Another big issue and probably the biggest is simply greed. Sex sells and nobody wants to share that. That's why vam is stagnant other than modders and other games pop up but then go no where. None of these people want to work with others.
Unity VaM 2 [v1.1.1 Beta] [Meshed VR]
- Thread starter Crazygamer43
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Not that it's greed. Everyone has their own vision for a product. I highly doubt anyone sits down and thinks about creating a adult game thinking it's going to be for making a lot of money. Maybe down the line it becomes that they can make money from it that but from what I've seen, "most" start off as passion projects.
I imported a few VAM models in Godot and they don't look that bad... in VR they are quite convincing, given how easy it is working with Godot I wouldn't write it off too soon.
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Don't worry, I still remember how a decade ago there was a lot of people talking shit about Blender and deepthroating proprietary 3d modeling software, and just look how the thing is going on today.
I talked about Godot/Redot's FUTURE and that guy just didn't understand shit. Unreal Engine is terrible for performance, it's a cancer right now.
The real shit will happen when some VAM-like software is developed on a FOSS engine. And you can understand this seeing how VAM1 has been carried by modders, there are amazing plugins, looks and scenes out there. Imagine all that workforce together on a FOSS project.
I totally agree, that was my idea too, moving away from Daz also for a completely FOSS stack. Honestly, I'm too old and tired to make a fully fledged VAM clone, as of now I can import morph and textures from a scene, as soon as I manage to add genitals I'll open source it for anybody interested in experimenting.
All this talk about... engine this, engine that, the thing is there is no successful vam like simulator except for meshedVR, and for how complex it is to develop a sim game like this, simply choosing a game engine doesn't prove any benefits. Maybe in theory unreal engine's rendering pipeline would look better, but in terms of performance and functionality, the developer would need to be proficient enough to even create something compared to vam.
That is a big issue, no one wants to work with anyone. It's all about that quick cash, everyone to themselves kinda thing.
Velomous
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Oh don't mention the unreal documentation, please spare me, I'm getting flashbacks
I didn't say it wasn't possible to do, borderline impossible, now try to get it to do more than look ok. I remember last time i tried to use godot IK which is absolutely critical for a game like vam, was completely and utterly broken for 3D, it could not be used in any meaningful way, and they left i thtat way for I think actual years. I think it's fixed by now... mostly? Not 100% on that, I know they were planning to fix it... But I don't remember seeing patch notes where they actually claimed to have.
The problem you will run into trying to make a game like vam in godot, besides performance (it's performance IS worse than unity, generally if you make an identical test in unity and godot, unity will win), is just basic functionality being either completely missing, lacking, or broken.
This means that if you want to make a game like this in godot, you can't just be a game developer, you gotta be an engine developer, because you will have to implement these missing basic functionalities into the engine yourself, or upgrade existing half baked functionality. And godot, blessedly, makes that easier than any other engine (you still gotta know the ins and outs of the engine to do it though, like with any other program you plan to develop), but if you take godot as it is now and try to recreate VAM in it? It will not go well for you.
I agree, I don't think that a solo developer could pull that off, but VAM's engine is basically a collection of 3rd party plugins, so that's kinda true for any game engine that's missing those.
I wanted to do some UI tests and I chose Godot because VR is very easy to setup. Then I tried importing some VAM looks because having backward compatibility would be a huge selling point for any VAM clone.
Right now I don't think Godot is ready for a project like that but I believe that an open source VAM clone project made in Godot could work in the long run.
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Velomous
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Yeah, but other engines like unity have a lot of ready made solutions. Unreal too, if to a lesser extent for things that aren't already implemented in the engine, but it has a lot more things already implemented anyways.
I can see you're a bit of an open source advocate which I can understand and relate to, but there is no reason to be so attached to wokot, there are other open source engines that would probably be more suited to a project like this, even if they are mostly just as unready for a project like this as godot is, like o3de, which is based on the cryengine that used to directly compete with unreal once (and if you want to see what the cryengine can do, look at star citizen).
o3de is a mess right now and not really ready for prime time, but for a project like this i'd say it has greater potential than godot does.
But honestly, I find there's no real practical reason to get attached to these foss engines), unreal is for most intents and purposes foss actually, you don't need to pay a dime to access their source code or use the engine.
Unreal and Unity are already source available, especially in unreal's case, that's sufficient. It's best to use the engine that's best suited to your project and you as a developer, not the engine that you vibe with most on a philosophical level. Getting too caught up in philosophy is how you procrastinate indefinitely on making your project.
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I tried or read about many engines before choosing Godot and O3DE seemed kinda dead. And I chose Godot because of the "lightweightness philosophy" not the FOSS one. Anyway, I don't have a project, I just wanted to test some ideas and ended up importing VAM looks in Godot.
Reading all your guys' discussion made me think that, everyone here wants a better VAM game
but no one wants to work on it
all vam is a ragdoll puppet simulator
and a majority of adult games are not about making the most amount of money
Its mainly people who dont want to take on such a project by themselves so instead of doing that they project their own expertise onto mesh's competence
but no one wants to work on it
all vam is a ragdoll puppet simulator
and a majority of adult games are not about making the most amount of money
Its mainly people who dont want to take on such a project by themselves so instead of doing that they project their own expertise onto mesh's competence
As I said, VAM is a collection of 3rd party plugins taken from Unity's asset store, so is in fact a "team effort". Tackling a similar project as a solo developer in a game engine that doesn't provide any of such plugins would take a looong time.
Velomous
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I actually do want to work on it, but I'm one person, and although I can confidently make vast chunks of a game like vam, better than meshedvr did it (already did in fact for some things, u know how the performance of the ui in vam is shit? I solved that issue in like 10 minutes in unreal, I was working on more things too but yeah), there are certain areas where I struggle a lot and it just sorta killed my motivation to not be able to outsource at least some of these parts. I'm not a 3d artist, I could be, I have the expertise required to be a real artist, just not a 3D one (and for making a 2D game the obstacle would be come the time it takes to draw every single image in it being a lot, every image can take up to a day to make depending on style and skill, if you're going fast, models aren't so different but with them it's easy to find free or cheap assets online ready to use so you wouldn't have to make everything)
It's mostly just that this is not something I truly want to do. So what got me stuck on this project was when I reached a point where I needed a proper model, i needed to import from daz to unreal, but I didn't wanna do it the way VAM did it, because they did it in the most shitty way possible, best way perhaps for backwards compatibility with daz, but worst way for performance, so some modification needs to be done to make it all work the way I'd like (instead of having what was it 20? 40? materials per chracter, I'd use only 1, 3 tops, and it should all be 1 mesh, eyelashes would probably not be part of the mesh, i'd implement them differently/separately, same with hair, eyebrows, pubes, but the base model should be just 1 mesh, including genitals, eyes, etc, and the default vam model is diced down into a couple separate meshes that some of which would either have to be remoed or merged into the base model); and after doing all the there's of course also ensuring backwards compatibility with daz morphs and possibly textures (textures would be trivial, I can do that easy, morphs are required but I don't know enough about them, maybe the eyes do need to be on a separate mesh for it to work? it's a limitation I could accept, gens gotta be same mesh tho).
Basically, converting the daz meshes to a proper game ready model was where I stopped, mostly because I don't want to deal with that whole process myself, but also in part because I'm not on windows so things like daz to unreal/blender bridges just ain't working for me, and aren't ever gonna, I have another pc which has windows on it but... Yeah, I just haven't gotten around to it, this represents days of work, in extremely complex software i'm almost completely unfamiliar with, and I just can't seem to get around to doing it, the 3d modeler I know that wants to be in on this wants to just make his own model but it's taking him so long i've kinda given up on him, so that was where my work ground to a halt.
I can do the programming parts easy enough, but there's more to game devleopment than just programming.
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What I do is read the base model directly from Daz .dsf file (it's a json), apply the morph from .vmb files (just a list of vectors) and then generate a mesh with three different materials (head, torso, limbs). Dsf file has also data for skinning and uv maps, so textures and bones work too.
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That's exactly why I talked about Redot and their in development ReX Engine, it will be much better for performance than Godot and is not made by activists. You can't just throw shit to any FOSS project because they are "woke" when the code is public domain and anybody can fork it.
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If you want to port the code to Unreal let me know.
https://f95zone.to/threads/vam-looks-import-in-godot.273517/
fbass
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