Here's the problem. The game is horribly behind where it should be now.
FarmD is a game that HAS an actual AI for its character plus actual fullbody gameplay with poses (both top and bottom).
It's a bit funky sometimes, but at least there's actual gameplay updates being made to the game. (open world and such)
This is a project making nowhere near as much as Heat.
Now take a look at Heat VR. It is making what is it, $80,000 a month?!
NO AI! STILL! To this day, the characters can't even move or do anything.
What actual work, has been done to the game?!
Nothing! Outside of them commissioning talented modellers and voice actors, I've seen hardly any effort actually made into the game and its code itself. If we were to take out the VR from this game, what would it actually... be? A really bad animation tool?
I don't get if this "game" can even be considered a game! It's been years too! 5 years! Half a decade.
Half a decade for what again...? We're going to get GTA VI by the time this "game" actually adds anything to do.
Sorry for the frustration. It's just, a game like this has SO MUCH potential and yet feels like no work or love is being put into it anymore. Just riding off the Patreon money and such.
I think they're trying to strike a balance between bugfixes and mechanical improvements and keeping patrons happy with fairly frequent but surface level additions, you know, jangly keys to keep the short attention span crowd engaged and paying. they just arent doing a great job at it lol. shit like animations, skins, new models and locations are the easiest things to add to the game and even some of those have months of lead time. the problem is with a monthly release cycle for "major" updates, with a few hotfixes in between it doesnt leave much room for actual substantive change because that kind of thing takes a pretty serious investment in time and manpower that would necessitate taking resources away from their bread and butter of keeping patrons engaged. and stopping or substantially slowing down the pace of new content additions for the sake of improvements to the actual mechanical/engine side of things would see patrons start dropping off because a lot of them are only interested in having new toys to play with not better ways to play with the ones they already have, so to speak.
i get that its a small team, but you mentioned farmD and SoftScale is a great case in point. its literally one guy doing 90% of the work (tho iirc he did commission some things like the models) by themself and it has a LOT of features that are lacking in heat. like the aforementioned rudimentary AI for the npc character. giving the NPC some agency, and something like procedural animations where it moves between locations and poses instead of just being a pose/animation viewer where you pick it from a list adds a lot to the game in terms of immersion and presence. I personally could do without AI in the modern generative/LLM sense, i like having real voice actors even if that limits the dialog options somewhat.
another thing is a more mature player body implementation, its been in farmD since the begining iirc which means he's had more time to work out the bugs and make things work decently. the biggest thing i'd love to see Heat do that farmD does well is having actual physics with compliance and collision. something more than just floppy dicks and jiggle physics. proper compliance and good inverse kinematics where like in farmD, your player characters fingers conform to surfaces, wrap around toys/cocks somewhat realistically, the fingers move/splay when you are stroking/petting the npc, the npcs head moves a bit when you push on it too iirc. all of this adds up to giving much more of an actual feeling of presence to both the player character and NPC. heats IK is kinda janky when posing, Im sure everybody has experienced torso spins, or weird arm/leg rotation when posing a hand or foot. im sure there is some way to improve that. heat should be able to improve hit detection/collision at least a little bit. fingers clipping into cocks when giving handjobs (especially when scaled), and dicks clipping through the other charcters mouths during blowjobs or through the ass/pussy in sex animations are kind of immersion breaking. i know that these kinds of things arent probably the easiest to fix and might increase demand on system resources for the calculations behind the scenes, but it'd be worth the effort imo.
the total lack of gravity and ragdoll physics and environment/prob collision is also pretty disapointing and ties back to the compliance thing. there's a hint of it in a few places, like when you have a characters hands snapped to another npcs body and then move the characters torso, there is actual IK when the arms bend as you move them closer. thats about the extent of it. i'd like to see a setting added that gives compliance and IK to the npcs so when you pick them up and move them, their feet (and the rest of their body if applicable) actually stop moving when they hit a solid surface instead of being a weightless perfectly rigid doll that clips through the floor/furniture. doesnt have to be full ragdoll like garrys mod, but at least have some spring/resistance so that if they're standing and you grab them and lower them, their fuckin knees bend and feet stay on the floor instead of ending up shin deep through the floor lol.
i could probably write 5 more paragraphs of this (lol hyperfocus) but i'll stop here lol.
