I was playing a Visual Novel (eroge) recently and started thinking that as Visual Novels are more "experiences" than games, and as in virtual reality "experiences" currently often work better than games, there could be some potential in creating erotic Visual Novels for virtual reality. After googling around, seems others have had the same idea (e.g. http://virtualnovelgame.com/) but XStoryPlayer could have quite some potential also in this regard.

The problem with user-created content (mods) is that it requires substantial expertise and commitment to create. If the learning curve is steep, most people will give up. Hence, you want to provide a possibility for people to contribute in a way that requires very little in the way of learning and returns quick results, and then people can learn more about the system over time and start contributing more in-depth. In 3D games and modeling, texture modification is a typical example of this - it allows you to customize characters and clothing without knowing much about modeling.

Allowing people to create their own VR Visual Novels could be a way to allow people to easily contribute content to XStoryPlayer. Given sufficient girl customization options, which are already in the development pipeline, and enough variety in environments, which the planned University campus environment could easily provide (not to mention that a university environment is very common in Visual Novels), it would be relatively straightforward to provide people the tools to create the Visual Novels. A tool for defining your own animations using VR controllers to drag characters around in some kind of puppet mode would be cool but canned animations would work too. Tools would be needed to define the following:

• Characters
  
  • Name
  • Appearance
• Scenes
  
  • Environment (room)
  • Characters present and their clothing
  • First dialog path ID
  • Dialog paths (dialog lines and animations for each character until next choice point)
  • Choice points (where user needs to choose one out of several options), a choice point always triggers either the next dialog path or a new scene.
• Interaction triggers (user needs to do something to trigger next dialog path) that define the interaction and the dialog path ID of the triggered path. For example:
  
  • Player cums on/in character (possibly different triggers for cumming on face / in mouth / in pussy / in ass etc.)
  • Player spanks character a certain amount
  • Player opens the clothing of the character
• Animations (if there is a way to define your own)
  
  • Body/clothing (latter needed if stripping is supported) movements
  • Type: Relative to a character, player or environment?
  • Target: If animation is relative to environment, then an object or position in the environment must be specified. Note that same animation (body/clothing movements) can be reused with different targets, for example animation of going to a chair and sitting on it can also be used for sitting on a bed.

Interactivity would work so that by default the characters turn around to keep facing and looking at the player if he moves around, but do not otherwise move except through animations in the dialog paths. The animations would then either be relative to character position (e.g. taking own clothes off), relative to player position (e.g. go down on knees in front of player and suck his cock), or relative to the environment (e.g. go and lay down on the bed).

This would work especially well for roomscale VR because movement between scenes always happen through dialog options. The player never needs to move much, except to move around within the scene. There would rarely if ever be a need for teleportation style movement, you would just need a way to re-center the scene.

Most probably this should be implemented so that there is a more flexible scripting layer underneath which is used for more in-depth modding (similar to the current scripting but updated for v4.0 and hopefully more powerful) and the Visual Novel tooling would simply generate the scripts that implement the Visual Novel. Preferably there would also be extension points that allow Visual Novels to be extended (e.g. to add more complex interactivity) by adding scripts or script fragments to them. Of course, if the scripting layer is good enough, the Visual Novel tooling could also be implemented by modders. So I hope X Moon Productions keeps this use case in mind when developing the scripting layer for XStoryPlayer v4.0

>> The problem with user-created content (mods) is that it requires substantial expertise and commitment to create. If the learning curve is steep, most people will give up. Hence, you want to provide a
>> possibility for people to contribute in a way that requires very little in the way of learning and returns quick results, and then people can learn more about the system over time and start contributing
>> more in-depth. In 3D games and modeling, texture modification is a typical example of this - it allows you to customize characters and clothing without knowing much about modeling.

I agree, the biggest bottleneck for modding is the creation of new characters and scenery.
Of course scripting should be as user friendly as possible, but to add visual novel's (or stories) it should be easy to add new characters and scenes as well.

Because the scenes and objects in e.g. the Unreal engine (in most cases) use their propriety editor this is not really an option. We have done some research into if it is possible to open the Unreal engine more (it is open source ), but found out that this results in legal issues so we abandoned that path. I am not saying modding is not possible with Unreal, but it either requires using either the Unreal editor (high learning curve and making debugging mods hard) or building a custom editor from scratch (a lot of work, need to update with each new version of uengine).

So we are going for something that allows modders to easily add content without knowledge of 3d editing and texturing.
(More advanced modders can also import objects in .obj or .fbx format.)

Scripting is important but also requires programming knowledge as well. Therefore we are taking a more intuitive approach that allows for character customization without the need for scripting.
(More advanced modders can add scripting of course.)

All in all modding should be easy to step into and to use more advanced features along the way.

@xpadmin nice

Sounds good!

So you are using Unreal engine now? How are you handling cloth and fluid simulation, I thought you were using a custom engine to support that?

juddre my guess would be no.