doahdm
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Upcoming Content Preview & Devlog 2/24/23
🕑 Added 2023-02-25 04:27:27 +0000 UTCHello everyone! I hope you're all enjoying Beach Paradise. It's been about two months since I've launched the Patreon, and while I'm very far from being able to do this full time, I remain committed to my promise of keeping nothing paywalled. As such, I'd like to keep people informed on what I've been working on in greater detail.
Patreon allows me to communicate more longform that Twitter, which otherwise forces me to piecemeal a lengthy post into a string of badly organized chat bubbles. Far from ideal! I obviously still miss Tumblr back when it was a suitable format for posting adult content, but those days are gone and thankfully Patreon has most of Tumblr's functionality.
A little background on Beach Paradise and what I try to do
Since this is my first devblog on Patreon, I'd like to talk a lot about my design philosophy, why things are the way they are, even if I've touched on these topics already on Twitter. A lot of questions are recurring so I'd like to treat this somewhat like a FAQ.
The next thing I'd like to talk about is the proportions of the girls relative to their official counterparts. Every once in a while, I get criticism and/or comments about some characters proportions differing from some of their official versions. I'd like to say that I understand where you're coming from, but to understand why I made the decisions I did I have to provide greater context for how the girls have appeared and changed in the franchise.
The first obvious point is that there's no consistency in the franchise itself, in a way that can't be explained away by aging and growth. The one that comes up the most is Ayane, whose breast size has changed wildly over the course of her appearances in DOA.
Furthermore, many of the characters proportions are less the consequence of creative discretion, but more so of time/cost saving by having a basic body shape that uses bone scaling to give the illusion of variety, but this method has obvious limitations. Dead or Alive Venus Vacation has over 25 female characters, but would it surprise you to learn that there's only 3 body types? That being the "common" body, the "Marie" body, and the "Honoka" body (named colloquially to represent which character first introduced the body type).
You might be wondering, why am I explaining all this? What does this have to do with Beach Paradise? The reason why I'm establishing this ground work is to explain why I took creative liberties in the size and proportions of many of the girls in Beach Paradise. With no established precedent of body consistency, and many of the girls having copy pasted bodies, I felt that I could use creative liberty to capture, what I felt was the spirit of the design while giving the body types a greater deal of variety. Some characters like Rachel and Sayuri have larger breasts than their official counterparts, some characters are roughly the same like Hitomi and Nyotengu, while some are smaller such as Leifang and Kasumi.
I've tried, within reason to take this basic framework and give more defining characteristics to each girl's body, mostly centered around breasts as they're the part of a woman's body that tends to vary most dramatically. When I play DOAXVV, I tend to come away with the impression that lots of the girls feel like clones. I'm just one man who has received a lot of help and a framework of tools and base meshes from other modders, but I do what I can within reason to give each girl their own unique flair!
In the future I'd like to be able to have more unique details like a variety of bellybuttons and such, but just understand that there's more variety now than there was before!
Not everyone is going to be satisfied with the creative license I take, naturally. If you close your eyes and imagine your favorite Dead or Alive girl naked it's unlikely that it will produce the exact same outcome as what I've provided, please just understand there's method to my madness!
Skindentation and support
With that out of the way. Let's talk about Skindentation, which I introduced in the most recent Beach Paradise update, 8.30. I've received a lot of positive feedback on flesh conforming fits and would like to make it the standard going forward, at least on costumes where it makes sense. Here's an example of how a swimsuit looks with and without the skindentation/support effect. Top being without and bottom being with.
Obviously adding this feature makes the process of adding new swimsuits take longer, but I think the effect is worth it and gives each swimsuit a lot more personality, rather than being so loose that it's just cloth resting on top of a nude body. Obviously skindentation won't apply to costumes that're loose naturally, like an unbutton blouse or something of that nature, but you get the idea.
Some of the suits early in the workflow didn't come out as I wanted though, so as I'm approaching the release of the next Beach Paradise version I wanted to redo some of the swimsuits I feel I did a not so great job on, this being one of them. Left is the existing 8.30 version with the retouched version on the right.
Some people ask me "are her breasts bigger in this costume?", which would be problematic if true, as I value consistency. The skindentation effect gives the illusion of being bigger even if the volume is the same, kind of the same way a pushup bra functions, which of course is part of the allure.
To be clear though, I use a blender plugin to measure the volume of each mesh to confirm that I'm not deviating too far from the nude breast size. Here's an example of the difference in nude volume vs. skindentation volume:
I know those decimal figures are gibberish without proper context, but just trust me when I say I'm keeping track!
Bug fixing, QA and Discord
Along with new content and features, I obviously have to keep up on my bug fixes and quality control. This is something I've struggled with, as I've accrued up to 150+ costumes and god knows how many motions for each girl. These can all have issues like bad weights, bad vertex normals, clipping, poorly mirrored textures, floating meshes/vertexes, etc.. Unfortunately as a largely one man operation it's hard to keep track of problems, but thankfully this process has become easier with people reporting issues on my Discord. Which has a convenient "bugs" channel that people can freely post to which gives me a convenient one stop shop to address issues.
Please join if you're interested in helping me manage bugs, or just want to interact with fellow BP fans and post sexy images and videos!
We're 2000 members strong and growing.
New scenes/motions
The next update has a lot of new poses, organized into "pose reels", which are a set of poses that automatically crossfade, combined into one scene for convenience of viewing. The reason we do this is because we don't have a formal UI for navigating scenes, as much as I wish we did. In it's place are a sequence of hotkeys which swap motion files from memory in order to give you a plethora of scenes to watch the girls prance around in.
Since there are nearing a hundred different hotkey combinations and no in game UI for navigating them, this is naturally one of the greatest obstacles people have for enjoying Beach Paradise. You certainly get used to it, but I wish as much as you do that there was a better solution to this problem. Plenty of fans do great work to make hotkey guides for me, but as there are such a vast array of motions it's naturally time consuming to make these guides, and I'm constantly adding motions making these image guides out of date.
Since programming part of my skillset, the best thing I can do is make use of the tools and mod structure I have, while sending out an open request for people who do have the skillset to help me try and work something out. I wish I had the money to commission someone for this kind of work but as I've said already, the Patreon hasn't grown enough for me to even consider that kind of thing.
In the meantime I want to start the process of pruning old pose sets that I find to be lower quality or redundant. The old pose sets have generic face animations and static hands. I did this to save time and quickly put out pose sets for people to enjoy. Pose cards in DOAXVV also use generic face animations, but I wanted to put a little more personality into the animations going forward, and as a result I will be pruning the F11+Q,W,E,R,T,Y pose sets to make space for unique higher quality ones. Currently, the pose sets that those hotkeys occupy are duplicates of the hotkeys one row above, but set in the bathroom stage, so I don't think they'll be greatly missed.
Reflecting on what we've accomplished
In terms of the lifecycle of a mod project, Beach Paradise is old as hell. More than half a decade is a long time for something like this! I do it because I love it though. I wish I could do it for a living (I'm not giving up hope), but for right now I can just focus on building up the Patreon.
To give you an idea of all that Beach Paradise has brought to Dead or Alive 5, I want to do a brief rundown of all the key features of Beach Paradise:
- Fully nude bodies for every Dead or Alive girl
- Hundreds of scenes and poses with new stages and scenery
- 60FPS compatibility for movies
- Improved breast physics
- Hundreds of costumes and swimsuits with malfunctions, topless and flesh
- Tan sliders and tanlines
- Improved wet shader effect on nude models (and some more news on that front soon)
- Improved internal lighting configurations, shaders and post processing depth effects to make scenes pop
- Several guest characters added from DOAXVV
- And so many more minor things that're hard to account for in one simple list!
Of course all of this wouldn't be possible with all the groundwork and support from the modding community, please read the readme or the about page on the Patreon to see who helped make BP possible!
New Content Preview
Phew! This devblog ended up being longer than I imagined. I admire your patience if you made it thus far reading the rantings and ravings of a man who has an unhealthy obsession with the girls of Dead or Alive. There's plenty more I'd like to discuss and preview, but for now I've gone on for way too long as it is.
Let's take inventory of what I've finished for the next update of Beach Paradise thus far. I'll list the hotkey combination (these will be posted multiple times as they contain multiple poses), the swimsuit, and the ones that're existing but revamped with skindentation will have an asterisk (*), and the ones revamped to have a wet effect in place of tan are marked with (^):
Left to right
F11+Q: Geranium*, Rainbow*, Snow*
F11+Q: Sally, Rowdy, Lavour
F11+Q: Sporty*, F11+W:, Chaps*, Tanktop^
F11+W: Sting, Grip, Grand Prix
F11+W: Patch, Gem, Rocket
That's just a sampling of the new poses! Showcasing only 2 of the 8 new posereel hotkeys, I've completed. Although it's all the new and revamped costumes so far (there'll be more by the time it's released) along with various bugfixes.
When is this out?!
I'm targeting a release before the end of the month. This will be my third time bothering you in this post... but please consider supporting me on Patreon!
Thanks for reading!
Comments
Guti
Great read, thank you for the amazing work!
Vlaphor
Been a big fan of this mod for that past half-decade and I can't wait to see what's next. This all looks amazing.
