💡 You didn’t know that you play with multiple Lollies the same time

Hi guys!

Last few weeks I've been deep into technical stuff to provide you not only with saves, but with cloud saves! This is to ensure your game data is safe and it could not be accidentally cleared together with your browser cookies or whatever. Also this will allow you to sync your game sessions between multiple devices in future. I’ve already done a lot but have nothing interesting to showcase you. However I expect this to be released on beta right after the Christmas version is gone!

So, while we’re waiting… I bet you didn’t know how the wardrobe animation works, and why I had to add multiple Lollies for you to play with simultaneously!

It’s quite simple to animate a single character – that’s what every game does. 

The obvious next step is to add new pieces to it during the game. And suddenly I found no way to do it. Now I’m pretty sure it’s possible with something like ‘generating textures and rigs dynamically’ but that sounded like rocket science for a person making his 1st game. TBH I still would like not to do that if possible. However this was a critical question when prototyping MyJLC.

What Unity provides from the box is the simple way to reskin existing pieces on the go. And most games are OK with it. You just switch character body in t-shirt to character body in jacket – that’s all. And this works fine until your game is all about changing clothes.

What about the games where fashion matters? Like MMORPGs? Unfortunately big company devs hardly sit on forums sharing how things work under the hood. Still I can make a guess: years ago I rummaged through the World of Warcraft 3d models and discovered that most of the clothes pieces are simply baked into the model. Have you ever wondered why there is a lot of artistic pauldrons and helmets, but chest armor pieces look like each other? – this is the reason – all of them share the same 3d model. So there are like 3-4 actual models reused for hundreds of clothes and only the texture is changing – great move and interesting to know, just it didn’t help me a lot.

My large goal was to allow adding unlimited clothes and combine them in all possible variations. And all the information I found for that was not enough. Seems like my requirements were too genre-specific.

Yeah, I know that the dress-up genre is considered dead. And TBH it has never utilized much animation even in the best years (maybe one of the reasons?). But it’s impossible that no one has met the same problem before. So after hours of googling and thinking I found an interesting idea, which ended up being the foundation for my wardrobe system.

Instead of trying to add things to the basic model (I call it ‘doll’ usually as it kinda looks like a cutout paper doll) I have created a bunch of ‘dolls’, one per each equipables set, shared the same skeleton and synchronized the animation between them. Then toggling the necessary objects during the game produces the required visual! 

Also in this case all the details could be manually rigged and adjusted to perfectly fit the body movements and each other, and even have some additional animation effects! Must admit, animating clothes without a body is pretty difficult, so all these ‘dolls’ also include the required body parts to provide me with guides. Therefore in v1.0 the game scene included about 10 invisible (and incomplete) copies of Lolly which were animated all-as-one: for accessories, tattoos, hosiery, underwear, outwear, fetish stuff, etc.

It worked like this prior to v1.2. Currently most of those ‘dolls’ are loaded into the memory and only the required pieces are built when you equip an item. Still 3 Lolly’s copies are alive each time you run the game: 

• 1 original doll for a nude body which is primary for all animation you see;

• 1 for clothes and customization options which are added to it on demand;

• and 1 for special effects like skinmarks, cum, censorship, etc. I hope to get rid of this one as well in future, but… it’s a bit more complicated, so I didn’t find enough time for it yet.

BTW sometimes when I’m remaking things it may look like this:

So now you know how it’s possible for MyJLC to handle a nearly unlimited number of customization items applied at once… and that invisible Lollies are watching your every action! Just kidding, most of them don't even have eyes to watch, lol! :-D

Happy New Year, folks!