The Hatboy Project: Delicious Sticky Poast

F O L L O W A N D S U P P O R T

YouTube Channel // Nexus Mods // Ko-Fi

C O M M O N T A G S

#hatboyproject LE daily // iterative progress #shoker // #jeff joker moreau // fandom specific #mass effect mods // #mass effect modding #private terminal mail // asks #for long and boring technical reasons // tech breakdowns (sometimes not just the tech)

R E S O U R C E S

Mass Effect Modding Discord // Lip-Sync for Mass Effect Games

M E N T I O N S I N M E D I A

Polygon // PCGamer // TechTimes

C L I C K F O R F A Q A N D M O R E

But, yes, it's for both Male and Female Shepard, now.

I have managed to find the sweet spot for audio level balancing in terms of gain, so my dialogue fits in with the vanilla audio except for a reverb effect. I need to figure out what the reverb setting is because it is the last man standing in terms of making this project as seamless as possible.

For any other intrepid modders out there, by the way, if you're staging new audio in the bridge, your audio should peak at -9db.

For most outdoor scenes, it's -12db.

This environmental reverb is a post-processing effect applied at runtime, and is not present in the raw audio.

I could cheat, and bake reverb into my audio files. That might help it. On my big PC speakers I can hardly tell there's a loss of reverb but it's really evident on phone speakers. I try to listen to my videos on several different sound systems to compare.

Hmm. Further testing required.

One of the ways the conversation after Mordin's recruitment mission in 3 can go. He's only quite so forward with Shepard if they've flirted with him at least once before this... otherwise it's a different line! The aim here is to give a sense of building tension between them and contribute to Joker having different levels of confidence about the entire situation depending on Shepard's interactions with him. I'm finishing up the animations on the other path, and will post that in the coming days, I am sure.

Hi, thank you for your kind words!

There is a lot of new content for the Legendary Edition:

Planned Content:

Nice-To-Have:

Honestly out of those the one I want most out of those is the most complex. I'm not sure how I'd manage to bake new animations for them that have the right coordinates. We do have the models with bones intact, but not their controls (IK handles, etc) so I'd probably need to rig them up. Rip the cabin environment & set it up in Maya for reference. Animate the scene, then bake & export. Possible, but time consuming. Would rather farm that out if possible, but... I'm not going to hold my breath, haha!

Alright, so... I have been working on a ton of stuff recently. Like.. a ton. I've structured and planned out four new conversations that unfold before Flux Bar. The way I've planned it out is that selecting a Flirt response where available on the dialogue wheel adds to Float Integer, just like the other LIs use to track friendship level/romance progress, etcetera. So, the more or less times you've flirted with him, the higher the value. The higher the value, the more confident he is. There's also options to just kinda... blow off his remarks, keeping that number lower or even subtracting from it, which affects which approach he eventually takes to Shepard in Flux. Basically, choosing the Flirt option gives +2 Choosing the neutral/friendly/tacit approval option gives +1 Choosing the negative/shutdown response gives -2

TL;DR our boy is smart and remembers how receptive you are to his antics

Now, to get this particular dialogue, the player has to have chosen the Renegade dialogue options post Sur'Kesh and must have flirted with him on two previous occasions to get this. My question is: Is this too fuckin' horny? Like, I don't know. This makes me laugh, but I'm biased. The thing is Shepard flirts with all the subtlety of a dumptruck so I feel like this is in-character but I'm suffering a crisis of confidence. I feel like the Paragon option is chiller. I should post that too for comparison.

Hi!

Yes, Legendary Edition supports mShepard.

Have a look on my YouTube, there are some working conversations featuring him!

Sure, it's this! But as always, I must stress - donating to this project is of course very, very appreciated! It does indeed help support my crippling smoothie addiction creative endeavours in various ways, some of which are fruit flavoured and others not. But - I will never hold any part of this project behind any paygate, and everyone will receive the same mod at the same time when it is released. Hmm. Maybe I can hack the end credits and put supporters' names in there, in its own section. Worth a try, right?

Hi! I'm working every day on it, so I can't say when. Every time I've provisionally put out a date, I've missed it so I'm sort of embarrassed to try and make estimates now. However... it only took me a week to finalise a conversation with fancy camera tricks and all new stuff in it, so it's not going to be a million years or anything. Stay tuned, if you can! :)

Narrator: Shepard did not, in fact, delete it.

This is a snippet of the first wholly new conversation for the LE. I'd always intended to put a conversation about this in the OT but it kind of ended up on the cutting room floor. Now, however, the process for doing conversations is a lot more streamlined in the toolset. My own personal process is a lot more streamlined, too; I did this whole thing in a little over two days. All the tedious building work is done for the rest of this, it's just down to the fun stuff like camera work and expressive animations.

In the past 2 days, I went from 0 to having a completely new 45 line conversation scripted, spliced, and implemented, with basic lipsync generated and installed. I've tested it and it's running. I made a video, but as the characters aren't emoting at all beyond lipsync I figured I'd wait until it's refined.

The process involves manually renaming all the lines and their multiple triggers, then hooking them all up to new animation files which also must be manually relinked. It's tedious and every line must be done twice because male & female FaceFX are different. Even though NPC audio is the same in English, you've still got to do it twice because of the way localisation works.

If someone wants my English audio to play but the subtitles in a language with gendered nouns & stuff, then I'd better make sure the right set of identical things fire, so the game serves up the right subtitles.

It's the first completely brand new conversation for LE, not a redux of something done in the OT so I can't wait to show you all.

I want a burrito.

Yes, I'm going to change "Babe With the Bullets" to be something else for BroShep. "Hunk Who Killed Harbinger" is top contender. Proof that I'm making it work for DudeShep, too!

Preview of this scene, not yet complete. The reason it's taken so long to get through this one is I learned an entirely new method for injecting audio, which is crazy, but very useful in terms of being non-destructive. There's a few animation errors in here and whatever but it's going well so far.

Yesterday, I got on a call with the president of NAVA, at his request.

He was really nice and took interest in what I had to say, and we had an exchange of ideas. We're on the same page with a lot of stuff, too, and really this is a no-man's-land for everyone in this situation. It is so good that this element of the discussion entered into play now, at the ground level, whilst we're still all figuring things out.

He asked for some details on a few things to present to the group, and he'll get in touch with me again later in the week.

It's a little nervewracking for me, since this project -- and my arguments -- are going to be presented directly, one-on-one, to at least one of the two main actors whose voices I digitally borrow for this project.

I reiterated my personal stance on respecting the wishes of VAs, so... we'll see how this goes. It's out of my hands, now.

I pray the gods will be merciful, haha.

Lost Content

I originally recorded this on August 14th, 2022 in the final run up to submission. This is for the original build, not Legendary, and uses the old synths. Somehow, I bungled up the build, and this conversation I did never actually made it into the files on Nexus, which is a shame, because it's some of the nicest facial animation I've ever done. (Some of the head movements look a little strange to me, but remember, these are all animated blind, by looking at a graph!) Unfortunately, none of the backups that I work off of now have this in the files, and I'm on a completely different machine now than the one I developed the OT on. In fact, until I went scouring my private Discord server and found this recording, I thought I may have hallucinated doing this scene or something. But no, there's proof... it existed, but it's lost, now. I didn't post it at the time because silly me didn't want to spoil what I kind of considered "the emotional moneyshot" of the mod. Well, it was a secret too well kept, I'm afraid, turns out...