/pone/ - My Little Pony

I've effective zero drawing experience.

I naively dreamed of creating an Ink Potts style animatic for Ponyphonic's Feed Me With Your Heart ever since I first heard the song. All I ever managed to produce is this bit of what I envisioned to be the ending card. Unfortunately when it comes to actually trying to draw the characters I'm quickly faced with the realization that I simply lack the skill nor motivation to do the song justice. Why do organics have to be so difficult to draw dammit

I write fan-fiction, but lean heavily towards darker, and more realistic settings than most "bronies" want to expose themselves to. But grimdark, gore for the sake of gore, doesn't appeal to me, as there's no story there.

So I end up writing magical-realm stuff in my head and it never reaches paper and that's probably just as well. Have a comic I generated by clicking on the boxes in the .swf file.

I'm just a drawfag.

My lifelong dream is an open source sandbox of independent pony bots you can mess with. I have made detailed plans of how one could work, but I have object blindness so starting it myself has proven impossible time and time again.

The game would be based mostly around the pony AI, making them seek food and shelter on their own and so on. Starting the AI from simple things like just picking food and building a basic shelter would make it faster to get the first basic release done, and also ensure that they had methods to keep living even if the late game houses and food markets got destroyed. As the basic survival needs got fulfilled, the ponies would start improving their settlement further, building proper housing and workplaces, making proper plans for freetime and so on.

As for what the player would do, once the sandbox ran indepently they could mess with it however they please. Spawn monsters, drop meteors on them or order them around to do what you want. Posess a pony and play around in person, living a normal life pony or going on a rampage. An independently functioning town of NPC:s would be a great base for many kinds of games from Sims to Assassins Creed.

Keeping the project open source would keep the lawyers off its back, and developing it in arcs like Dwarf Fortress would help split the seemingly massive project into small chunks, each release adding a new function to the game. First release would be just about making the ponies move, eat and sleep, second would be adding framework for professions and construction, third would be items, interiors and ownership, fourth about desires and socializing and so on.

This is the game I'd want more than anything, but like I said, I can't do it alone. I can write up design documentation just fine, but I definitely can't do it alone. Would anyone with normal eyesight here be interested?

>>323433

Thanks. I draw a fair amount of anatomy inspiration from Arareroll and Akweer, at least for when I'm trying to draw horsey stuff. My "chibi" stuff, I don't really have a inspiration for.

i released a toonboom puppet for anyone to use as they please:

https://www.deviantart.com/age3rcm/art/Toon-Boom-Harmony-Puppet-Rig-MLP-FIM-mare-729767634

A tad bit edgy especially if you don't understand but it's mine, some of you might like it since it starts to teeter into not being MLP related kinda like Them's Fightin' Herds. Started out MLP related but then quickly shifted over into it's own thing after the Cease and Desist.

>>323420

sounds very dwarf fortress-y. If you don't care too much about the visual aspect, there is a pony-fortress mod which might just be about 90% of what you want. Also a lot of the programming will be nonvisual so you can start out and share the project and see if people will join.

That said; I don't think open sourciness is going to protect you from the lawyers. Whilst you are not worth targeting for extracting money; you can still be a viable target for accusal of trademark infringement; since they have an obligation to do so if they want to keep said mark. Then again; name it 'my small horse' rather then 'my little pony' and may just be considered different enough to not garner any such attention.

>>323478

I dig it anon. It's okay to draw edgy shit. I like drawing gore/thingpone every now and then.

>>323489

Thanks anon, I've spent years on and off lore building and novelization in hopes of one day of publishing it. The artwork is just a big plus. I've actually got alot of work in the form of visualizations of concepts, but it would be too large of a file to share most of the written work plus I think it's still incomplete and I don't want people seeing it before the proper end result. Off related note, I just have a bunch of Out Of Character art made of the character.

>>323490

Sounds neat. I don't really have the talent for writing and just draw whatever.

>>323491

Oh geez is it that time of the day again anon?

I really am in no position to do anything and do not have the time to do anything anymore, but I used to make a lot of OC. I drawfagged, musicfagged for the /pone/ game haha, writefagged a little bit, even did a little bit of /agdg/. I had a lot of projects that I would start but never finish, and I have a lot of crazy ideas that I'm probably never going to accomplish because like I said, I simply don't have the time anymore, and some all of these are so autistically far out there I'd probably never be able to accomplish them even given infinite motivation and time, including:

>Sappy, cuddly POV clop comic (possibly animated) with Octavia Melody

>Fully animated pony music video for Mike David's "Weekends Off", starring Delta Vee

>Actually good pony music that doesn't have as much autism as my previous stuff

>Pony Zeppelin 12, a Space Station 13 inspired multiplayer game except away missions are a central focus of the game (that's what the two video embeds are; one was made in Godot except I couldn't figure out a nice way to do atmos without destroying performance, and the second was made in C++ using SFML except how SFML handles shaders is opaque as fuck and C++ compile times are terrible, so eventually I just decided to write my own engine and you can guess how that went down, as you can notice from the diminishing amount of progress every single time I jumped ship)

>Equus in Space, the Space Station 13 crossover fanfic:

>>322011

>>322012

>>322013

>>322014

>>322015

>A subtly pony-themed software suite focused around vimlike interfaces, including a DAW and a UI design tool

Yeah, as for drawing, I haven't even touched a stylus in a long while.

>>323528

>>323484

I like Dwarf Fortress, but even with pony mod it's a game about making the colony survive rather than a sandbox about ponies living on their own.I don't consider graphics too important, but with ponies it would be very necessary for enjoying the cuteness of ponies going about their business.

I know that more people would join if there was a skeleton of a game to start working on, but the tragedy is that I myself would need help getting that skeleton made. I have object blindness, meaning trying to search for anything whether from google or from paper in front of my face is exceedingly difficult, so needing google for instructions, modules and instructions for using those modules will inevitably stop all my progress. For reference, here is all the spaghetti code I've managed to make after years of attempts, with all the code I've managed to find on my own while still failing to find simple and necessary basic commands: https://www.sendspace.com/file/aljemo

If anyone would like to help, here's the minimum I'd need to get started:

-path to target (sensibly made, not my hack)

-run a function when a path is completed

And that's it. But without a seeing eye programmer to help me this is what's holding back the entire project.

Also, the biggest reason for making the game open source would be that no one would be legally in charge of it. There would be no one to sue, and trying to get it deleted from the web would be impossible.

>>323686

Aight. I know fuckall of unity so I'm gonna do a few guesses. I'\m guessing the MoveTo class is the pony.

>in-code comments

You can get the pony to not change tasks by separating the thinking and the acting step out of the Think() function. You already have a 'task' variable. Only change it from idle to something else, and have the tasks turn back to idle mode when said task is done. You can then still interrupt tasks irrespective of the task at hand, afterwards, but if you limit this to emergencies, they should generally finish a task before picking up a second one.

>-path to target (sensibly made, not my hack)

One thing that might slip you up is that a Transform is not a location; it is a function (mathematical, not c#-like) that changes the pony from the current to the new position (instantly). You can also think of it as an arrow from (0,0) in the direction and of the length the pony has to travel in. 'goal' as such might be easily confused with location of the goalObject

If you return a GameObject rather then a boolean from your FindClosest function rather then a boolean, this would allow you to work with multiple objects at once and you don't necessarily need to change your goal (variable). Believe it or not but your actual moving code is fair enough. What you are missing as far as i can see is object avoidance. This is something that is still being studied to find out the best way to do that.

One way one can do this is by using bounding boxes around objects where, as long as you are outside the bounding box, you are guaranteed to not touch the object (read: not touching it enough to be a problem; sometimes some clipping may be acceptable). Next, you keep out of those boxes.

You could either check out whether you are actually inside such a box, and move out if this is the case (this works fairly well in situations where players control the moving object), but in this case, you may want to do some planning a-priory. You need a way to find out whether any objects bounding boxes cross the direct path between you and your target. If it does, change your approach to the side of the closest object crossing this path.Once you have reached the end of the path, repeat above until you can naively path to the target.

You may realise that this might be a problem when you have multiple ponies moving around you dont want to intersect. I'm sure you dont want unicorn twilight in the exact same place as a random purple pegasus. In that case you probably want to re-calculate the paths to the target every time, at least for the objects that actually moved.

>-run a function when a path is completed

You already have a function that should tell you that you are at the end of a path. You can execute this in your think loop before you are going to shuffle destinations around. You can then execute whatever function you want in the space where you have the 'return true' statement.

If you want to be sure the function is only executed once, or if you want the ability to execute arbitrary functions, you can pass an optional function as an argument to AtEndOfPath with whatever signature you like and execute it if that argument is not null.

>There would be no one to sue

You underestimate the ability of lawyers to send letters they have been paid handsomely to send. If there is 'my little pony' content findable online, the owners of the site hosting it can be send such a letter. If there's 10 000 sites with a copy of such material, it can still be beneficial for the trademark owner to get letters sent to all 10k sites. But lets skip this issue in further discussion because I do agree this may be a good way to minimize the impact of such letters sent.

If these comments are of use to you feel free to post more questions here until someone redirects us to /gamedev/ or whatever

>>323701

Thanks, but actually this version is just as discardable mess as the first one, so it's better to start over yet again than keep going with it.

Unity has a great pathfinding system with automatic navmeshes and collision avoidance. The problem is that the only instructions I've found on how to actually use that pathfinding come from a discussion where someone was asking help for his code on his project, and the pathfinding code in my project is just that code copypasted as a whole with no idea how it works. It really is necessary to get someone else to handle those functions needed for anything to do anything in game, because my implementation is like bringing an entire car wreck home because you needed a reading light.

>>323734

>y u Unity

Judging from the posts and the codebase, I would guess it is what he had easiest access for resources for his platform for. Also pretty easy to know it is a 3d-game-thingie because a bunch of games advertise this before actually starting.

>Godot?

If you have some experience with it and you can set up a scene with it easily, i challenge you to drop us an example. I know very little about this library so i don't know how suitable it would be.

>I'm speaking highly theoretic here

No you are not. These are methods already in use for solving these problems. What is lacking in computer science is a one true way (TM) to fix the problem. You are correct though in the sense that there are ways of fixing it ``enough'' for the purposes of small horse simulator

>>323725

>this version is just as discardable … start over yet again

I am going to disagree. This is in my opinion a perfectly valid starting point to continue from. MoveTo.cs works very well as a starting point for a Pony.cs file, which can then be used in the larger Horsethingie universe. What is so wrong with it that can't be fixed?

>Unity has a great pathfinding system … no idea how it works

Lets see what thirdanon can come up with in regards to godot. I'm guessing he's a linuxfag but I'm quite certain i can port it if it doesn't compile under windows; and i'm happy to at the very least chat about small horse sim pathfinding

>>323364

I'll be reading some story or browsing through stories on fimfic and go 'man these have pretty high ratings but I'm sure I can do better than them'. I come up with a premise, write ten thousand words over the course of a few days, and then cringe and drop it. Happened a couple times. So instead of writing a genuine story, I shifted to writing oneshots. Problem being, the moment I submit that shit, and it sounds incredibly pathetic to say, but I become overwhelming anxious about it to the point where I become unable to think about anything else. Three times now I've gone through this cycle, where each time I submit the thing, fret over it for a day or two, and then while trying to sleep go 'Is this really worth it' and I get up and impulsively unsubmit it. There's a huge sigh of relief, I tell myself I'm never doing that again, I'm able to go to sleep, and then two weeks later it'll happen again. The only options I have at this point are going to a therapist, getting meds and becoming a zombie, which I am genuinely considering, or going on a multi-day-long alcohol binge just to let myself allow my stories to get submitted.

>>323741

>Oh god oh no some people I'll never meet will think I'm cringy.

I know nothing I say will fix your shit, anon, but god damn you need to leave your comfort zone.

I'm currently working on my own pony thing that's completely separate from mlp. I was hoping to have the first episode totally done in time for me to reserve a panel at Bronycon and show it off, but unfortunately it's still nowhere near finished.

Word of advice: Learn to draw or else you'll be spending thousands of dollars on commissions to get anything off the ground. I love the artist I'm working with, but god dammit I have to spend nearly every penny on this thing.