I think I have a general gameplan for how I'm going to work things following last week's loss. The situation with the faces is still a bit up in the air; COR Team has said that they're planning on releasing a new version of Charmers in the very near future, so until I can see what form it takes and how well I can adapt it to my purposes it doesn't make very much sense to put much work into any Citrus-based masks. So I haven't been.

 

But there's a lot planned this update besides the faces. I had only just started putting the hair sets into the mod when I found out that I wouldn't be able to use my current batch of faces from Charmers, but nearly everything for the new bodies was done. Since remaking the faces is going to take a while whatever happens with Charmers, and since the hairs will need to be re-checked for fitment issues with the remade faces no matter what happens (and also to avoid having to go through and pull out the ones with the fit issues on the SeXtreme faces that I've been ignoring), I've decided that I'm going to initially release the stuff that's already done sans any new hair or faces as a 'Type XXX Body' pack following the pre-setback 'very soon-ish' timeline. Once the situation with the faces is resolved, I'll release them and the hair sets packaged together as the proper Dibella-themed update that I had been intending the Type XXX set as a whole to be. To that end I've also pulled the Fragment of Dibella head insert from the current pack so as to maintain the thematic continuity, and of course the Busts of Dibella that used the Charmers face as well. 

 

Structurally, I'm planning on doing these as sort of cumulative updates. The existing DMA stuff still works fine on its own, obviously, and will be getting an updated version with the few changes I made to its content, specifically the new Centurion arms and the glow animations on several parts. The Type XXX set adds enough new and functionally independent content that it almost could work as a stand-alone mod- or, well, it was going to before I lost the faces. Even before those were gone I hadn't seriously considered fully splitting it off due to the interaction with the robotic limbs that I had designed into it, but now that it's back to relying on the existing faces I really can't separate them. And as for the Dibella pack there's absolutely no point in making that stand-alone. It'd also be kinda nice to avoid increasing the .esp count as much as I did with the DCC sets, even if it does come at the cost of an eventual third page on AddItemMenu.  

 

So to that end I'll be setting things up so that the packs are downloaded individually, but the .esp bundled into each successive one replaces the one previous. You'll download the base pack, which will just have the existing robotic-themed content, and you'll be able to use that as-is. Adding the Type XXX pack will replace the base .esp and add in all the Doll-based bodies and other more fetishy content, but will need to have the base pack downloaded beforehand or the robotic parts won't show up in-game. The eventual Dibella pack will replace the .esp from both and add in the new faces and hairs. This will also help keep the file sizes palatable; with 7zip compression the base and Type XXX packs come in at around 100 and 140MB respectively, keeping them well under the point where LL's upload system likes to choke which will hopefully mean that I can avoid having to off-site them. I'm also a bit inclined to only put the update on LL, at least initially, and put off uploading it on Nexus. Part of the reasoning there is that the SE version is still TBD, which is to say that I haven't even started looking at building one yet. Heck, I still haven't figured out why the pony mask in that version is broken. Just hasn't been a priority, honestly.

 

Also low on my priority list is a "CBBE" version. I put that in scare quotes because it isn't entirely necessary to do one, given how this stuff is built. The primary conflict between CBBE and UUNP is the mismatch in the way the textures are mapped onto the models, but with these the skin textures are all on their own isolated paths so that conflict doesn't come into play. The majority of the parts here are going to look the same regardless of the body type you're using, because they were intentionally built to ignore it. The only caveat is with the Variable parts, which are intended to conform to your body preset and are built using the UUNP meshes and sliders. They have the same isolated textures, so those aren't a concern, but I don't know how well they'll conform with CBBE presets. Rebuilding them entirely to the CBBE meshes would be A Pain so I'd like to avoid that, but I have started some experiments with transferring the CBBE sliders onto the existing Variable Doll meshes. Don't know how well that'll actually work yet, though, as everything else kinda derailed the testing.

 

Some of that everything else was finishing off the aforementioned 'nearly' for the Type XXX content. This has mostly just been polishing off the earliest work from the whole line of experiments for a 'salacious' update that got wholly subsumed by the Doll stuff, by getting their ground/inventory models and whatnot finished. 

 

 

Finding an adequate collision donor for the Pedestals here was a bit less of a pain than I expected, as the first one that came to mind, the one for the large shovel, ended up working out pretty well. It's not without problems, as it's quite a bit thinner than the pedestal models which can lead to them clipping through the ground at some points, but it's actually a bit less bad about that than I was expecting it to be. 

 

 

Aside from on the Sphere pedestal, of course. That one was pretty much hopeless. 

 

 

It's also set up so that it's damn near impossible to get the things to stand upright, which is annoying. But there's not much of anything else that would be the right size for these that would let them do that, so this is good enough for now. 

 

The other main target was the original Milker-type chests that led to this whole line of development in the first place. These along with all the other Type XXX chests were switched over to using the collision from the Imperial Heavy Armor instead of the Iron Armor's that was used of the robotic DMA chests, in part because it tended to fit the range of sizes that the chests were built to a bit better but especially because using it didn't result in the inverted lighting bug that I was getting on the earlier versions built with the existing DMA collision. Don't ask me why the hell that is, I just welcomed not having to do the extra step to fix that. 

 

 

You'll notice that the orientation on the Harness chest is different, though; both this and the Manga body-based fixed-weight chest are set up like this because it's the only way they'd fit into the collision. Otherwise those ginormous hooters would be well outside of its bounds and clip though everything. Trying to find a better orientation setting for them is on my list of maybe-to-do's, but as I've touched on before messing around with those is a really obnoxious process. And honestly, this doesn't look bad. The important part about it is the ground model's orientation, which worked out great.

 

 

I also finally got around to adding in a harness-less version of the expanded chest, which has been on my list for months. I had been considering doing multiple sizes of this both with and without the milker, but the Doll set kind of displaced those as well. 

 

 

This whole set comes in both flesh and rubber. Stone and brass versions are a bit pointless here, as these are more explicitly designed as humanoid body parts stuck onto a robot. The rubberized versions work as a slight (the slightest) concession to modesty, as well as a stopgap replacement for the beast race-compatible versions that I've entirely been putting off doing for the whole set. (It's not that it would be entirely hard to do them. It would mainly just involve a lot of tedious CK work to build the alternate Armor Add-ons and texture sets that they would need. But to maintain the existing CBBE 'compatibility' they would also need to have their textures on isolated paths instead of the user's defaults, like the rest of the bodyparts, and there's a lot of different options for beast textures which leads to a high likelihood of a much more drastic change from the user's textures than switch to Fair Skin on the non-beast characters causes. It's still something that I should do, since as-is using the fleshy parts on beast characters just results in very weirdly-colored human skin, but I'm dithering.) 

 

There's also no modesty plated options on these. Partially because I didn't feel it fit the theme, but in a much larger part because I kinda lost the slider settings I used to make the expanded chest. Whoops. 

 

There's one more batch of minor extra things that're getting added into the base part of the mod. It occurred to me one day that the only thing that I had as far as head coverings go that still showed off the 'brain' parts was the old modified Dwarven Bikini crest that I carried over from very early on in the DCC project, but that it wasn't really all that optimized for this. Particularly in that it was still the original unpolished version, without the re-chroming that I added during the course of the DCC's development, and also that it had the largely unnecessary head and chin strap. That chin strap has the potential to be a problem with certain head shapes, and it didn't really need any straps at all as an add-on to a robot. So I took hardly any time at all tossing chromed and strapless variation in, and then did the same with the Bikini Armor's original crestless version as well, because why not? 

 

 

Showing them on the Dibella face there is a bit pointless, though, since you guys won't be getting that one. So here it is paired with one of the existing faces and the unharnessed Milker chest to give you a better idea of what you'll be getting with the pack as it's currently formulated.

 

 

Even without the new faces, I like this. It's silly.

 

 

The UNPFx- based pelvises work particularly well with a robotic chest like this. The humanoid waist on those is cinched down very closely to the internal piping, which gives it a thinner and much more intentionally artificial look especially from the back. It's fun.

 

 

So that's the current plan. Future plans depend a lot on how I can salvage the situation with the faces. I intend to get some kind of new set of those out and restart the whole Dibella theme again at some point, but right now I can't really give any sort of timeline for that. I'd also kind of like to revisit the idea of having a pre-cut base head mesh that I could use to both build new static faces without having to repeat the cutting process over and over again, as well as to maybe create a dedicated Doll race to let people build original Doll characters with working facial animations. Both of those are a fair bit outside of my wheelhouse, though. I have a general idea of how new races work and the various challenges I'd have in adapting one to work with the DMA parts, but I've never gotten into the nuts and bolts of it. And as for the pre-cut head mesh I already ran into issues while experimenting with the idea on the Charmers faces, where a lot of the sliders up and stopped working right. I have some suspicions about what went wrong, but those suspicions involve the technical aspects of how the Racemenu sliders work so I'm well and truly at sea there. It's probably worth trying to figure out, though, since it would provide a massive improvement over the previous process. 

 

I've also got a couple other little ideas that I want to try poking around with to see if I can tuck them into the mod quickly, but nothing much that should be a major hangup should I have to skip over it. Aside from that it's pretty much down to the testing and error-checking. So expect to be able to do this to your own followers sooner than later.

 

 

And as an added bonus, have a bit of headcanon I wrote up as some background lore for this initial release. The original intent was to use it for the 'lore' section when I do the update for the main page, but it ended up much larger than what I wanted there. That'll end up using a vastly truncated version instead, but I figure it can't hurt to put the fuller one up as well. (The 'd/m' notations are placeholders for the dates, didn't want to take the time to figure out the exact timeline for this after deciding not to use it)

 

B--, I am sure you are aware by now that our colleague failed to return from his last expedition. What you may not yet know is that the team we sent to resupply him found his encampment burned out and the path he was using to enter the ruins collapsed beyond all hope of reopening. What exactly happened is unclear, and some of what was found is unsettling. Our colleague's recent theories about Dwemer technology at the end of their existence may have been bizarre, but it seems that he came across something that exceeded even his expectations. I enclose a transcription of the legible portions of a damaged journal recovered from the camp, so you can judge for yourself.  --S

 

d/m - Reached the site without incident. The locals seem to avoid this region, so we'll have to make do with the people we brought along. Did hire on the 'bandits' who sold word of their find to us, but I don't know how useful they'll be. Couldn't have been all that good at banditry, considering how starved they were, but there's always room for a few more hands at a dig site.

 

d/m - Don't know how they found this route into the ruin. The surface portions are long collapsed, and there's no real indication that this cave would be related to them. The hidden path at the back...

...long passage through the rock, ending in a cracked wall...

...Will enter to...

 

d/m - The initial rooms are in decent shape. Appear to have been ore and ingot storage, no traps or automatons. Further rooms partially collapsed, will have to dig out as much as possible but...

 

...in the last week. Not sure how extensive the collapse is. Our hired hands were worried that their discovery would prove fruitless, had to reassure them that this was normal for Dwarven ruins...

 

d/m - At last! Finding mangled scraps of automatons in the rubble. Doesn't match any of the major types, but also not quite what I was expecting. Not sure...

 

...hand. Very clearly a carved stone hand, in a bright white marble. Only partially reconstructed, but...

...did the Dwarves go in for this kind of work? They were certainly master sculptors, but they usually produced blocky, abstract designs, while this is perfectly lifelike. Have I lucked out and found the location of that Dibe...

...one of the areas suggested by my prior research, but I hadn't given it that high of a probability. Was it even more widespread than...

 

d/m - Metal arms, now. So far nothing but arms, first in stone, and now in the usual Dwarven metal. But instead of the armored design that I was expecting, they're cast to the same feminine shape as the stone arms. They are clearly meant to be parts of an automaton, but they don't seem to be the combat-focused automatons mentioned in the...

 

...appear to be a series of storerooms, if the structure follows normal Dwarven conventions. Will try the room one down and across the hall next, it seems to be...

 

...feet this time. Made from a dark, resilient material, rubber I think it's called? But why? And why is it in such a strange sandal? It almost looks...

 

...is definitely flesh. Or something that looks like flesh. It seems too real to be fake, but also too fake to be real. This almost tracks with...

...the bodies described there were intact with mechanical limbs, this is a mechanical limb with sections of...

 

...arms, feet, and now a leg. I'm a little bit concerned about where this is going. I'm afraid the status of Dwemer studies will take a hit when we open the next room...

 

d/m - I understand it now. It all makes sense. 
           The Dwarves were perverts.