Wow I don't post on here much

I've been posting a bunch of junk on my AD Twitter. However, given the...slow-motion car crash that is the new management, I am shifting that over to my Discord server. You can join and enable notifications for just major updates, or turn them on for everything, if you like getting pinged constantly.

I've got something new cooking, so I'll probably post it on FA when it's available (:

just a reminder that this is a certified Crux Moment

have a nice day

I'm doing a round of written commissions to help out  pixelthegryphon with a move. You can read about why I'm doing this here.

So, they'll be vore stories with Pixel as either pred or prey, plus your own character(s).

See here for some specifics! You won't be using the commission form for this one, but my commission page still mostly applies.

I will be opening for regular commissions after this batch is done.

Would people rather see written work uploaded as a PDF (which you have to open and view), or as text (which appears directly on the submission page)?

I guess I could also just upload PDFs and also put the text into the description, but that’s a little wonky.

EDIT: I’ll be doing both from now on. It’s easy enough to set up, and I can just stick the description and stuff at the top of the page.

Check here for all of the details:

https://blog.crux.sexy/commissions/

I've been doing some short stories and vignettes to get the creative juices flowing. I am considering doing them on commission.

A while back, I did longer-form stories (e.g. in the 5k word range), but I found those to be a bit too ponderous for my liking. So, this would just be vignettes in the 500 to 1500 word range.

I am still getting a feel for how long this takes, so pricing will probably start around 3 cents per word. That's $30 per 1000 words.

I'd be down for writing pretty much anything that's been featured in my gallery.

Would any of y'all be interested in this?

I've set up a blog!

https://blog.crux.sexy/

It's going to be for dev diaries -- summaries of what I've been working on, snippets of new things, that sort of stuff. It'll be for the games I'm working on (hosted at https://crux.sexy), as well as some other stuff, like VR content.

I'll post links to it in journals, although they might not be as frequent as on twitter, to keep the journal-spam down.

With Flash on its way out of browsers, something new is needed for X-ray vore pics. I've already brought up the replacement I've been developing, but it seems pertinent to bring it up again now.

So, check out xray.crux.sexy!

Here's an example of what you can do with the site.

Check out the submission here for all the details!

I've been real busy with Macrovision, introducing a bunch of silhouettes for things like skylines and mountains. I developed a MUCH better workflow for importing models; it's a single script now, rather than a bunch of manual fiddling in Adobe Bridge and Illustrator.

I've also added a second vertical scale for "interesting" altitudes -- like the cruising altitude of commercial aircraft, low-earth orbit, and so forth.

Another big thing: the help has been rewritten! It's now hosted on Notion, which is a great tool for documentation. I've described all of the site's important features. Have a look, and let me know what you think!

Beyond that, uhh...nice weather we're having?

Macrovision! Macrovision! Macrovision! Macrovision!

I've added a bunch of characters. Most are new submissions (since there was a decent rush recently), but I've gotten some backlogged entries as well. That should be continuing.

There are now 748 characters and just under 5000 silhouettes in total. I'll be importing another 80+ buildings from NYC soon, bumping that total up to more like 5500.

I haven't been doing much with my other projects. Feast is pretty close to being stable enough to write some actual content for, but I still have a lot of systems I'd like to introduce (like persistent quests, and meaningful NPC interactions). I also want to go fix up the UI on the x-ray viewer, so that it's not quite so miserable to look at.

So yeah, not too much going on. Shout in the comments below if there's a city you want me to grab buildings from, I guess.

Macrovision's wild real-building ride has been going pretty well. Boston, Houston, Indianapolis, Liverpool, London, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Seattle, and Vancouver are now represented by some of their largest buildings (and some smaller ones, too).

Illustrator has been giving me headaches. Sometimes it just...stops. It also crashed at one point, but Bridge managed to keep chugging, impressively!

I'll be surveying some other large cities for more additions. I also want to include some categories of buildings, such as:

- popular furcon hotels
- stadiums and sports fields
- shopping malls and business plazas

Again, this is all driven by OpenStreetMap model data, so I can only add buildings if they're included in that dataset. The downtown areas of large cities tend to have the best coverage; everything outside of those zones tends to just be generic boxes.

I might grab a few overhead shots of generic city-blocks, though, since those provide a nice comparison against paws and whatnot.

That's most of what's relevant from the past week. A lot of time went into cursed H3VR modding!

oopsie I forgot for a bit

I've been getting back to work on Macrovision content! This includes new characters (some from the backlog, some freshly submitted) and a whole new category: real buildings.

Now, I obviously do already have some real buildings, mostly under the Landmarks category. This time, however, I'm working with models from the Open Street Map project. This lets me import an entire city's worth of buildings.

The path from Blender to Macrovision is a bit convoluted, though:

1. I run a script to isolate the building I'm interested in and take five pictures of it. Three pictures are taken from the side: north, northwest, and west. Two pictures are taken from the top: north and west. The world is unlit, so the model itself is dark, but the Freestyle renderer is used to draw lines on the edges.
2. I batch-image-trace these images twice. The first batch traces regardless of color; the second batch ignores the white lines.
3. I batch-convert the resulting Illustrator files to finalize the trace and to, for the second batch, adjust the color to a dark gray. This results in .svg files.
4. I run a script to manually combine the .svg files together. This is cursed.
5. I batch-convert the resulting combined .svg files to auto-trim their bounds

This would be much simpler if Illustrator's action recording system could remember my image tracing settings...but alas, it cannot.

So, yeah, that's cursed. The process has several manual steps, and takes a while, but it's mostly hands-off. So far, I've added ten buildings from Chicago and eighteen buildings from NYC. I'm currently working on a big pile from Houston.

These buildings should give a much wider range of things to compare against for modestly sized macros. You'll find them under the real-buildings category.

Beyond new content, I'm looking into a few lingering bugs. The view should no longer jump a bit when panning after zooming with the y-axis unlocked. I'm thinking of making zooming happen relative to the mouse cursor, rather than the center of the screen, but that'll take a bit of thinking (and MATH).

Rotation is also something I'd really like to add. Actually rotating the images is trivial; the problem is that my click detection gets royally fucked up, and I've had a surprising amount of trouble fixing it.

Clicks are detected by drawing the entity to an invisible canvas and sampling it at the point you clicked. If the pixel is opaque, it's a hit. This works excellently, but getting the rotated image placed correctly has proved elusive. It's always rotating around the wrong point, or winding up flung off the canvas. I'm sure I'll get it sometime soon! The same problem affects flipped images, incidentally.

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I've been playing a lot of VRChat. Whee. Been playing around with making worlds. Nothing much to report yet, though.

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I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was looking into making VR content. I've made some great headway in that department -- including a few trial runs of ambisonic audio. Ambisonic audio captures an entire sound field; it's a bit like how a light field camera can be refocused in post, and lets you listen at any angle.

Unfortunately, I have yet to find a player that correctly handles both ambisonic audio and that can play 360 stereoscopic video in VR. All of the VR players I've tried don't handle the sound properly! VLC can play 360 video and handles the ambisonic audio, but it can't display in VR (yet).

The stopgap solution is, apparently, Unity. That lets me get everything working at once. I might have something finished pretty soon (along with a regular 360 version for those without VR).

technology sucks lol

I am now a certified popufur with 200,000 pageviews!

That is all

thx

Whoops, missed the journal yesterday!

I've been spending most of my time wrapped up in VR - it's really quite something, especially when you throw in full-body tracking as well.

I've got my crux avatar textured (the original avatar is by Zab!). I'm still mucking around with the specifics, but it's working pretty well. I've also gotten that model imported into LIV, which lets me use it for third person streaming (that video might not be around for long; twitch doesn't keep 'em forever).

Obviously, I'm now looking into 3D/VR content creation. 360 images and animations look great, although the render times are pretty brutal. It'll probably be a while until I do anything there.

I finally made some dang vore audio for once! I'd like to do more short pieces like that. Will see how that goes.

Not much has gone on programming-wise, because of..well, entirely because of VR stuff. I will probably drift back to work on Feast in a week or so.

Not too much going on this week! I've done some more work behind the scenes on Feast, but it's not immediately apparent -- most of it has to do with how combat tests are designed and calculated. I'll be continuing to work on AI and fundamental stuff; new writing should happen in a few weeks.

I've done some preliminary work on a new UI for Stroll, but I have a LOT of thinking to do before I go much further on that. Don't expect to see too much on that front for a while.

I'll be quite distracted for a while, since I've just gotten into VRChat. I've got a nice crux model retextured to match Fen's patterns, and I'm just waiting for New User status so that I can upload the dang thing...

Also, I'm turning 25 on the 24th (which is a few minutes from now). I can finally rent a car!

I've started doing field recordings again. Although much of them will be general foley work, there'll definitely be some useful vore content as well.

You can find me on Freesound. I'll probably make submissions for any major batches of vore sounds; for now, I just have some old sounds of stroganoff being stirred (try slowing it down for some deeper slime).

Bit of a lighter week for Feast, but there's still be seen some good stuff happening. I've implemented a new AI system, which assigns weights to all of a creature's available actions based on a collection of deciders. For example, the current default AI will avoid passing, surrendering, and releasing prey.

All action conditions can now be described, so the game can explain exactly why certain actions are available to you. I'm not sure if I want to have the game show every action you can't perform, since that could get messy. I might make that an option, along with the verbose explanation of every single condition!

Digestion now happens passively during combat; you don't have to actively digest prey every turn. I'll need to muck around with balance for this.

There are werewolves now. Hot.

I'm still figuring out exactly how a game-over state will be handled, but for now, getting destroyed (either digested below 0 health or having negative health of a greater magnitude than your maximum health) will prompt you to respawn in your home.

One problem with the current system is that you'll permanently lose a bit of mass, since the predator will slightly absorb you before the game decides it's time to respawn. I suppose it is reasonable to deduct some size from the player when that happens, especially since you can gain it back by eating a rando.

That's another issue that will need some balance work. You can just eat nerds for an hour to get incredibly large, making you impossible to eat. Perhaps I'll give each creature a base size that determines how much mass they can reasonable gain; your base size will only increase through consumables and progression.

Balance is hard! I'll figure that out as I go.

This was almost on vore day. Oh well.

As you may have already seen, I've properly announced the re-development of Feast. I've gotten some very useful feedback (and screenshots of broken menus).

The game now has a profile screen, which shows your items, stats, and prey. I've covered the usual bases with items -- key items that don't do anything by themselves, consumable items that can be used (currently indefinitely, out of combat...) to do something, and equipment that can be held to give you new actions or to reduce the damage you take.

Your current prey appears in a little view for each contain. They (or, at least their names) squirm around a bit, and disappear once completely absorbed.

The basics of an AI system are now implemented; right now, there are only two types: random, which just picks actions at absolute random, and vore, which picks vore moves if they're likely to succeed. This will be getting significantly more work once I figure out how it's actually going to function.

Unbirthing has been added. Both it and cock vore are "two-stage" -- there's an outer container (slit, cock) and an inner container (womb, balls). By default, prey gets automatically pulled into the inner container once it's dead, but that can be overridden to allow for some fun stuff like CTF.

The UI has been smoothed out a bit -- it should be scaled down on mobile, making it less tightly packed, and I've given some more room to the action buttons in combat.

Size-shifting has been introduced, with  aeznon's Geta now available to shrink (or be shrunk by). Size is based entirely on mass; digesting a creature claims its mass for yourself, and growth/shrinking effects will scale your mass up or down appropriately. Having more mass than your opponent gives you an advantage in vore-related checks, and the capacity of your containers (e.g. your stomach) depend on your mass.

 kuroodod's lion is returning from the old version of Feast, once again here to bully tiny players who wind up in dark alleys. I do need to make him actually shrink the player...

None of this is balanced yet, obviously.

There's now a debug room to the south of your home, which lets you meddle with your stats and size. I've also introduced currency, so you'll eventually be able to steal money from people you've devoured and use it to buy sandwiches.

So yeah -- the next big step looks like it's going to be AI. Once that's working, I'll be adding a bunch of generic enemies so that there can be some variety (and, perhaps, some progression!)

I've gotten lots more work done on Feast!

The interface has been cleaned up a fair bit -- the combatant lists scroll to center whoever you select, and selected entities now have a marching-ants outline to make it more obvious what's going on. If a unit's turn begins and it's inside a predator, the predator is automatically selected. That's because...

...turns are now a thing! Each creature's initiative meter fills up at rate based on the square root of its speed -- so a creature with 40 speed will act twice as often as a creature with 10 speed. I might allow for multiple actions per turn; right now, you just get one.

Horizontal scrolling in the combatant lists should feel better now. Web development is annoying.

New entries now appear at the top of the combat log. It seems more reasonable to put things there, since most of your visual focus is on the top of the screen. Text also has a little fade-in transition when added.

I've also begun working on explore mode in earnest. The game now starts in it, and you can return to it from combat once one side loses. It's pretty basic at the moment, but you can wander around and stumble into unwinnable boss fights, so that's a good thing!

I have a few more guest bosses floating around, including  threes (whose red panda has a lot of grabs) and  goldeneyegryphonsadist (whose gryphon is Definitely Very Unfair). They'll be getting some more actions and such as I work on new mechanics, naturally.

There are now a number of status effects, such as stuns and shields (and surrendering...). Next up will be permanent perks and item effects, which will be handled pretty much identically. I'm also planning to add a more detailed vore system, which might include finding your own bones in a predator that you keep succumbing to...

So, all in all, progress has been steady, and should continue to be so! Remember to join the Discord server if you want to follow along.

More Feast work! The English language is a pain in the bum.

I've been spending a fair bit of time improving how text is generated. The game now works in first, second and third person, and I no longer have a separate template for every combination of POVs. To do so, I had to figure out a way to correctly conjugate verbs.

Conjugation (at least in the English language) is how you produce the correct verb to go along with a subject noun. It's what makes "I eat" different from "he eats", as well as "I am" different from "you are" and "he is".

Fortunately, this isn't too complex; you just have to define the various forms of each verb and make sure the noun's pluralization and perspective is correct.

Entities actually change their name when viewed in second or first person, replacing the usual (im)proper noun with a set of pronouns.

So, with all of that combined, I can now write a single template and get every POV combination (including less sensible ones, like first/first) all at once.

Beyond language, I've done some more work on the UI, adding things like healthbars. Base vigors are now determined by your stats, and stain drains/buffs will harm/heal the appropriate vigors.

The current encounter now features a very large lycanroc.

I'm currently trying to figure out how to balance things. Right now, stat-based tests take the difference between the score of the attacker and the defender, then plug the result into a logistic function -- which looks like this. Unlike in something like D&D, this is not a linear curve, so significant differences in stats don't give guaranteed success/failure.

It seems like a pretty smart system, but I need to work out "normal" stats -- what an average person would be expected to have, and what a relatively powerful character would be able to attain. That will affect how steep that curve is -- the steeper it is, the more powerful the same difference in stats is.

Numbers are tricky, but at least they aren't as tricky as English verbs...

Feast is coming along quite well! Here're some things that have been introduced:

- There's a new interface that better handles large numbers of combatants.
-- Still needs a lot of work, though!

- Text can now contain nouns, verbs, and adjectives that are formatted correctly for their context, and these words can be randomly chosen.
-- The random picker avoids using the same word twice in a row.

- Stats have been fleshed out some. I'm currently working with...
-- Three vigors: health, stamina, and resolve. Running out of one renders you unable to fight
-- Five stats: toughness, power, speed, willpower, and charm.
-- Some vore-stats: weight and bulk (your weight + the bulk of everyone inside you)

- Attacks can damage your vigors or drain your stats

- Actions can now be group actions, which target many enemies (or allies) at the same time
-- STOMP

- Grappling is now possible, using the same general mechanics as vore, but without digestion and whatnot

The current guest-star is Withers, who is such a good bossmonster that I had to use her for testing. I was also mucking around with  dalken's taur, who will be back...once I figure out a good way to switch combat encounters, at least.

One big thing on my plate is figuring out how turns will work. I was thinking of something like Shadowrun's initiative system, where you can move several times per combat turn if you have enough initiative points.

As usual, you can join my Discord server to see the latest updates. I've got bots that post the latest changes to all my projects!

I decided that I should communicate a little more about what I've been up to. I'll be posting a journal at the end of every week (i.e. on Sunday) to recap what's been going on.

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The biggest thing I've been up to is a rewrite of Feast. This is a complete replacement of the old game (it's not going anywhere, though!). I was pretty unhappy with the old one for a few reasons:

- The code itself was an unmaintainable mess. A lot of stuff was duplicated unnecessarily, which was partially because...
- Everything was done custom. Each enemy's actions were done individually, because...
- What structure I did have wasn't flexible enough. The game had "combat" and "eaten" states, but they wound up being too annoying to use

All of this together meant that it was turning into more of a text adventure, where every enemy behaved distinctly from every other enemy, and nothing was consistent. That was actually my motivation to go on and make Satiate, which is a text adventure engine.

The rewrite is looking a lot nicer. I learned Typescript, which provides much better organization of my code (if I do something wrong, it actually tells me, rather than just letting me find out at runtime!). I'm also using Vue for the UI, which has made things a lot faster to develop.

So far, I've mostly been working on the combat system. An important concept I've enforced is that there's nothing special about the player -- in the old Feast, only you had a stomach, for example; everyone else just had special combat actions that depicted you being eaten. Now, everyone is symmetric; the player is just whoever's designated as being described in first person.

Next up will be some more vore mechanics, along with a system for moving around the world. I'm thinking of doing compass-rose navigation within locations, and a map for fast-travelling between locations. Not sure how much I'll be doing in the way of quests, story, and so forth, but there's lots of room for growth.

If you want to follow development, join the Discord server!

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Beyond that, I've got some audio for animations in the works. I'll probably post links to that stuff next week.

I'm taking a break from Macrovision at the moment. I'll be adding more folks once I've recovered a bit from doing 685 people! I'm pretty happy with where it's standing right now -- there are some UI tweaks that need to happen, and I want to add some more features, like an entity search.

Overall, though, I'd say it's basically at v1.0.

man there's a lot of spam out there.

It's bad enough that I wrote a Chrome extension that filters out frontpage submissions with certain titles. By default, it only targets things like "reminder" in the title, but I've added "ych", "adopt", and "auction" to my own list. That covers most of the unwanted posts without too much collateral damage.

FA seriously needs to clamp down on the volume of this stuff -- it's drowning out actual content, sometimes accounting for more than half of the frontpage posts! Whilst it's not necessarily high art (last time I looked there was a dick pic), at least it's content, rather than an endless tide of copy-pasted adopts and ads for a YCH I've already seen four of five times.

EDIT: The filter is now available for Firefox, too.

Here're a few interesting things I've been working on!

X-Ray Viewer: A website that lets you view x-ray style images. Here's an example, using this base image and this internal view. Once you've set it up, you can copy the URL to share it.

"You Died" Telegram bot: I couldn't find a good tool to create those "you died" images, so I made a bot that does it. That's all there is to it.

Macrovision is getting close to v1.0; there are still some kinks to work out, of course. I'm still taking character submissions for it!

As for future work, I'm planning to return to Stroll and fix up its UI. I've learned quite a bit from working on Macrovision...and yeah, there's room for improvement.

The past few days have been intense -- anger-inducing and eye-opening in equal measure.

I scored a jackpot on my upbringing. It is impossible for me to grasp the anger and fear that centuries of oppression have inflicted.

I understand that I will never understand.

Regardless, I stand.