Beach Paradise: Status Update
It’s been a while since I’ve worked on Beach Paradise, I know! The project was dormant for a long time, but now that I’m working on it again I really need some feedback from users and fans alike! I’d like to give some background on my ideas, struggles, direction, and ultimately better understand the expectations of people looking forward to the future of Beach Paradise.This will be a long post, but I would really appreciate it if you’d stick through it to the end.
Platform Problems
Before I get into production of the mod I’d like to get into the media platform woes I’ve had. After the well publicized TOS changes on Tumblr that appeared to have outlawed my content as well as a breadth of others, I attempted to jump ship to Twitter. I will be blunt: Twitter is a bad platform, and not suitable for Beach Paradise. I ran to Twitter to escape the threat of purging from Tumblr, and ultimately ended up having all of my content purged from Twitter anyways, and I had to reupload it with the hope that it wouldn’t happen again (thankfully it hasn’t). Setting even that matter aside, the formatting, image size limitation, image quantity limitation, and stringent character limit are all obnoxious to deal with and ultimately make posts like the one I’m writing right now utterly impossible if not segregated in a reply chain of god knows how many tweets. It is an insipid, stupid platform and I have no desire to return to it.
The saving grace in all this bad news was that despite the threats from Tumblr that implied my content would disappear, it has not come to fruition. Lo and behold all my posts are viewable and I can upload new NSFW content without hassle. This may be a fluke or simply flying under the radar, but I believe it’s possible that my content exists on a technicality due to not having explicit sex and also not depicting real life women or girls. This is great news because despite Tumblr’s pratfalls as of late, it’s a much easier and more functional platform to work with, and despite my dormancy here a lot of you have apparently stuck around.
Stuck in Limbo
Doubtless many of you have wondered if the project was dead, or simply “finished”. Beach Paradise version 4 and 5 in particular were a herculean effort and ultimately a break was needed. Limitations were encountered, and ultimately I wanted more modding breakthroughs before continuing to work on Beach Paradise. In particular these things were on my mind at the time: multiple character scenes, better UI navigation for gravure scenes, more UI navigation and options for costume and body settings, uncapped costume slots, etc.. Ultimately these kinds of breakthroughs halted almost immediately with the release of DOA6.
This, at the time, seemed like great news. Moving over to a new game was an exciting prospect, and whether it would be DOAXVV, or DOA6 didn’t matter to me as long as I had the tools to work with. It’s been almost a year since DOA6 has released now, and 2 years since DOAXVV released. The tools simply haven’t materialized.
I have nothing but gratitude towards the fantastic toolmakers for DOA5, mainly Doutouko and then Fallingcat. Without these two principle figures it’s unlikely the modding scene would have flourished as it did. Doutoko made the tools for importing and exporting meshes, armatures, camera, lighting, motions. Fallingcat implemented a system for implementing a range of costumes and Paradise scenes into the game. Many more people created many tools for DOA5 that made Beach Paradise possible. I completely lack the programming prowess to make these tools and therefore they were indispensable figures for me. Tool creators never get enough credit.
DOAXVV and DOA6 currently lack the foundation of tools required to make something like Beach Paradise possible. As far as I can tell you cannot modify lighting in either game at the moment, and you cannot modify scenes and motions without hacky, impractical methods. These tools do not materialize out of nowhere and I tried to be patient, but ultimately I feel I have waited long enough, and ultimately I would like to go back to working on DOA5 and doing what I can to make BP even better even if my Santa’s wishlist never materializes for modding capabilities.
Does this mean I’ll never leave DOA5? Absolutely not. If the tools appear, I would like to try moving over. The engine improvements are subtle, but they’re present in DOAXVV and DOA6, but for the time being I think it’s time to stop sitting on my hands and do what I can do for BP right now.
Plans for Beach Paradise
With plans like group scenes and whatnot on hold, ultimately I can only do what I know how to do, and that is to simply improve what I have. I have improved the bodies of the entire cast, with improved shaders, lighting, smoother textures and revised breast meshes and a vastly improved buttocks and pelvis area. These will function as the new base. I don’t want to show everything just yet as I may make tweaks and revisions, if I deem them necessary, but for now just take a tiny preview at the revised Ayane bust.
With a new base body for each girl we of course run into new obstacles, most significantly that the outfits must be reworked, which is unarguably the most time consuming task ahead of me. With the vast quantity of swimsuits available for every girl in the currently released Beach Paradise, doing this over again for new bodies is not a prospect I’m looking forward to admittedly. Ultimately I want to try to do something new rather than bash my head against the wall yet again.
In short, I would like to focus on quality over quantity. The swimwear in BP 5.0 is using a procedural transformer tool to make general approximations of each girls body type. This leads to minor deformations and ultimately losing the finer details of each girls shape. It was ultimately deemed a necessarily evil in order to give each girl a full dresser of swimwear without presenting an unreasonable workload to myself. This did not feel unreasonable as Team Ninja does the exact same thing, using a “common” body for the vast majority of the cast, and simply morphing them from a generic body. Much the same sacrifices are made and ultimately the cast of DOA lacks a certain amount of body diversity.
With a new focus on quality I would like to attempt to model each swimsuit to each body manually, which will preserve their unique shape of the new base body and allow for more creative application, such as swimsuit transparency and slippage. A generic transformed body may pass as the real thing covered by a swimsuit, but with the bra slipped and the whole breast exposed and unsupported, it becomes impossible to hide the differences even to the less discerning eye. We avoided this by frankensteining the “topless” models in BP 5.0, but having the top slipped would cause clipping and deformation if transformed.
To put this in simple terms, I would like to focus on quality and revealing malfunction features to the swimwear, but this would ultimately mean drastically cutting down the quantity of swimsuits for each girl to a couple if not a handful at most. There would still be many swimsuits overall, perhaps even more than in BP 5.0, but ultimately each girl would only be able to wear a couple of them as they would be uniquely modeled to their body (I would probably make some of them available to all with much effort, like the most popular ones such as Fortune).
Conclusion
If you read all this I have one simple thing to say: Thank you, but I have one request! Please let me know if the plan to model swimsuits individually but accurately to each female sounds like a good plan to you, or if you’d still prefer the old method of many transformed swimsuits with a clean topless version. I’d also like to know how many of you are still interested in BP for DOA5. Let me know!