SxB-R Expansion Round-up

[red3dred]

During a long, arduous conversation with Erina, we had many important topics brought up, discussed, and the expansion of content to Sexbound Reborn requires listing a few new features moving forward, and here, in the open, they can be discussed and generally agreed/disagreed upon.

• Sexbound Sub-gender expansion:

Currently, sub-genders have a few seemingly useful features missing, whether they are compatible with the overall status of most racial supports, is to be considered, and a more suitable approach taken, however, features like custom graphics for sub-genders (such as, for example, the unfinished hyper graphics) is one of the discussed features. Custom body-traits would also be considered, should custom positions require it, but those would require more work.

• Pregnancy and "belly-size":

Sexbound currently only features one belly, a boolean, "true or false" whether it exists or not. This also mixes into the "groin" graphics, meaning it is shared between both genders. The current set of changes i've done already showcases that between accounting for pregnancy progress to create "stages"/"sizes", and spicing in Cumflation, we can easily draw bigger bellies fitting of pregnancies and amount of fluids, but this brings in more issues as well; More assets are required for all races, and most importantly, even for the currently supported Vanilla races, it requires a separation between "Male groins" and "Female groins", as the art becomes bigger and more complex, more of the body structure will need to change, and less compatible it is between both genders, less "Universal". This isn't even accounting for things like custom sub-genders, which add another multiplier onto the amount of art required.
"Default" size limit would be 5, though that maybe a bit too "hyper" for many, so either Cumflation can be disabled, or the limit can be lowered via Climax config. This also means the "default amount" of bellies a race would need to support, unless a side-mod wants to add more sizes.

• The main course; More positions, more Sexbound:

Not quite a fully necessary topic to account for, under such large reworks, but definitely piles up onto the two above, art, AND code wise, as making new positions poses an issue: kicking out and effectively "breaking" all old supports, as they now would require new art, and perhaps more patches, to support, let's say, new sub-genders. More Belly sizes. Male and Female separate groins. To move forward without leaving all the previous work behind, a bridge needs to be set, to allow previous supports to still be used, until updated, and to account for "missing content" in the existing supports.

Below are the words of Erina, listed and shortened;

So the problem essentially boils down to "How does one define all these extras in a way it is easily addable but not required?" For race support modders - slap a list of supported gender types in the species file. Makes it problematic for users to change as this requires patch-patching the species files
So if we just slap an option into the sub-gender list setting to change things. That results in it becoming unsupported for all races that do not offer the stuff for it. Though that's technically no problem as long is it falls back to the usual base images. So I guess we just need to set some naming examples and let others follow up on it?
This is all on a per-species artwork basis. It's just a matter of how to most effectively bridge the free-for-all discrepency between what is there for a species and what is wanted by user/content. Log cleanest version is species file patching of additionally supported genetial type names with their associated asset path, but not easiest to change for users. Easiest to understand and change would be to just slap it into the sub-gender declaration, and if the species has the files show it else show normal. But that will result in POV levels of error spam until StarGlue.
My suggestion is, the species file defines a list like;

"genitalTypes": {
  "<name>": "<filepath>",
  ...
}

Filepath here being a folder, I guess. While we're at it... Screw the sub-gender plugin config setting for gender requirements, that goes into the main config list too. Why split? Just...

{
  "name": "futanari",
  <all your body trait data>
  "gender": "female"
}

Same way the species check could be done. Optional parameter "species", list of species names. If not given - free for all. If given - check if species is in list.
As for cross-compatibility we have (only one) option.
Just dump extra data into the species file for which positions are supported. None given? Assume all vanilla.
Which also allows for defining monster species (though we need to get that data from elsewhere) to say "we don't support all vanilla positions".

A general idea of the topics to be shortened, if people don't want to read the overwhelming wall of text: We want to add more. A lot more. But between Starbound's limitations, and Sexbound's currently strict setup, we need to come to terms on a few things, and commit to those paths. This topic is about how to handle that, in a public way open to viewing and suggesting, while also serving as a "to-do list" somewhat.

Comments and discussion regarding the so-called "StarGlue" are ommited as they don't necessarily require input, more-so the cooperation of the currently on-going source-code altering projects. Since several features require things that are outside the limitations of Sexbound, or Starbound itself for that matter, we'd need to expand upon Starbound itself to reach that functionality. Contributions have already been made to some of the largest/commonly used source-code altering projects, and should they be accepted, we'll be able to provide custom features tied to those clients/special mods. But that is going to require more work, and essentially making and releasing several versions of Sexbound that try to account for those special clients.
If all else fails, and the projects stand against such contributions, a custom executable will be worked upon to try and provide the required feature-set, but that is currently far off on our schedule, we haven't even fixed Defeat yet, and we're talking about fixing Starbound, preposterous right?

So yeah, to all users, feel free to comment onto these suggested and listed changes, more are likely going to be added onto this topic.
For modders, feel free to take a look, voice your opinion on the amount of work you're fine/agree to do for a race-support, and if you'd want/need any more features from Sexbound Reborn.
For other contributors, do poke me if i missed something or should change the wording somewhere. It's 2 AM here pretty much, and i'm on my third cup of coffee for the day.