Sex Mod Framework - Development Discussion

[blue1820]

I was on the fence with this title, but after seeing this post I am going to buy it, if it has the same engine as Skyrim, I can see a world of potential in this adventure. 

[ebbluminous]

43 minutes ago, blue1820 said:

I was on the fence with this title, but after seeing this post I am going to buy it, if it has the same engine as Skyrim, I can see a world of potential in this adventure. 

It does not have the same as Skyrim.

 

Starfield is Creation Engine 2, so doesn't mean it has the same or greater potential than Skyrim for modding. We can hope, but don't expect

[Lexa Stormborn]

to be fair, bethesda has hailed starfield as a modders paradise. i definitely think we can expect it to at least match skyrim, although i do expect it to be more

[Aya_is_best]

Still can't help but wonder how feasible it'd be to implement a futanari gender that'd count as either male or female depending on the context of player interactions. FO4's FutaFEV was honestly kinda jank with how you'd still make your pussy usable in sex animations.

 

Wanna think futa-specific animations could also be done, but I also acknowledge how niche dickgirls are.

Spoiler

Though a male/futa/female threesome would probably be hot nonetheless

 

[ButtJutsu]

6 hours ago, Lexa Stormborn said:

to be fair, bethesda has hailed starfield as a modders paradise. i definitely think we can expect it to at least match skyrim, although i do expect it to be more

It's 2023 and people still believe everything that comes out of their mouth? 

[ebbluminous]

12 hours ago, Lexa Stormborn said:

to be fair, bethesda has hailed starfield as a modders paradise. i definitely think we can expect it to at least match skyrim, although i do expect it to be more

Toddy is only interested in how to monetise mods, so it will be a paradise for him if they are able to do that

[leonardo7th]

10 hours ago, Aya_is_best said:

Still can't help but wonder how feasible it'd be to implement a futanari gender that'd count as either male or female depending on the context of player interactions. FO4's FutaFEV was honestly kinda jank with how you'd still make your pussy usable in sex animations.

 

Wanna think futa-specific animations could also be done, but I also acknowledge how niche dickgirls are.

  Hide contents

Though a male/futa/female threesome would probably be hot nonetheless

 

Hear hear. The futa mods have been very hit or miss in Bethesda games. Especially when compared to the very robust sex frameworks that have been developed before. Obviously the mod devs are directing most of their efforts either to the more mainstream interests or their personal preference, so we can't expect too much.

 

I hope that this time the option for a 3rd gender is at least considered early on, so that it can be easier to expand on it later on, rather than it being jankily fitted in after the fact.

 

[Wasmachensachen]

5 hours ago, ebbluminous said:

Toddy is only interested in how to monetise mods, so it will be a paradise for him if they are able to do that

I don't think that Todd wants anything like that. He is the game director, not the head of marketing. I hate when people make him responsible for everything and don't even think about the possibility that he has no saying in certain matters.

[ebbluminous]

3 minutes ago, Wasmachensachen said:

I don't think that Todd wants anything like that. He is the game director, not the head of marketing. I hate when people make him responsible for everything and don't even think about the possibility that he has no saying in certain matters.

Although a smart Toddy would have a contract that gives bonuses and rewards for financial success, therefore monetarising mods would be in his own interest. I'd be very surprised if he is on a flat salary.

[七八九筒]

18 hours ago, Lexa Stormborn said:

公平地说，贝塞斯达将 Starfield 誉为改装者的天堂。我绝对认为我们可以期望它至少能与《天际》相匹配，尽管我确实希望它能更好

in our chinese bbs and discord have a famous remark：“Todd的嘴，骗人的鬼”

 

[vietthai96]

i prefer Sexlab-type Framework, AAF is pretty meh ngl, Ostim is not bad though, just sad that it isn't have Creature feature and not many features was developed around it, still it is fine if we have another situation where we can use both Sexlab and Ostim since both don't conflict with each other

[chooo]

On 8/30/2023 at 8:50 PM, Trykz said:

 

The thing I keep going back to, is how "resource heavy" the game is purported

to be. It's enough that it has many either upgrading major pieces of hardware, or

even buying/building brand new gaming rigs.

 

Todd Howard a couple of days ago: "Upgrade your PC"  ...ohhh Todd haha.

 

My PC is somewhat of a beast and 60FPS at Native 1440p is about all I can muster.

RTX 3080 Ti

R7 5800x

32GB of 3600 DDR4

980 SSD

Edited September 8, 2023 by chooo
Added some specs

[Trykz]

42 minutes ago, chooo said:

 

Todd Howard a couple of days ago: "Upgrade your PC"  ...ohhh Todd haha.

 

My PC is somewhat of a beast and 60FPS at Native 1440p is about all I can muster.

RTX 3080 Ti

R7 5800x

32GB of 3600 DDR4

980 SSD

 

Yeah, but he's been saying that all along. I need to see what my FPS actually is. I know I'm

not getting 60, but the game runs well smooth enough for me. I don't see any hitching or

jittery graphics, and my audio desync problem is completely gone. Even after adding reshade

and a few presets to test out, it just runs nice and smooth. And I even added a mod that

intensifies things like laser weapons and the like.

 

1 hour ago, vietthai96 said:

i prefer Sexlab-type Framework, AAF is pretty meh ngl, Ostim is not bad though, just sad that it isn't have Creature feature and not many features was developed around it, still it is fine if we have another situation where we can use both Sexlab and Ostim since both don't conflict with each other

 

I don't like AAF at all. But it's what we got for FO4 so it is what it is. Better than nothing

I suppose, and I'm thankful and appreciative of the work that went into getting it to us.

But for this game, I hope we'll see something more streamlined, intuitive, and without

the awful fade-to-black, doppleganger thing.

 

Something simple that just loads the called animation, and positions the actors. I really

liked SexLab's diary, but always thought it would have been better off as a separate

mod, rather than being an included feature the framework needed to track.

[Akira1364]

I mean there is a direct "successor" to AAF that specifically addresses the issues people here have mentioned...

[robert_d_negro]

23 hours ago, Lexa Stormborn said:

to be fair, bethesda has hailed starfield as a modders paradise. i definitely think we can expect it to at least match skyrim, although i do expect it to be more

it would be nice but i doubt it.... besides matching skyrim is not enough. why should i bother to install all the mods if there is nothing new besides sci fi theme in starfield, fallout 4 proved this. skyrim has already killed almost all bugs and there are lots of guides for all the mods, if starfield wants to beat that, it has to be with something new that modders can use... only then the community could switch

 

the next months are going to be interesting, lets wait and see what the modders say about sf

[Trykz]

2 hours ago, robert_d_negro said:

it would be nice but i doubt it.... besides matching skyrim is not enough. why should i bother to install all the mods if there is nothing new besides sci fi theme in starfield, fallout 4 proved this. skyrim has already killed almost all bugs and there are lots of guides for all the mods, if starfield wants to beat that, it has to be with something new that modders can use... only then the community could switch

 

the next months are going to be interesting, lets wait and see what the modders say about sf

 

I don't.

 

Because two things are true here... Bethesda staked their rep on this game, and convinced Microsoft to invest in it. So it NEEDS to be "at least" on par with Skyrim's

modding capability. If the latter doesn't happen, then the former won't matter to Microsoft, and some Bethesda housekeeping will be in order. Count on it.

 

And two... it needs to follow Bethesda's tradition of producing highly moddable games, and expand upon it. That's where modders come in. Because in the end, THEY

are Bethesda's true target audience. Because there's NO WAY Skyrim could wear the crown that it does without them. It would never have been so wildly popular.

 

And Bethesda knows it.

[ag12]

Most people have already said a lot of the stuff that'd be nice to have in a new iteration, I got a more technical one:

consolidated call counters for player controls. I know that various mods on Skyrim had systems to count e.g. DisablePlayerControls calls and track them internally, such as ZAP, and maybe even SexLab had it (I never saw an easily accessible API for it) - but it's been a gripe of mine trying to mod back then. Different mods will enable/disable player controls for various scenes and reasons, and it used to be very easy to break - e.g. if you have a scripted sequence where the player has no control, SL does a scene and then restores controls at the end, you had to check and account for that and disable the controls again.

 

So while it's not actually sex related, it can safely be assumed that the entire LL ecosystem is going to have this framework as a dependency, so it'd be the ideal place to track the player control status and have other mods call API functions to handle player controls, massively reducing the chance of mods conflicting and enabling player controls again at the wrong time.

 

Just a minor convenience thing. I bet there's a hundred ways I could've handled it, but I remember having had issues with SL scenes nested inside other scenes and making sure the player can't run off in between, not sure if SL is meant to restore whatever control status is present before the scene starts, but it never did for me!

Either way, looking forward to all of it and best of luck to all the asset creators, hopefully you can struggle through the potential new animation systems. At least I expect Starfield to support custom animations like Fallout 4, without FNIS or other workarounds.

[Deathmaw]

7 hours ago, Akira1364 said:

I mean there is a direct "successor" to AAF that specifically addresses the issues people here have mentioned...

 

Is there? What is it?

[imafaget]

Many good points in this thread, not sure if it's been mentioned already, but an inbuilt SLAL function would be good, instead of it being a separate addon. A nice additional functionality to this could be it being able to scan for new loaded animations each time you start the game/load your save, then presenting you with a menu on which new animations to add in (I suppose this loading menu would preferably only appear when you access the MCM for Sexlab, instead of it popping up after loading). This would make it easier to load new animations from packs instead of having to enter the SLAL menu and clicking them manually.

 

Of the 3 frameworks that I've tried before (Sexlab, Ostim, AAF), I'd say Sexlab was the best and most versatile, with the most compatibility with other mods. I see that the creators of Ostim are willing to make a unified framework for Starfield alongside Sexlab, and I think that would be optimal so as to prevent fragmentation of the mod community. Thank you everyone for your hard work!

[zaira]

On 9/7/2023 at 6:03 PM, VersuchDrei said:

...With precision always comes complexity....

Then it is even more important that modders are taken by the hand and supported.

 

Wrapper functions that reduce complexity by solving typical use cases would be a good tool (layered complexity). The expert can study the wrapper functions to refine his use cases, the beginner can immediately produce playable results.

[zaira]

On 9/7/2023 at 7:37 PM, Varithina said:

 

Nope no1, is a solid and reliable, as well as stable framework

This is not a contradiction to what I said - the modder is also interested in stability and reliability, of course.

 

But I've seen many frameworks fail because they place a lower priority on their accessibility than their functionality.

BTW: This is what we call "Ivory Tower Development" in our business.

Edited September 9, 2023 by zaira

[Ashal]

36 minutes ago, zaira said:

But I've seen many frameworks fail because they place a lower priority on their accessibility than their functionality.

 

To that end, I will say one of my biggest goals with SexLab during its initial development was to make it as dead simple to utilize as possible.

 

I wanted the framework to be useable with very minimal scripting and modding knowledge; that way, anybody with an idea for a sexlab mod would be capable of implementing their idea with minimal knowledge.  You only need to know two things in order to use SexLab to implement your sex mod idea: how to set a property on a script and how to call the StartSex() function from it.

 

IMO, it's the job of a framework mod to be as dead simple as possible for a modder to make use of. The more time they have to spend learning to use the framework, the less likely they are to use it at all. Being able to implement ideas quickly is the mother of innovation and growth. 

 

I plan on carrying that philosophy forward in this framework.

 

---

 

However, I will admit, from the user perspective, SexLab certainly grew overly complex and bloated.  I was always overly focused on the mod creator's point of view to the detriment of the common user. Hoping to strike a better balance this time around.

 

[TheStranger]

I've got two more suggestions. I believe it is out of the scope for the framework, but I think it would be important for mods with sexual content. It would be good to try to unify as much as possible to ensure that mods made by separate authors function together.

 

The first one is a keyword/tag library for equipped gear (I think Starfield still uses this system). The idea is for there to be a set of standardized keywords so mods using the framework can trigger events/dialogue using them. Could have some that define the clothing in general: Suggestive (some cleavage, tight), revealing (short skirt, lots of boob), skimpy (barely anything there, breasts fully or near fully exposed), lewd (most or everything is on display) etc.

 

There should also be multiple sets of more specific keywords that describe at least the following body parts: Breast left, breast right, butt right, butt left, genitals. Each set would include keywords that describes how visible it is: slightly (only briefly or from certain angles, like going commando), partial (think side boob or dangerously close to the vagina/penis), full (its out in the open). So we would end up with keywords like: "breast left full", "butt right slightly", "genitals partial", "breast left slightly", etc.

 

If there is no keyword for visibility, then the body part should be considered covered (but it is up to each mod author to decide how to utilize the keyword).

 

A couple of other keywords that could be useful: Face visible and mouth exposed (face determines if others can see the characters expression or identity, and mouth exposed could be used to know if the headgear should be unequipped for oral sex). Yes, this means that some vanilla armors and equipment must have the tags applied to them, but hopefully something equivalent to Keyword Item Distributor for Skyrim comes to Starfield to make that easier (and less of a compatibility nightmare).

 

The last suggestion I have is for a set of parameters to describe the look of the player character so mods using the framework can use them to trigger mainly dialogue, but possibly other situations.

 

The game already has a way of determining the overall body build of the player character: light, heavy and muscular. At some point one could read other values about the look and body of the player when BodySlide and a way of defining the morphs (LooksMenu?) in game becomes possible (assuming that happens). But to begin with one could let the player manually describe their character through using MCM settings (again assuming Mod Control Menu becomes a thing). Obviously the setting would include things like butt size, breast size, genital size. Some values would need to be inputted manually anyway, they would be things like: body hair, pubic hair, hair color, hair length, eye color, scarred, tattooed. Could also have a value set up for the inevitable mod that adds visible dirt on a character.

 

All these values would be exposed as a part of an API so other mods can easily get access to these values.

 

I just think building a system that allows the quests/dialogue/systems that modders make react more to how the character is dressed and looks would be awesome. Perhaps it is better if this was built as its own framework that could run parallel to the sex framework. Systems similar to this was eventually made for Skyrim, in separate mods by separate authors, but as I mentioned previously, getting this established as early as possible would allow more mods to take advantage of it and hopefully make everything feel more cohesive.

[Ashal]

18 hours ago, Trykz said:

I really liked SexLab's diary, but always thought it would have been better off as a separate

mod, rather than being an included feature the framework needed to track.

 

Making another mod track the sort of information the diary tracked would've been difficult and cumbersome. The diary was more or less just a side effect of me wanting to have the framework track a multitude of information on the player and separate NPCs so that other mods would have a common pool of information/stats to pull from. I wanted other mods to pull from the same data about sex experience for NPCs and the player rather than generating their own and becoming inconsistent. I essentially wanted to avoid mods disagreeing whether or not an NPC is a virgin or a whore. The diary page in the MCM was basically just meant as a way to surface that information to the common user.

 

As far as I'm aware, few mods actually ended up using any of that stat tracking.

[zaira]

16 minutes ago, TheStranger said:

keyword/tag

This is the key point for every modder to be able to connecting scenes to the world and not only for outfits. Animations, locations, furniture - everything: Tags are the developer's equivalent for eyes in the game space.

Edited September 9, 2023 by zaira