The long silence and where the project has been.

Hi!

As you might have already seen, the project went into a bit of a hiatus the past couple of months. (The last update was in February I think? Nearly 5 months ago x.x)

This was due to a bunch of real life factors, including university, the game I work on plus a bunch of personal projects (and of course burnout). This made me able to dedicate only a very small amount of time to VTubeTiny, with only very sparse bursts of will to work on it.

The project is not dead however, and I've been making slow but steady progress on the next update, which will be a pretty big overhaul to the app!

In this post, I'd like to showcase some of the upcoming features in VTubeTiny 3!

New UI layout

VTubeTiny will have a complete overhaul of how the UI is structured.

Gone are the old and frankly very annoying to use lists of actors and assets. The actor properties window is now split into two separate windows: The stage tree and the object properties window.

The new stage tree window allows the creator to easily see which object is the parent of which other object, making parenting as easy as dragging one actor and dropping it on the actor you want to parent it to.

The asset browser also got a facelift, showing all of the assets as a list of items on the bottom! And while it's still a WIP, I think it still looks much tidier than just the filename display of the previous version. You can also drag textures from the asset browser directly onto the stage, to put them in as static actors.

Speaking of the asset browser, you can now also drag assets from it onto asset selector dropdowns, massively simplifying asset selection.

And while as before, the UI is still a work in progress and I'm not fully satisfied with all of its aspects, I feel like it's shaping up to be much more usable than it was before. :)

PS. rotation now works as intended, no longer rotating from the top left and instead rotating from the center of the character. This was pissing me off for a very long time (parented objects now also rotate relative to the parent object!)

A mascot (and a sample character)

This is a bit on the lighter side, but we've got an actual mascot now! Meet Lotus, designed by me and drawn by my good friend AlexTheTrain, she's gonna serve as both the mascot and the upcoming sample character of VTubeTiny!

Character improvements

The most important aspect of a VTuber software, that being the actual character models also got an improvement! First of all, thanks to HugoVG on Github, we've introduced speaking visemes! This practically means that you can assign multiple speaking textures to a single character, allowing them to change while you talk. Pretty cool!

Another change which I feel is worth a mention is the fact that characters are now assets. Before if you were to delete the actor that had the character you were speaking as in, it would completely remove the character, forcing you to create them all over again. Now, the character lives independently of the animator component, allowing you to assign it to many components at once, or persist it even if the component gets deleted without any issues!

Stage Graph

Keeping the best (and biggest) last, this update will bring the Stage Graph to VTubeTiny! The stage graph is a powerful visual scripting engine allowing the creator to code in custom events and actions for their VTubeTiny stage. Right now it's in a very early stage of development, but it nontheless allows to create some fun stuff with it.

So far a very limited amount of nodes are implemented, but I'm very much open to hearing what people would like me to add. (Twitch integration 100% planned and in the works!)

Other stuff

Just before I wrap this up, I'd like to mention a couple more things that I don't feel are either that important to show, or yet ready.

• The stage can now have a texture set as a background (both stretched and tiled)
• VTubeTiny now has a very simple C# plugin interface that allows people to load in custom components
• Reparenting actors now no longer causes them to move places

Final words

Lastly, thank you for your patience! I'm trying to wrap up this update within a reasonable timeframe while also making it worth the wait.

Massive thanks to everyone who donated and/or downloaded the project too!! (I never assumed so many people would be interested in it, like genuinely).

If you'd like to contribute to the project, it's open source and available here on github!

And of course, if you have any, please leave any enhancement and/or addition suggestions in the comments! Listening to feedback on what people want from a project like this is incredibly valuable.

Cheers!