Hoping to dump thoughts in this blog. Please provide any feedback and ideas to help drive this design. If something sounds dumb, let me know. If you have a cool idea, let me know.

I think as a foundation Frostfall has a lot of good ideas and kind of served to drive a lot of my thoughts and design below. If i say player i mean actor (any actor/npc/creature)

 

This is proposal for the new Arousal Mechanics to be add at my "Next-Gen" arousal mod

https://www.loverslab.com/files/file/20867-osl-aroused-arousal-reborn-sse-ae/

 

Because of the significant changes to underlying data structure, and performance improvements, the overall arousal system can be much more "dynamic" and "realtime" without relying on occasional scans/updates. Everything should be able to be much more reactive to gameplay.

 

This is largely a brain dump so apologies if its confusing.

 

Goals:

At a fundamental level, I think there needs to be a better mechanism for handling the two primary "Arousal" types, "State based arousal" (ex. Wearing Clothes, being naked, Wearing Devices, standing in the rain, being in presence of naked people, Viewing/Participating in scenes etc...) and "Event  based arousal" (ex. , vibration from plugs/piercings, orgasm, butt slap, etc...) 

 

I view these as two fundamentally different "types" of things, and trying to handle them within the same pipeline like arousal mods historically have, can cause a lot of oddities and limitations. Having mechanisms for handling them distinctly i believe will open a lot of potential for the future. As such this is driving much of the design

 

Core Attributes

There are two primary attributes that drive the underlying arousal mechanics.

• Arousal: Represents the actors current arousal. As an actor gets hornier, your arousal increases. (And vice versa)
• Horniness: Causes arousal to increase more quickly (or gradually lower if horniness is low). Establishes a "Baseline" target arousal level that arousal gradually normalizes to. [NEED: Better name]
  • Things like Clothing, Armor, Perks, Devices, etc... add to your total horniness. Certain events can also boost your horniness

 

This effectively provides 2 primary levers to adjust a players overall arousal. Directly adding to Arousal which can provide "temporary" boosts that will gradually normalize back down, and adding to horniness which will both cause arousal to raise to follow, and adjust the overall players "baseline" arousal level.

I am also thinking that if the player has relatively low horniness, but is blasted with a lot of arousal, that arousal will decay at a quicker rate (think of it like the farther apart the values, the higher the rate to "equalize" those values.) But the horniness will also slightly increase. So you temporarily have a lot of arousal, but will return to a "cooldown" state over time, however your baseline "horniness" also slightly increases. 

 

To try and give an example of the ways im thinking this might work is something like a Devious devices plug.

Maybe having a plug equipped increases your horniness by "25" 

If your previous horniness value was 30, and your arousal level was 32, on equip your horniness value is now 55.

Your arousal will then gradually increase to 55  as it is below your baseline (maybe gets to 40 after 1 min, 45 after another min, 48, after another, 50, after another, etc...)

 

Now lets say the plug vibrates, it could apply 30 arousal over 1 minute as it vibrates, shooting your arousal level up to 85

Then once its stops, since your baseline horniness level is still 55, it will gradually decrease back down to 55 over the course of X minutes. [I think all these rates would be configurable]

 

 

Im thinking that this will provide a more robust foundation for how arousal mechanics can work to allow for differentiating between "State" based arousal like equipped clothes/devices, and "event" based arousal like viewing scenes, viewing naked people, etc...

It also allows more weights for future "stats" systems to adjust things like maybe as your exposed to more arousal, your horniness grows quicker, arousal decays slower, etc... 

 

 

 

What Impacts Arousal/Horniness

I think at a simple level when thinking about this system, Horniness maps to an actors "State" while arousal maps to "Events". So for Example:

 

A Player has a base "Horniness" Attribute of 0. [Think of this like your base health] 

On top of that base level is "Modifiers" based off things like Clothing/Devices.

These values are stacked on top of your base horniness up to a point (ex. Base 10, plug 20 = 30..... but if base 75, plug 20, maybe plug will only increase up to 60, so your horniness is still 75 since plug doesnt add to it (or maybe only adds 5 so your horniness is now 80)

Lewd Clothing: 20 Horniness, Plug: 25 Horniness, ChastityBelt W/Plug: 40 Horniness, naked: 50 horniness etc..

So if a player is wearing a plug and lewd clothes their horniness is:

0 + 20 + 25 = 45 horniness.

 

The base horniness is modified by a players arousal being above/below their current horniness level.

 

So in that example, players arousal will move towards 45. Because their arousal is above there base horniness, there base horniness will very slowly gain value over time. (the higher arousal, and difference between base H <-> total H <-> arousal will modify the adjustment rate).

 

Say over the course of 10 minutes it increases your base horniness to 5, your total horniness is 50 and your arousal is likely somewhere around 50. If you remove the plug, your horniness will drop to 25, and your arousal will slowly lower down to 25. Your base horniness gain rate will also be significantly reduced since the difference between totalhorniness/arousal and base is much less.

 

Say you continue playing for a long time from there and dont encounter any other arousal related events. say after 2 hours, your base horniness is 20, your total horniness is 30, and the gain from lewd clothes is 10. At this point your horniness has "stabilized" since the relative "horniness" rating of the clothes has reached is limits and won't directly cause increases to your base horniness. So even though your arousal is above your base horniness, its not within a limit that would cause a gain in base horniness. (If you got a one time blast to 90 arousal, you would slowly gain base horniness as your arousal lowered back down to your horniness level, and then stop gaining again once it lowered to the threshold.)

 

If you then remove your lewd armor and wear normal clothes, your total horniness would then lower down to your base horniness (since you have no modifiers) of 20. Your arousal will then hover around 20 since thats your new "normal" baseline. If you wish to lower your base horniness, then you need to keep your arousal below your horniness level of 20. Ex. maybe being in rain lowers your horniness level by 20, so if your in a storm your total horniness is 0 (20 - 20), arousal is 0, and base will slowly move back down to 0).

 

I realise this might sound pretty complicated and confusing, but I actually think it should be fairly intuitive and majority of what i explained isnt actually seen by users, rather its just what the internals of the system are "actually" doing. 

 

Some ideas for things that manipulate:

 

Increases Horniness:

Types of CLothing

Wearing Devices

Participating in Scenes

Viewing Scenes

Being Naked

In Presence of Naked

Spells/Potions

???

 

Decreases Horniness:

Being in Storm/Rain

Being around corpses

Wearing Devices if not Masochist? (Ie overtime goes from lowering to increasing?)

Spells/Potions

???

 

Increases Arousal:

Butt Spanking/Groping

Lewd Conversation/Being spoken to

Device Vibration

Attacking with plug?

Spells/Potions

???

 

Decreases Arousal:

Orgasm

Killing Things

Spells/Potions

???

 

 

How will existing mods handle this

I think this system should be able to support existing mods sla manipulation "Acceptably". Because in the past the only mechanism has been to give a one time "Arousal" gain for things, I think we can have that manipulate the arousal stat above, and it should play nice with the proposed system. It might also "automagically" solved the common issue of your arousal simply always growing and never lowering.

 

 

 

 

 

Anyways that was a lot, Mostly just a brain dump. I will try to clean up my thoughts but hoping to get the initial ideas from some people.

 

Also let me know of any ideas you guys have for cool things that can be handled /considered.

 

I definately have a "Player-Centric" thinking around things, So it would be good to get some thoughts from people who interact with npc based arousal mechanics. I think naturally will always need to "Help" npc stats as far as aggressive seeding/random state adjustments for new/old npcs.