First time Starbound mod creator

[Ariianna3288]

I have an idea for a sexbound addon that allows for body modification or transformation like that of becoming a hucow or other such creatures.  How do I start?

[Erina Sugino]

32 minutes ago, Ariianna3288 said:

I have an idea for a sexbound addon that allows for body modification or transformation like that of becoming a hucow or other such creatures.  How do I start?

 

What's a "hucow"?

[SingleForLife]

2 hours ago, Erina Sugino said:

 

What's a "hucow"?

HUman COW, basically transforming peoples bodys to make them lifestock

[Erina Sugino]

Ok, still doesn't tell me very much, so different approach.

What type of transformation are we talking about here. Changing spritesheets during sex? That's simple enough. Just hook into the actor.lua function the deals with actor building and rendering and add your own check that then proceeds to use a different spritesheet. Just requires having essentially a fully functional mock-race worth of spritesheets for every position, which is quite a bit of work. Also still begs the question of how to trigger the transformation.

 

If you want the lazy and easier route, you could simply do it as a custom position. Positions can override which spritesheet to use for a given actor (by number), so you could just make a custom position that overrides actor 1 or actor 2's spritesheets with the transformed one. Pros: You only have to make as many sprites as the number of positions you want to support. Also, triggering the transformation is simply choosing your custom position in the wheel. Cons: It is now bound to actor number and switching roles (if eligible) will just make the other person be transformed instead.

 

If you're talking about transforming the entity itself, outside of sexnodes - forget about it. The short answer is "How do I start? You don't, for it's impossible". The long answer is that you would most likely have to look into mods like "Starbecue", "Starpounds" or even "Futara's Dragon Engine" as they all already tried their hand at making a "custom entity renderer" - a hellish performance nightmare whereas the actual entity is turned invisible (creating native problems with Sexbound) and then the effect animator is used to basically do what Sexbound does on sexnodes, but for the base entity. Emulate rendering the normal entity in all it's different animations, Lua sided. It works, but is a really hefty tradeoff. Also, if you don't want to reinvent not just the wheel, but the entire concept of a car, you would need to use one of these mods as dependency to have access to their entity renderer; which is a biiiiiig toll for just wanting your little gimmick, so once again I would argue against that.

 

Beyond these Lua schenanigans, the only next best bet (and certainly most realibly future-proof one) is looking into depending on Starbound alterations like StarExtensions, OpenStarbound or StarGlue. All of which offer one or another new feature that let's you swap spritesheets on player entities. It's a barebones feature that is just a copy of how NPCs can be defined to use a custom spritesheet instead of the racial one, used for story NPCs like Ester, but in your case (where you essentially want to achieve swapping to a different racial spritesheet altogether) would get the job done. Convincing people to dabble with these types of mods for a simple kinky gimmick like this, though, is a different story.

 

Tl;dr: Yes Starbound modding is a complicated mess these days.

[Ant Cant]

The best I can suggest is look into how the morph ball works and see if you can make one that turns you into a cow instead of a morph ball.

[Erina Sugino]

1 hour ago, Ant Cant said:

The best I can suggest is look into how the morph ball works and see if you can make one that turns you into a cow instead of a morph ball.

 

The distortion spehere is using a tech instead of a status effect, but ultimately the same approach as aforementioned mods on a much much smaller scale.