Custom Cosmetic: Maelstrorca

"Maelstrorcas are a synthetic-organic creation that were created in a laboratory as part of an experiment."

Custom cosmetic to play as a fishy fellow, the Maelstrorca. Optimized to keep texture memory usage as low as possible while retaining as much quality as possible.

Important

Update Notes

HOW TO USE

Select the 'Mods' option in the Ark: Survival Ascended main menu.
Search for Maelstrorca and subscribe to this mod ingame.
Restart your game after fully downloading and installing the cosmetic. It is REQUIRED that you restart every time the cosmetic updates! Otherwise it will not show up.
In the game, open your Inventory and select the 'Cosmetics' tab at the top.
Open up the Maelstrorca cosmetics folder on the right side in the 'Custom Cosmetics' section.
'Use' or drag any Maelstrorca skin to the torso slot.

Features

Conditional Overlays

The Maelstrorca visually becomes wet while standing in rain or while swimming and slowly dries when not.
The Maelstrorca visually becomes covered in sand as you remain in a sandstorm, jump into water or stand in rain to wash it off!
The Maelstrorca will visually get bloody and hurt. Scars and cuts appear as health drops. Healing will mend the wounds.

Lifelike Behaviors

The Maelstrorca will visually show that its in pain and hurt. Ears droop down and the facial expressions change to show the player its condition without looking at the UI.
The eyes move and jitter around randomly as eyes do to breathe some more life into this fishy fellow.
The tail slowly wags from side to side while standing still.

Body Features

The tail, ears and body have physics, interacting with the environment, structures and objects around, colliding with them.
Most of the Maelstrorcas are available in both a male and female version though visually they make no difference as of now, this might change later.
All Maelstrorcas come with a first person view model that reflects the color and patterns of the third person model as well as the damage,wetness and sanding overlays.
Maelstrorcas come with emissions, stripes or patterns that will glow in the dark similar to aberrant dinos.
All Maelstrorca textures will be carefully optimized to keep the texture memory usage at a minimum. Most textures will be carefully modified to reduce their filesize to a minimum in order to keep the mod size as small as possible while offering as much quality and quantity as possible.

Variations

There are different variations available, they come in different colors, emissions and model features. Some have extra fins, some of horns, some don't.

Available Variations:

Amethyst Default Toothless

Upcoming

Future Plans:

More variations.
Texture optimizations.

Known Issues:

First Person thumbs are a bit... off at times.
Texture optimization is still WIP.
All cosmetics with physics cast secondary capsule shadows onto objects nearby both in third person and first person. I cannot prevent this, the Capsule Shadow options in the Devkit Blueprint are being ignored. This can create overshadowing when prone and can cause weird shadows in first person. You can disable Capsule Shadows via the console command 'r.CapsuleShadows 0' as far as i'm aware nothing in the game uses Unreal's physics so it should be safe to disable without any negative visual impact.

Changelogs

Version 10

Swapped Body Physics Collision Channel from WorldStatic to OnlyCollideWithStationary to fix sea mines exploding your physics while nearby (should keep all other collisions with terrain, structures, beds etc)

Version 9

Fixed Amethyst using default Emissions which light up parts of the body that aren't supposed to glow.
Fixed Toothless skin using emissions lighting up its body at night where it shouldn't.
Fixed wrong Blendshape being targeted with the flag system.
Fixed Default Maelstrorca wrongly using Amethyst's First Person arms.

Version 8

Fixed some morph targets.
Fixed mod internally still named Custom Cosmetic: Avali.
Added Toothless Maelstrorca variant.
Changed Amethyst's fin textures to not blacken out extra fins.
Changed Maelstrorca names.
Ported better tailwagging from Novabeast.
Fixed Amethyst texture seams.
Fixed eyes not staying closed when sleeping or unconscious.
Made eyes slowly close as torpor rises, this goes all the way from 0 to 200 torpor at which point the eyes are completely closed (and you fall unconscious even with max fortitude).
Fixed Sandstorm not applying sand overlay over time.
Fixed beer/troodon buff detection preventing the facial expression from working.
Removed some debugging code.
Simplified blinking code.

Version 7

Fixed facial expressions for when affected by beer and troodon poison.
Fixed sand overlay not working and made it actually dependent on being affected by a sandstorm (indoors no longer counts).