I am amazed with how much Kiseff has been updating the game. Atlyss is already on its 5th patch this month! Incredible!
In spite of my awe, my anxiety loves to remind me my own activity has been lackluster. What if something breaks???

I will remedy that today! For now...
All 3 of my Atlyss mods have a new release today! It's all available on my Ko-Fi right now. My focus has been on future-proofing and fixes. Camera Freedom and Accurate Collisions got mostly bug fixes for their updates.
There was one change of note for Camera Freedom. If you press the hotkey to hide the player's head it will no longer hide everything above the neck. Your equipment will still be displayed. I did this because I wanted to be able to see the hood of an outfit while in first-person.
You might notice that I actually have an avater icon now. That's D-Don! She's one of the characters I play as on Atlyss and she's the one you have seen the most in many of the silly screenshots I upload.
I finally settled on a particular look for her. She's got a weird affinity for bones and the general vibe of the catacombs so the Necromancer Hood was a perfect addition for her look. Thanks Kiseff!

The future-proofing should prevent the mod from breaking as easily during updates. Same should be true for Accurate Collisions, and especially the Growth Mod. The code in the growth mod remains my cleanest out of them all. I want to make sure I'm clear for adding new features because there's already so much to keep track of.
I feel bad for not having anything substantial to add beyond fixes and future-proofing. So for those who wanted more shrinking I did exactly that!

Gahool, Biggun, Nograd, Carbuncles, Alshar, Stezza, and Death Knights can all give the shrink debuff now. I also resolved that problem with Diva so the slime orb's AoE gives the debuff too!
I also made the shrink debuff apply no matter the level difference. Previously a high level difference would make the player become resistant to the debuff. I thought it would be nice to have it that way to show off the player's growth! They're too strong to be shrunk by weaker foes!
But when I considered the appeal of shrinking to begin with, I realized maybe people would prefer it if they got shrunk anyway even if the damage barely hurt at all.
Let me know if you prefer it the other way.
By the way, not all enemies shrink the same amount. Angela and Diva have the strongest shrink debuff. This is followed by Zuulneruda/Kaluuz and then Gahool. I'll figure out how to make the debuff stack eventually.

Today also featured some attempts to make the player's collision scale with their size. I go into more details about this on Ko-fi, but it was way harder than I thought it would be. Collision adjustments is the hardest task out of anything else I want to achieve for my growing needs! I apologize for my incompetency, but there's a lot I'll need to learn to make these collisions work. I'll do my best.
There was also an attempt to adjust ledgegrabs with scaling. Similar to the collision problem, this was also unexpectedly harder to implement than I thought. The good news is it's going to be a whole lot easier than collision from what I can tell. Ledgegrabs just had a lot more logic going on than I thought. It's a section of the code I never paid attention to much until now.

Whew. Doing this really makes me appreciate the work Kiseff put into this. Give Atlyss a try if you can! I've been loving it so far.

It's time to do some code cleanup.
Angela's tail has been growing incorrectly this whole time!

That was the only real bug that existed. The rest of what I needed to do was just some refactoring.

With some extra time I started to make some progress on the mod. The most recent build of the mod on Ko-fi was a rush job and I really don't like that. There were features I wanted to put in that build that I set aside to match Kiseff's build.
Visual effects and the player's shadow now scale properly with their size. Now your shield will actually cover the player's body at larger sizes. The shadow will match larger sizes as well. The same is true for being small. Other miscellaneous effects scale as well.
This is also true for Zuula's new particle effect that Kiseff added.

I tried to make DIva's attack give the shrink debuff properly, but so far I haven't figured out what object is the AoE splash effect that the slime balls create with each bounce. I'll figure it out with more time.

In the meantime, I gave a few more enemies the shrink debuff as well. I think I should make the debuff relevant to some degree throughout the whole game. I'll detail which ones will be receiving the debuff in their attacks later.

Not much was done today. I was busy!
I was made aware of the fact that the Camera Freedom mod was broken after Kiseff's latest hotfix patch.

Good news.
It's fixed now!

Camera Freedom is considered feature complete so I have it available on the Thunderstore: https://thunderstore.io/c/atlyss/p/.....amera_Freedom/

This was an extremely easy fix, but it did show that the camera mod is currently very susceptible to breaking if Kiseff ever updates a particular function again. I'll need to release another fix to address that at some point.

Well I did some tests online after resetting all my characters.
It seems like the shrink debuff just doesn't happen when joining servers.

The server needs to sync all clients together so if there's a debuff it doesn't recognize it will ignore it and tell all the clients that it never happened. This means even though I have the growth mod, I still don't see the shrink debuff while in that server. The theory I shared in the previous journal was wrong.
However, this may be an ideal outcome. It probably would be really weird for other players to see someone else be affected by something that they themselves aren't being affected by. This means there won't be any weird desync issues from any custom buffs/debuffs I make!

This situation may play out differently if the host is the one with the growth mod. I fear that a host with the growth mod would cause many issues, especially with the features I have planned. Diva is going to cause me a lot of headaches I'm sure.

In the meantime, Kiseff pushed out a hotfix. I'm confident that this update does not affect this mod in the slightest. I can rest easy knowing that.
Something I noticed when I joined online servers is that many of the modded ones were a mess when it came to performance. I think a lot of mods are acting up because of the update. I wish other mod developers the best of luck. This is what it means to mod a game in early access!

I'll be honest, I was rushing this so much. I want to play the new update to Atlyss! Have you seen those new enemies in Tuul Enclave? They're so cool!
My mind has been racing with ideas seeing this update I feel like I'm going to lose focus.

My excitement aside, the Growth Mod has been updated on my Ko-fi page. With this, the shrink debuff now exists and I have the movement adjustments based on the player's size is also included. I did not test how this works in multiplayer, but I'm hoping it works without much of an issue.
Obviously other players do not have the shrink debuff, so when they get hit by an attack that would do that I imagine that a growth mod user would actually see them shrink. The player wouldn't actually be shrinking on their side of the screen.
The game does try to sync buff/debuffs across the server, but what happens if the server tries to sync a debuff that only exists for one player? From what I can tell, Kiseff was smart with their code. The game shouldn't cause any errors. Instead, it will just ignore the debuff it doesn't recognize and move on.
That's just my theory. I haven't tested this to confirm. I'll likely report about it in a future journal.

Oh also, I decided to make Slime Diva be one of the enemies that can apply the shrink debuff. I figured I could work it in the release and it was definitely a rush job. I wanted the slime ball attack to do it, but only the ball itself can shrink you. The AoE it leaves on the ground with each bounce won't do it! I should have expected this...
I'll fix this in the next release for sure, I don't mean to disappoint anyone who has given me support so far.

The next update on Ko-fi will definitely just add the shrink debuff to more attacks. As always, I'm open to suggestion.

Some ideas have been thrown my way already. For some reason, it never crossed my mind to make size theft exist. I'm definitely going to try to work this in. My goals right now are to making the game more compatible to size changes. Right now, a lot of visuals are not aligned to your size. The shield effect, shadow effect, and more do not match the size properly. Some NPCs also have some misaligned visuals with size and I want to address that as well.

For now I need to play the game! If you're willing to support me, please support Kiseff as well if you can! They're doing amazing work with Atlyss.

PANIC!
Does this mean the growth mod is broken?
Probably not actually.

The timing of this update is interesting. I was actually just finishing up the shrink debuff implementation and was probably going to post an update to the ko-fi today. Instead, this may get delayed a day to make sure the mod is up to date with the game.

Based on the changelog, the only thing I really need to update in the mod is the list of quests that are tracked for NPC growth. Everything else should work mostly fine.
I'll be performing some quick tests today to make sure it's working.

As for the shrinking implementation, it's mostly done! The last thing I needed to do was make certain enemies have the ability to do it. I was thinking Zuulneruda, Kaluuz, Wizboars, and of course Angela would all have a way to give the debuff. Let me know if you think some other enemies should be able to as well. I'll implement that later. I just wanted to get these working first.
I also needed to make the ability stack. Kiseff has some code related to stacking buffs/debuffs, but it seems to be a work in progress. I don't want to jump ahead of Kiseff and try implementing something they're working on themselves. I think I found a workaround to get stacking working without making my mod break whenever Kiseff finishes their implementation. Except, that workaround was based on the previous build! Now I have to double check.

Expect a mod update from me very soon. Hopefully I don't get too distracted by the update itself.

EDIT: THERE ARE MORE NPCs???
I'm getting more growth ideas oh no.

I've been implementing some movement changes. The larger you grow, the faster you move and the higher you jump. The smaller you shrink has the opposite affect.
I encountered a lot of trouble trying to make the ratio between movement and size feel right. I think I hit a decent sweet spot.
Extreme sizes lead to many unforeseen issues. A high jump value actually makes your midair dash gain height. Strange, but not a situation most would encounter with this mod. If the player is big enough, they can mid-air dash to fly forever! This situation requires a pretty ridiculous size to achieve so I don't think anyone would find it bothersome, but it bothers me.
More annoyingly, smaller sizes were a lot more complicated than I initially thought. The player's speed actually ramps up to a maximum instead of instantly moving at a set number. This isn't normally noticeable as this happens very quickly in normal gameplay. When your speed is set to something low it becomes quite apparent.
That alone isn't a big deal. The real head wringer was the jumping. The mod can't just change the jump height and call it a day. It has to make sure the gravity plays nicely as well. Not only that, but there seems to be a strange issue with tiny jump values. The player can't even jump if the value is low enough, they just instantly snap to the ground.
I had to adjust the ground detection to the player's size to combat this, but even that didn't seem to help much. For reasons I have yet to deduce, the player just stuck to the floor like glue. So, I set a minimum value that the gravity and jump height can be set to.

Whew.
The mod is approaching the "cheating" territory now. By "cheating" I mean that the player will be able to do unintended actions that Kissef didn't develop for. Until now the mod has been a purely visual experience. Gameplay changes will have friction with the game's design. I'll be doing my best to keep the original design intent in mind with any changes I make.

All of this testing at different sizes really makes me want to tackle the accurate collisions mod again. I doubt I can make accurate collisions with the NPCs, but I did intend to make the player's collision also change size. I'd love to make accurate collision between players in mutliplayer as well. That task will be much more difficult to achieve, but I'd like to attempt it at the very least.

As for Ko-fi updates, I still have some things I want to implement and adjust before I put an udpate on there, but I hope I can get that done soon.

I finally figured out how to get a custom debuff working. All it took was a little procrastinating!
I made a post showcasing it in action and I used getting hit by Angela as an example, but I have other enemies in mind that could also do it. I planned to have Zuuldera have the ability to shrink you as well as some other enemies.
This may be a growth mod, but that doesn't mean you can grow with no resistance from the enemy!

The debuff won't be as severe as it is in the showcase I posted today. Angela will shrink you way more than any enemy ever will. Also, the debuff does nothing to your stats. I know that seems weird, but I feel that reducing your stats would be annoying more than anything else. That, and I like to think that even a tiny character can still deal good damage.
Besides, there are other negative affects that will be relevant to this mod. I mentioned before that I planned to make the size affect movement.

If you're small, then movement speed will be reduced. Movement is actually a big deal in Atlyss. Many attacks cover a lot of space and projectiles move fairly quickly. Not being able to move as fast is a big enough punishment. Zuuldera's arena has two mounds on either side of the room. What if you couldn't even jump to high ground because you're too small?

Right now, movement isn't affected by size. I have yet to implement that. This is what I'll be working on alongside finishing up the implementation of the shrinking debuff. The debuff is still missing some things. I'd like to make a custom icon for it. Maybe a particle effect too, but I don't consider that necessary. I also want to make sure the debuff can be stacked. Getting hit multiple times will shrink you further and further.

Unfortunately, now that it is October I will slowing down with developing the Growth Mod. Spooky month is an important month to me, so there are projects I'll be working on that will take some focus away from this mod. Expect slower updates, but not a hiatus. To be honest I've been sacrificing a lot of time to this mod. As a result I made a lot more progress than I reasonably should. This is a faster pace than I usually work on most projects. That focus is now going to be a bit reduced, but just for this month!
...And probably December as well when that rolls around. I don't expect to be fully done with the mod by then since I'm trying to cram in so many features. We'll see!

It's taking me a while to implement this shrinking debuff. I could have added it more quickly if I just had the mod handle everything separate from the game itself, but I insist on making this work in tandem with the game's functions. That's what making me take longer to make it happen. I forbid myself to write completely unclean code.
The benefit to doing this is that whenever the game updates, the mod will likely still work even if a lot of names of objects change. Something that mods should always keep in mind is that the developer can change the script at any time. The mod's code should be ready for that.

Soon, I'll be working on movement changes. The big one will be the ledge grab. I am worried about one specific thing. There's platforming in Atlyss. If I do things like change the player's speed based on size or give them a higher ledge grab height it might break the design of some areas. I don't think it'll be that much of a problem, especially if I add toggles, but you can never expect what can go wrong in development.

Imagine if a size change softlocks you haha.
The progress today is all related to the debuff, but I feel I'll be able to implement the movement changes more quickly.

So, while I continue to be slow about adding certain features I've been fixing a few issues and making some changes.
The commands I was talking about in the previous journal entry is included in this update as well as a new setting.

You can now type /disableGrowth [Player Name] to turn off growth effects for that player. /disableAllGrowth is also available.
I made these commands due some player already being huge, or some players standing close to me and not knowing that they were gargantuan on my screen. It allowed me to see where they were with better clarity.
/enableGrowth & /enableAllGrowth also exist for whenever I wanted to turn the effect back on.

Testing this was a little funny as I turned some heads during failed tests. They were able to see the chat message when I had errors. Oops! Luckily, no one questioned it.

Also, there is a setting called "Growth to Server" which will update your size to the server. Players who have mods that remove size limits were now able to see how large my character actually was! Although, it also made me realize that I was huge. Level 25+ characters start to approach the size of Angela. They're definitely taller than Vivian. It was hard to realize this since from my perspective everyone around my level was about the same size as I was. /disableAllGrowth certainly made it obvious.

There's also other little fixes in this update. Vivian's breasts won't be torpedo-shaped from expansion, size changes now happen proportionally, and if someone updates their appearance the mod will scale based on that change.

This update is on the ko-fi.
I swear I'll get this debuff working.

The accurate collisions mod is on my ko-fi now. It's definitely a WIP so I'm not going to make it actually public for now, but I don't know if I'll ever finish it.
I grumbled about this already in the previous journal entry so I won't go on about it in this post.

I don't think I'll ever reach a "finished" state with the Accurate Collisions mod, but after thinking about it a bunch today I figured I may still work on it a little. I've given up on making the collisions truly accurate. That's most likely an unreachable dream. Even so, I can at least publish a scuffed attempt.

Here's the plan regarding the Accurate Collisions mod: I will make it so collisions are more accurate between players. Currently players pass through each other like they don't exist, so the mod will provide the option to change that.
Right now, the mod only creates more """accurate""" collisions with certain NPCs, so the same will be true for players later down the line.

I put """"accurate"""" in extra sarcasm quotes because it isn't accurate at all. The collisions do not follow animation and they are shaped as if the model is in an A-Pose. (An A-Pose is similar to a T-Pose).
Refer to my previous journal for extra ramblings.

Besides the accurate collisions, I've been making little improvements to the growth mod along the way. While I have yet to make any new features at this time, I have been fixing things here or there.
One thing I started working on was chat commands. Something I realized when playing online is that there are other mods out there that can change sizes of players. This can create a desync in what other people see compared to what I see with the Growth Mod. Some players already have huge values in their character files so the Growth Mod makes them even bigger than that.
Sometimes, I don't want to see the growth effect applied to certain players. A chat command would work nice for that!

I'm thinking, "/disableGrowth [player name]" and "/enableGrowth [player name]" would work well.

This is a weird time to write a journal.
So, I mentioned before I wanted to make a mod that creates more accurate collisions with NPCs (the friendly ones) and even the players!

Last night while I was working on it, I discovered that the mod I want to make may be impossible.

I'll try to communicate this with as little jargon as possible. The models for the NPCs all have a mesh. The mesh contains the data of the model's shape. In my mod, I change the collision shape of NPCs to match the shape of their model's mesh.

This works. However, NPCs are animated. They have jiggle physics. The colliders do not animate with how the model is animated.
For an example, Angela's tail sways back and forth at all times. If you stand in the way of her tail it wont hit you since the collider isn't animating with it.

I have to update the mesh to match the animation. This is possible! I have a method for this that may or may not work. All I would need to do is test it, but I can't.

The mesh is marked as "Non-Readable". This means my code is not allowed to see the mesh's data. The collision cannot change shape.
I cannot make the mesh readable, you can only make that change before you make the game.
Kiseff would need to update the game and make these meshes readable for my code to be viable. This is a change that would be ill-advised as non-readable meshes actually help with a game's performance. Kiseff would have absolutely no reason to do that unless they themselves were trying to pull off the same nonsense I'm trying to pull.

The only solution to this is finding out a way get that mesh's data even though it's unreadable. While this is probably possible, it's way outside my realm of expertise.

So, I can make SLIGHTLY more accurate collision, but it's collision that feels worse than the basic cylinder shape Kiseff uses.

I'll share a WIP version of this accurate collision mod soon on my ko-fi. I don't know if I even want to finish it up for a public release at this point.

Sorry for the small drought in journal updates, I haven't been forgetting.
I...distracted myself a bit haha. I know I said my goal was to get the shrink debuff working, but I've been playing in public multiplayer servers a bunch lately. I found out someone made a mod that lets people change size. It was especially interesting to me because I could see it!
So far, the Growth Mod has been entirely client side. No one could see how big you actually were at any given time. Inspired by seeing this mod, I had to give it a shot myself.

Long story short, I got it working, but there are caveats. There's only one way to send your player's appearance data to others, and it's to use the same function the Vanity Mirror uses. When you change your appearance with the mirror, there's a sound effect and a sparkly effect that plays after using it. If I were to send the appearance data every time your size changed it would spam the effects when you grow!
That's no fun, so I adjusted it. The data only gets sent when you're done growing.

The other downside is that this can cause potential desyncs. If multiple players had the Growth Mod they would see different sizes of each other. You'll appear roughly twice as large as you're supposed to for the other player! There's nothing I can really do about that at this time. So, I made it a toggle called "Growth To Server". If you're playing with other Growth Mod users it would be best to toggle it off. Otherwise, leave it on! Players will be able to see how you've grown.

Despite my distraction, I did make some headway on the shrink debuff specifically. I'm learning how the game handles debuffs so I can get it working smoothly. I could just write my own code to apply a debuff whenever you get hit by a specific attack, but that's lame! I want a debuff to show up on screen and count down for how long it lasts. I want it to be as if it's an actual mechanic!
My progress has all amounted to studying so far, but knowledge is power!

Today marks another release of the WIP Growth Mod on my kofi page.
Included is the repeatable quest changes I've mentioned in previous journal posts, but I also included some adjustments.

This entire time I had the Arm growth settings off by default and I just realized it when I was testing it recently. The reason why arm growth exists is because it gives muscle growth some representation. So, by default I made it so arm growth is tied to the Strength stat. That would make sense would it not?

I initially had the setting off because personally, muscle growth doesn't do much for me. I had the setting off when I shared the mod on my ko-fi, and it has been off by default since. So, now it's on! Anyone who already downloaded it will have to update the setting for themselves if they want to see it.

If I wasn't playtesting all the growth settings I wouldn't have noticed! This playtesting was spurred on when I was informed that setting a multiplier to 0 is the equivalent to toggling a body part's scaling off. This meant I had a bunch of redundant settings and a whole lot of redundant code as well. I'm glad they pointed this out cause it really cleaned up some of the script.

This update includes the removal of the redundant settings, but the Player keeps their toggles. NPCs only grow based on quests, and in Vivian's case, from enchantments. The player's growth is based on their stats. (Exp, Level, Strength, Mind, Dexterity, & Vitality). I imagine people will want to be able to adjust what body part grows for different stats, so I left those toggles alone. I could potentially replace those toggles with multipliers, but I think it's fine the way it is now.

So what am I focusing on next?
Two things. The shrink debuff and an accurate collisions mod. Accurate collisions can work as its own standalone mod so that will be separate from the Growth Mod. I predict that both of these features will take a little longer to make compared to what I have been working on so far. The shrink debuff will require me to delve into the enemy code more and familiarize myself with the debuffs that are already in the game.
For accurate collisions with NPCs, I'm not even sure if the idea I have will even work. I won't know until I start trying. Hopefully, it goes well.
Unity does a lot of the heavy lifting for programmers when it comes to collisions and physics, so you don't have to write a whole ton of code related to that. A developer can get away with putting physics components on objects and just toggle the settings Unity provides.
I'm modding the game, and thus, I don't have the project file. I'll have to mess with these components through scripting alone, and I haven't done that before myself. We'll see how it goes.

I did it! Yay!
The mod now adjusts your character's save file to track quests you have done more than once!

Finally.

I can go back to focusing on other features now! Hm, I'm not sure what to focus on next. I'll figure it out tomorrow.

This is a short journal huh?

Unfortunate news, I still haven't resolved the quest problem.

I thought I figured it out, I must be very close. I managed to get the game to remember repeated quests, but after a second reload it will forget them once more.

I'm trying to not write my own methods for saving this information since whenever KisSoft updates the game, I want the mod to remain as compatible as possible to future changes, as I'm sure there will be many.
The downside is that I'll hit walls like this one where the solution isn't immediately apparent.
I guess I'll just need another day.

My initial idea when making the Growth Mod was going to be purely visual. Just make some tools that makes the NPCs and player grow. Now the idea has grown into something else entirely.
It's not often I get the chance give people a gaming experience. Prior to starting this project, most of my work had only been shared among a small group of friends. Otherwise, I only code for myself. It's fun to give people something to play with, but it takes a lot of work. The effort isn't worth it if you don't have an audience.
When a bunch of people showed interest in my mod I realized that I suddenly had an opportunity to put something fun together. This mod doesn't have to just be a visual fetish thing, I could make it its own gameplay experience on top of the great game that Atlyss already is.

It may require a lot more work than the initial idea, but I think it's worth it even if a small group of people play it and have fun with it.

I'm already putting systems in place to get these gameplay features working. However, my main focus is still the visual aspects of the mod. Gameplay changes won't come into play for a while. Before that, I want to make the mod a little more interactive. When your character is larger, or smaller, I think it would be fun if it affected your movement. An easy one would be making your jump height change with size.
I have to be careful with kinds of changes since Atlyss is not designed with this in mind. Platforming segments would play out differently as an example. However, this is a mod. Sacrificing some gameplay stability for immersion is perfectly valid.

That aside, today I tried to fix the questing problem.
I failed.
But, I'm getting closer to a solution. Hopefully, I'll have this figured out tomorrow.

Sorry, I've been a little busy. I didn't write any journals for a couple days.
The good news is, today marks the release of version 0.1.0 of the Growth Mod for my ko-fi supporters! I hope this makes up for my inactivity for a little while.
This version includes the multipliers I've added recently as well as some fixes. The thigh growth I've been messing with is included in this update as well. Zuula now has ass expansion as a result as well.

Zuula lacks a butt bone, so my previous methods made it impossible for me to give her AE. Fortunately, she does have thigh bones, so through that I'm able to make it work. This does mean Zuula doesn't have a "thigh" setting as the thigh bones are the only why I can make her butt grow to begin with.

With this update there are now 100+ settings in the Growth Mod. I hope that isn't too overwhelming. Everyone has their own preferences when it comes to growth/expansion and I want to be able to provide the customization needed to allow those preferences to be met. If I was still making this mod for myself I would just hardcode everything haha!
I'm sure there will be more settings to come, especially since I want this mod to provide gameplay additions on top of the size changing features.

I've been hopping into public multiplayer servers online to test the mod and I've recently gotten one of my characters to level 20! As of now, anyone with a level 20 characters has probably experienced all the content Atlyss has to offer at this time. At that point, you can only repeat quests. For the Growth Mod, that means you can make the NPCs grow bigger and bigger and BIGGER and BIGGER!

....Except you can't

Every time you reload the game the NPCs will grow to match how many quests of theirs you have completed. However, the game does not keep track of repeated quests. I realized this means there's a maximum size the NPCs can reach. You can go past this point when you repeat quests, but they will shrink back down to that maximum when you reload the game.

This isn't ideal, I wanted the growth to be slow, but infinite! My next goal will be to fix this little issue. Hopefully I don't end up causing any errors along the way.

Finally, I have more topic to bring up: shrinking! I've added some functionality to make shrinking exist in the Growth Mod. Currently, this isn't implemented in a way anyone can experience it, but it does exist.
Technically, you can already shrink with the mod since growth is handled with addition. There's nothing stopping you from using negative values to shrink instead of grow. However, you can easily go past 0 and cause negative scaling.
Now I've added shrinking using division. I have a way to cause shrinking that will never tip the scales in the negatives, but there isn't anything that uses this functionality. I had the idea to create a shrinking debuff that takes away your size temporarily. This is how I'll implement the shrinking. I'm excited to make that happen soon.

Okay it.....on some NPCs it almost looks okay?
The reason why I thought it didn't look good was because when the NPC started walking the animation looks weird and bad. I don't like.
It does look fairly good on Vivian and Sally. Even when they walk it works alright. Past a certain size Vivian's walking animation starts to look bad, but Sally's looks mostly fine if you don't look too close.

However, this mod isn't just for me anymore so I decided I'm going to leave it in with a toggle for thighs to expand alongside the butt or not.

And uh, that's it today.
No pictures for today. I ran out! I'll have more screenshots at some point. I may show off the thighs growing with the butt with Sally, but not today.

All done with the camera mod update!
If you want, you can get it from the Thunderstore: https://thunderstore.io/c/atlyss/p/.....amera_Freedom/

I won't say everything I updated here since you can just view the changelog. What's important is that now the camera mod works a lot more seamlessly. Plus, it works with the player character's growth better as well! If you have the "Match Player Height" option on, the camera will adjust its own height and zoom in/out based on the player's height in real time! This really helps with making you feel bigger as you play through the game.
Sure you could just zoom out or adjust the camera height, but the mod is tailored to work specifically with growth.

Also, if you're pushing the sizes to the extremes, the camera will be properly positioned in response to that. Even if you make yourself tall than Angela's tower the camera will stay far enough away so that your model isn't taking up the whole frame. The camera won't get stuck inside of you either.

However, I didn't update the camera just for growing. I want to make shrinking possible in this growth mod. Technically, shrinking already exists in the growth mod. Just set the modifiers to negative values and you will shrink! However, that's not how I actually want to implement it. I want shrinking to be a status effect of sorts. When you're smaller than what the game allows, the camera does a really bad job keeping track of you. You can barely see yourself and you don't feel that small since the camera isn't zoomed in at all in response to your new size.

With this camera mod, now you can REALLY feel small.

I have yet to add any kind of shrinking status effect to the growth mod. Whenever I do, the camera mod is already setup to work with it.

Shrinking won't be my focus quite yet. I have other things to work on before I start trying to implement that feature.

Side note: the Angela sequence I uploaded today was me messing around. I figured out a way to "scale" the position of Angela to move her where I wanted, but it's suuuuuuuper finicky. I could barely make those screenshots work. It was fun to do at least.

Short journal today.
I spent an embarrassingly long time trying to get the camera mod to properly match the player's height. I got it to zoom in and out pretty well, but the movement wasn't smooth at all. My math was off.
Now that I'm about to go to sleep, my brain finally comes up with the right equation to adjust the camera with player size.
It's frustrating, but I can't deny progress was made.

I should be better than this...
Hopefully by tomorrow I'll be done with this camera side quest and I can get back to growing!

A few things have been changed so far.
Certain hotkeys will stop responding if you have the chat open. For example, the hotkey that changes whether your head is visible will be disabled while chat is open.

I didn't test it, but the camera should reset properly after starting/ending dialogue.

What I did test was the adjustments I made to the "Match Player Height" setting. My new math does a bit of a better job matching the height, but small players will still have the camera positioned way too high. I also need to make the camera zoom in and out with the height.
I don't have time for that today.

Not much done, but that's just what happens sometimes.

Gah! I missed a day! Sorry!
Good news is, I managed to get the enchantment growth working with Vivian! Feels nice to write some code and have it work on the first try.
I already made a post showcasing it, but I'll briefly explain it here. Enchantments will give Vivian a large burst of growth that is temporary. She'll shrink back to normal size over the course of a minute. When transmuting, individual body parts grow instead.

The growth does stack of course. If you do multiple enchantments she'll be VERY big for a little while.

With that done, I may take another look at what I can do for Zuula. I know I said I wasn't going to mess with thighs, but Zuula doesn't even have a butt bones! She does have thigh bones. With that, I may be able to give her ass expansion. I don't have to worry about it looking weird because she has no walking animation.

Another thing I need to look at is my camera mod.
If you don't know I made a camera mod and I have it on the Thunderstore right now:
https://thunderstore.io/c/atlyss/p/.....amera_Freedom/

This mod is meant to be compatible with the growth mod to an extent. I have settings to make the camera automatically match the player height, but it's a little off-center. Larger players will notice the camera doesn't line up with their eyes and is slightly closer to their chest. Smaller players will notice the camera is aligned slightly above the their head. Not good! You also can't make vertical adjustments when the camera is trying to match the player's height. That doesn't feel good. I feel I should change that.
I also want the camera to zoom in/out with a player's height. A bigger player has a bigger frame, so you don't want the camera to be close.

Of course, it's easy to adjust whenever you need to, but I like the idea of having the camera automatically position itself when you're growing or even shrinking.
A camera that automatically repositions with size can really reinforce the feeling of the size difference!

Also, the camera doesn't quite remember its exact position after going in and out of dialogue. It remembers the vertical/horizontal offset, but not your zoom level. If you're in first person that can be annoying.

So, the Growth Mod might go on a small break for these camera changes.

Decided to focus on making the thighs of NPCs grow.
For me, ass expansion doesn't look good if only the cheeks expand. The thighs should grow with!

Immediately, I run into an issue. The thigh bones have children. All of the child bones will scale along with the thighs! Visually, this means the entire leg grows. Even the feet! This isn't what I want!
Luckily, this isn't something a little math can't solve.
....Is what I thought.
Even if I keep the rest of the leg proportional, this breaks the animation slightly. It's noticeable enough that it bothers me.

I'll leave the thighs alone.

I did it, I added even more settings. Yesterday I made a post about how many settings are already in the mod, but I've added more. 20+ more in fact!
The multipliers are now exposed as settings. Now you don't have to mess around with the modifiers if you don't want to. Not only that, but now all NPCs have their own multipliers.

This allowed me to address a particular issue with Sally. Her shop had a low ceiling, which meant she could grow through the roof very quickly. By the 10th quest her head was already in touching it, and Sally gives out the most quests out of all the NPCs right now! She also has the most repeatable quests.
Her tail was already large by default so the tail would very quickly break through the wall. I don't mind the tail doing that, but it shouldn't happen so soon!

With NPC-specific multipliers, I'm now able to make Sally grow in height much more slowly. I did the same with her tail since it had similar issues. The rest of her proportions grow as they should, but now with proper giantess growth!
It'll take more than 30 quests for Sally to outgrow her shop now. The tail still breaks out early, but it takes longer now.
I'll make a gif of this new growth soon.

For now, I won't add this update to the ko-fi. I want to put a bit more into it before I update it. I want to share a new build at least once every week.