Good news!
Less than 4 hours after I announced that I was having trouble getting the “Chat Interaction” feature to work, the problems were solved!
In order to truly determine whether or not the feature was fully functional and ready for official release – or if there were still hidden problems waiting to be discovered – I decided to stream Yandere Simulator on YouTube and invite fans to type commands in chat to help me test the feature!
Hundreds of people showed up to help! It was a very successful test; every aspect of the Chat Interaction feature was confirmed to be functioning. A couple of bugs were identified, but that’s exactly what we wanted; to learn if there were any hidden problems that still needed to be fixed. (And afterwards, I talked with the chat in “Vtuber Form” for three hours!)
So far, there are two problems I need to fix before this feature is ready for official release:
- The chat-reading plugin doesn’t understand how to interpret emojis, so if anyone sends an emoji in the chat, the plugin freezes up until the emoji is pushed out of the message queue by new messages. Whoops! We can fix that.
- The plugin crashes if you activate it, restart the school scene, and then activate it again. Oops! We’ll get to the bottom of this problem.
There are also a handful of other minor problems that should be fixed as well (it’s hard to click the text field where you enter the URL, and accessories are not deactivating when the chat picks the player’s accessory) but they’re relatively trivial matters that will be quick and easy to address.
I think that this feature has a lot of potential, and I’m interested in hearing creative suggestions for ways that a chatroom of people could interact with Yandere Simulator. I’ve created a Reddit thread where you can post suggestions for new commands to add to the Chat Interaction feature:
Please join the thread and share your ideas!
Thanks to everyone who visited the live stream and helped me test this feature! I really appreciated your assistance a lot!