PalSlide - A Palworld Bodyslide for Pals?

[SwissxPiplup]

How feasible would it be for a Bodyslide type of software to allow users to decide how the Pal bodies should look and turning that into a pak once exported that can be dragged into the proper folders?

 

Currently the models created are entirely based on the mod author's preferences, which is fine, but they're not everybody's preference. A PalSlide software could import models with sliders, allowing the user to tune the model to their own preferences before exporting the model (or models).

 

This may screw with some animation alignments but I believe there are in-game tools for alignment anyway so that can be left up to the user to tinker with anyway.

[Spirit_Shard]

I don't know if a bodyslide style solution would work, Bodyslide works specifically because of how the Creation Engine utilizes a Max and Min body mesh to calculate 'weight' as a slider, so bodyslide will modify different weighted regions of the mesh to morph and calculate these 2 models and compile them for the game, then the weight mechanic does all the math in-game. I guess on a technical level someone could put together such a tool to compile for Unreal Engine (as in a general tool for meshes, not really Palworld specific) but unless I'm misunderstanding something it would still require the min-max style meshes to be made for the math to work-out.

If that's the case then using Morph Targets would be much more viable and already works. Tools like Altermatic can already utilize Morph Targets to either randomize or specifically customize morphs but onto a mesh. The issue here is the model must be built with morph targets in the first place and the vast majority of models don't utilize them at all. People in The Broken Chatbox community have being doing some really interesting and impressive stuff with morphs so we're certainly learning how to utilize them better (I'm also learning about edge-cases we need to find solutions for >.>), but the number of modelers and the number of  Pals to cover is quite large so it will take time to cover them all.

There's technically another potential solution I have which will be in the Altermatic rework that's been in the works for a while, but it's currently really not stable and doesn't have the best results, so I recommend models implement Morph Targets when they can.

[SwissxPiplup]

I see. I was thinking the game would see nothing different from how models are currently provided, all of the fancy stuff would be done in PalSlide itself, once exported it would would be no different from downloading an installing a regular ol' pak file. You're correct about the slider weights however, everything would need a minimum and maximum value; the information of which would need to be provided in the downloaded file in the first place, likely ignored by the game, only readable by PalSlide itself.

 

Alternatively model packs could be shipped in a different format supporting all of this information, imported into PalSlide and converted to a readable pak file upon export, but this would complicate things for the average user. All the game sees is a model to load, no min or max values, just one value (unless supported by another mod such as Altermatic).

 

It is also entirely possible that I have no idea what I'm talking about. We can't rule that out. I'm just a Palworld player with a dream.