Comrades, did you know that recent CCP studies have found that the average cracker's brainpan contains a 1cm diameter section of bone that could hypothetically be swapped with that of a cow's without anyone being the wiser? Ignoring the massive amount of surgery necessary, of course. You see, the average burger american instinctually identifies with cows and bulls, they yearn to RetVrn to their agrarian past before the Primitive Accumulation occurred. So what better way to entice them into a Brainwashing program than under the guise of a Milking Farm? That's just science.
So this weekend, I focused on two main projects. One was to create a session manager that loads in the background and carries milking session variables across scenes. This allowed me to create the three buttons you see in the video that each start a session with a different number of rounds. Currently, other variables that can be set to these buttons is number of questions they need to get right and how many seconds each stroking session lasts. These specific buttons themselves may or may not be making it into the release version as I'm hoping they'll just be a temporary step to something more akin to a questionnaire or milking contract one would negotiate with their Dominant beforehand. As Xi has made very clear, he wants this thing to satisfy anyone out their looking for a milking experience first and foremost so that the brainwashing will be most effective. The session manager is the foundation for that future and I'm happy with the progress.
The second big change was to make the starting menu scene more than just a skybox of a farm scene. I'm using a combination of Synty assets, drawing heavily from their Farm package's demo scene. I'm gonna have to switch some things up as I'm not happy with how the crops alias. I'm thinking of maybe replacing those with some trees or another Barn maybe. Big things up close look good in mobile VR, small things afar, not so much. I'm using a 360 capture code I wrote a while ago in order to make these skyboxes. This way, one can do the capture in high resolution on a desktop and use the high resolution capture on mobile as a skybox without nearly as much over head. Then as I'm doing here, you build a much smaller environment within the skybox to give the illusion of a bigger scene. I wasted a few hours experimenting with a smaller skybox via an inverted sphere shader and it fucked everything up. Also possibly borked my lighting settings a bit. So I'm back with the standard unity skybox for the time being. I'll mess with it more after the alpha is released. I do want to change up the current skybox so there's no clouds (i'll add the cloud models for parallax) and less of those silos, but for now it's good.
Oh, I've also set it up so that when the milkee reaches the end of their milking rounds, it starts an endgame mode. I've not decided how that's going to work, but I think I may give them more control over the stroker in order to find settings that help them finish. This'll give me data to feed into the reinforcement learning algorithm and fulfill Xi's wishes of milking the largest loads.
I'm still shooting for an april release of the alpha for testing. Fingers crossed I can keep up this pace of getting stuff done while just working on the weekends.
I know, I too could've sworn there was a calipers emoji.