Skunkfrakker & Veelicious
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Post for Monday’s Update (on a Friday!)Hi Everyone! It’s Fri..
🕑 Added 2021-07-30 18:28:00 +0000 UTCPost for Monday’s Update (on a Friday!)
Hi Everyone!
It’s Friday but the new stuff went up on Monday :P I’ve been posting on twitter what I’ve been up to, but I really wanted to make sure I could resolve a Quest issue I was having with eqCy. I was going to work on building the main scene for it, but the parts I had worked horribly on the Quest, so I had to make a ton of trees. The new environment is a few different biomes and several of them are forested, so to have non-functioning trees when the design demands trees constituted an emergency :P
In any case I think the tree solution I came up with is pretty cool. The trees are all unique and they’re available for you to use yourself in the BestiSDK. The PC version trees aren’t my original artwork and they’re not licensed for redistribution, so I can’t give you those to use, but the ones I came up with are 100% original so they’re fair game for your own creations in the Besti SDK. They’ll be in the next release and there are 15 trees in total (3 birch trees, 3 palm trees, 4 pine trees, 2 willow trees, and 3 fruit trees.) All of them have a negligible performance impact on Oculus Quest so you can make a forest of them and still have a ton of headroom for characters and animations. They even animate themselves according to a central wind system so they aren’t completely static and boring, and the shader I made for them batches them all together so they’re super performant while they’re doing that <3
I need to assemble that into a good environment to ride your rideable friends around in but that’ll be a fun couple days of placing rocks and stuff.
Anyway!
On Monday an updated version of Besti Create was released for both PC and Quest, and it has a bunch of improvements needed to fix Besti X specific issues as well as improvements needed to make eqCy work properly. The biggest difference is that now you can make climbable surfaces in the Besti SDK. I don’t think there will be any climbing in eqCy, but I figured that would be a good example to use for a contextual “use” function with the cursor. That’s what I really made, and I made a type of “use” function that makes you climb to the top of a ladder. Now I can apply “use” to any function so you just select it and it does various functions. That’s how you’re going to choose to ride or ride (har har) your friends depending on what you select in 2D mode, though you’ll have a more organic method of doing that in VR if you want to.
I also made an obstacle course to test AI pathing over unique terrain. I want a bridge in the eqCy environment and I want to make sure the AI is able to conceptualize a bridge and path across it. I already have the flat surface pathing set up and that’s good at finding its way around, and bridges should work I just want to make sure before I 3D model a nice bridge.
That’s it for now though! New keys on Monday! Below is a full log of what I did.
--Skunk
Changelog/Worklog since 7/19
- Updated the core version ID to 26.
- Improved transition for opening splash sequences by altering the overall logic of it. This fixes a bug that was introduced by adding shader-based anti-aliasing to the intro screens because I switched those screens to being camera overlays instead of existing in the world. Now they fade in and out smoothly in 2D like they do in VR.
- Created the eqCy profile so we can make eqCy executables.
- Added the eqCy theme to the internal tool dropdown so I can specify it as the target theme to load.
- Increased the overall graphical fidelity of Ultra a little bit more.
- Started on a basic obstacle course scene so I can test the upgraded mobility you have in eqCy as well as friend AI pathing.
- Found a bug in the scene editor system and fixed it. Need to parse the names of scenes as one string, so we need to replace un-windows-safe strings with safe strings. As it is presently you can't have a scene name in the Besti SDK with a space in it.
- Wrote the inverse parser into the MCP. Need to put a build out for that. Let's continue though it's not going to hurt the code compatibility.
- Wrote the universal use system. It contextually runs functions on selected objects based on how they’re set up.
- Created a use function for climbing.
- Finished the obstacle course. I made this in Probuilder, which is a tool anyone can use inside Unity to make prototype worlds. Very fucking handy and much faster than using a 3D app because you can just jump right into it in one step with the BestiSDK. There are a couple pathing logic things I need to be able to test, and I put in a vertical section to test the climbing system. For pathing logic, I wanted to make sure the AI can handle ramps and bridges, so I made some mesas and a bridge connecting them. I conceptually want two types of climbable surfaces, too, so we'll have a climbable wall, and two types of ladders set up in different ways.
- Fixed an issue with the climbing system that was happening when you have a character loaded as an avatar. Avatar climbing was happening before the interactor positioning was happening, causing the character to violently shake when attempting to climb something. Fixed by re-timing the climbing behavior to happen after the character's hands are identified and positioned.
- Fixed an issue with SteamVR that was causing a crash when you switched from 2D to VR that only happened in the final build of the game, and not in the editor. It didn't have this problem in the menus, and if you switched in the menus it wouldn't crash. It only happened on the final build when you switched while loaded into a level. Had to write a program designed to trace down that specific bug.
- Created a BestiSDK example on various ways to set up the climbing system.
- Implemented the Oculus Phase Sync behavior that is part of the latest Oculus SDK. Doesn't hurt to implement and has the potential to greatly improve performance on the Quest 2.
- Fixed an issue that was affecting the right hand on Oculus Quest. I swear I fixed this last week... Something may be un-fixing it. Searched around and didn't find anything similar to the code that could do that. May have just screwed up or had a bad ctrl-z.
- Fixed an issue with the hand sticky system that was causing a movement conflict when wearing an avatar while climbing a ladder with simplified geometry.
- Wrote the documentation for the Besti SDK Climbable Surface tool.
- Wrote the documentation for the Besti SDK Low Poly Water tool.
- Updated Core ID to 27.
- Made a ton of trees. 15 in total and they’re all really beautiful and fast.
- Set up an example scene using the new trees, our water, etc... Need to redesign this to better suit our needs but it’s demonstrative of the overall look and feel of the place.
