TLDR: 6 Kink of the Month updates from Jan to March 2021. v4.0 Variety and Polish Overhaul over 5 updates in April and May. Variety = more diverse and distinguishable character customizations (incl proper ethnic & age differences) + much bigger selection of clothes + NPCs dressing according to their location and job + more daily activity and furniture animations + high attractiveness NPCs actually look hot. Polish = minimize clipping issues (body poking through clothes, dick poking through partner's stomach, skirt not following legs when sitting down, etc) + no more vagina deform when too many morphs are used + smoother gameplay due to clothes taking less time to load, bug fixes, UI enhancements and optimizations.

(Please read this whole post if possible, TLDR doesn't cover everything)

Each year around April-May, the project undergoes an overhaul over 5 consecutive updates that addresses and massively improves on a major weakness of the game that couldn't be solved in one or two updates. In 2019, it was the v2.0 Daz Character Overhaul which hugely upgrades the base character models and animations. Earlier in 2020, it was the v3.0 AI & Interactions Overhaul which got rid of the whole 'visual novel' feel of the game, making the game a full 3d experience and giving NPCs more autonomy and interactivity. In 2021, there will be another overhaul over 5 updates in April and May, the v4.0 Variety and Polish Overhaul.

But before talking about the overhaul itself, let's discuss the first three months of 2021, before the overhaul actually starts. As you know, Kink of the Month has become an integral part of LifePlay's development, providing patrons and the wider community with a transparent way to decide what adult content I work on and add each month to the game and contribute ideas directly to it. So far, it's simply been one Kink of the Month update per month (each month has 2 or 3 updates). However, since the v4.0 Overhaul requires 5 consecutive updates - it will already take up the whole update schedule for April and May 2021 (April has 2, May has 3), so there will be no KotM updates in these two months. To make up for this, these 2 'lost' KotM updates are moved ahead to the start of the year + I add another bonus one to March, so that the release schedule of the first 5 months of 2021 will be like this:

- 9 Jan: v3.18, Kink of the Month

- 23 Jan: v3.19, Kink of the Month

- 6 Feb: v3.20, Kink of the Month

- 20 Feb: v3.21, Kink of the Month

- 6 Mar: v3.22, Kink of the Month

- 20 Mar: v3.23, Kink of the Month

- 3 Apr: v4.0 Beta 1, Overhaul

- 17 Apr: v4.0 Beta 2, Overhaul

- 1 May: v4.0 Beta 3, Overhaul

- 15 May: v4.0 Beta 4, Overhaul

- 29 May: v4.0 Stable, Overhaul

- June onwards: v4.1, v4.2, v4.3, etc

The 6 KotM updates in 3 months will be a great opportunity for many fetishes that haven't got much love so far to be worked on because:

- In each month's patrons poll, both options with the most and second-most votes will be worked on. They will then both be excluded for 2 months, allowing another pair to have a chance the following month.

- The most popular kink by far, Pregnancy, happens to be excluded for Jan and Feb (because it just won Dec) and can only win at most one update in May, giving others a chance.

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Now, let's move on and explain the v4.0 Variety and Polish Overhaul:

The Problems - Why Focus on Variety and Polish?

Having been first released in April 2018 and with very regular updates at least twice a month, the game has reached a pretty playable state in terms of features and content, but still two aspects have always been very lacking:

1/ Variety: 

In terms of characters:

- While the character models themselves look realistic enough, within each gender, despite how much you randomize or use the customizations available, all characters still look too similar, like it's too obvious they all 'come from the same root'. 

- Non-Caucasian characters don't show many ethnic features at all, they just look like the default Caucasian character with skin painted on

- Everyone looks like young adults. Hard to make 18yos or anyone above 40. Elders just look like 30-something with white hair.

- The game does generate a lot of NPCs (as it should in a life simulation game), and even though they have different stats and have some AI now, they end up all being forgettable because they look too similar. For example, half of the time when that event triggers where a friend calls me to hang out, I have no clue who that person actually is, even if he turns out to be the guy sitting next to me in the office this morning.

- There's no relation between the attractiveness stat and the actual hotness of the face and body of an NPC being generated at all. In fact, it's rare for the randomization algorithm to actually throw out a NPC with a pretty face and a hot body at all.

In terms of clothes:

- There is too little variety of clothes, this makes the issue of NPCs being too similar even worse 

- No uniforms to speak of. You can hardly distinguish who's the customer and who's the staff in your current location without hovering over everyone.

- Each clothing mesh can only be worn or removed, there's no 'in-between' stage at all.

In terms of animations:

- Still too few daily activity and furniture animations, characters look rather stiff in their 3d environments

2/ Polish:

In terms of characters:

- Extensive use of morphs often lead to either deformation of the vagina or terrible clipping with clothes, limiting your customization options even more, making characters look every more identical.

- Dick poking through partner's stomach during adult scenes and some other character-on-character clipping issues

In terms of clothes:

- The clothes currently in game aren't worth much more than as placeholders. Not only do they lack in variety, there are just too many issues with them.

- Due to both poor morph transfer and skeleton rigging, more often than not clothes cause terrible-looking clipping issues with the body

- Skirts and dresses are the worst, all it takes is for the girl to sit down and they go straight across through her knees

- Each clothing asset currently takes too much hard drive space, takes too long to load (main cause of choppy gameplay) and can cause fatal error crashes. For variety of clothes to happen, each piece can't be as heavy as it is right now or the game will be 50GB to download!

Still many lingering bugs to fix and the UI can be enhanced further for more user friendliness

The Solution - What Will the v4.0 Variety and Polish Overhaul Consist Of?

1/ Variety:

In terms of characters:

- Add a lot more customizations, especially to the face, to allow for truly unique-looking characters

- Add proper customizations for ethnic features.

- Add proper customizations for age-related features, from 18 year olds to grandparents.

- Massively improve the randomization algorithm to generate NPCs (and for that button top-left corner of the character creation screen) to make distinguishable characters

- Add a large number of unique presets for conventionally attractive faces (I’ll probably use models and movie stars as reference for them). In the future, the community can also contribute to this ‘hot face database’.

- Add some logic for the Npc generation process to take in account the attractiveness stat and pick a preset from above with further randomizations

- Characters change appearance gradually from age and fitness/ muscle stat changes

- 3D beards for the longer facial hair styles

- (Very advanced feature that even titles from big studios sometimes can't get right so not 100% certain it can be done for LifePlay yet, will need further experimenting) Allow the player to import real life photos and the game generates them into character faces. Also as long as importing images at runtime can be done, it can be used for custom tattoos and other skin overlays too.

In terms of clothes:

- Add a huge selection of new clothes and accessories for men and women (pretty much I'll add every assets I can find if they're within a reasonable polycount range or can be optimized to a reasonable polycount)

- The new clothes will include uniforms and location/scene-appropriate attires, clearly distinguishing staff and customer, doctor and patient, hooker and John, etc

- Some of the most common clothing pieces (won't be possible to do this for all the clothes though) will now have an additional in-between stage to be used mostly for adult scenes, such as jeans pulled down, panties pulled to the side, t-shirt pulled up to expose breasts etc

In terms of animations:

- More daily activity and furniture animations, not only to make the game more lively (since the characters will be diverse looking wearing diverse clothes, would be a waste if they all just stand around, sit around or play the same animations repeatedly when in the 3D environment), but also as an extra test for clipping minimization (see below)

2/ Polish:

In terms of characters:

- Improve the Character Creation UI and control, especially regarding morphs (hopefully with sculpting by dragging with the mouse). No point adding tons of new customizations then have bad UI prevent players from fully utilizing them.

- Fix the deformation of the vagina when the player uses many morphs

- Add options to the adult scene UI to partially undress an apparel piece (i.e. pull aside panties) when there's an 'in-between' stage available for that asset

- Uses some of the same methods used for clothes described below to limit character-on-character clipping issues, especially dick poking through partner's stomach.

In terms of clothes:

- Proper morph transfer and skeleton rigging for all the clothes to prevent clipping issues with the body even when many morphs are used or complex animations are being played

- Split the most common 'poking through' areas of the body (nipples, lower stomach, vagina, etc) into separate texture 'slots' that can be dynamically and temporarily made transparent (but the player won't be able to notice) when clothes are already worn and covering them completely. This won't cause any seams at all, don't worry.

- Add a system to dynamically 'simplify' certain body morphs when putting on clothes covering them so that the morphs on the clothes can follow the body perfectly with no clipping, despite always being at a disadvantage in terms of the number of vertices it can use (due to performance, if each apparel piece has the same polycount as the character model, no PCs would be able to handle the game). Again, the point is the player won't be able to notice that their character's fully dressed body uses fewer morphs than when nude. This system will take into account the type of apparel too when deciding how much simplifying is appropriate: the morphs on a tight fitting bodysuit can't be simplified too much, but a loose casual T-Shirt? That belly button depth morph probably isn't worth the potential clipping and can be simplified away when dressed compared to nude. 

- Very slightly less tight-fitting clothes in general as an extra clipping prevention method, a final fail-safe basically

- Improve the Inventory menu and Buy Apparel menu UI and control, taking into account a much larger selection of clothes available

- Optimize each clothing asset to take as little hard drive space as possible so that they load faster result into smoother gameplay and no fatal error crashes.

- Remove some unused and outdated files from the game folder to save some space for the new clothing assets. Hopefully even when tons of new clothes are added, the final download size for the game post v4.0 overhaul won't increase by too much.

Bug fixes and other optimizations. The final update of the 5-update overhaul is called v4.0 Stable after all!

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So, that's the current plans for v4.0 at this early stage. Obviously the overhaul is still 4 months away (with a very kinky first quarter of 2021 to look forward to first!) so please don't hesitate to suggest your own ideas relevant to the main focus and I'll be happy to consider adding to the plans. The final v4.0 plans will be posted in early March, with the details on what exactly will be worked on in each of the 5 overhaul updates.