
Importing custom models/patterns: No idea how to do this, it might be easy, or not, but it would be fun if I could get it to work