April 2021

First Devblog - April 2021

This document is the very first devblog written regarding the Macro Micro VR Service game. The next devblogs shall be more prepared and more organized.
I will attempt to release a devblog monthy about every month's major changes, evolutions, functionnalities, etc.
Devblogs shall be available to Patreon members only until the release of a public game update. When such update occurs, every devblog written prior to this update shall be publicated one by one on the game's website.

Settings UI

I updated the game settings' graphical interface.
Game settings will no longer be updated automatically. It is now possible to apply changes, to save them, to restore them to their default state, or to undo any unsaved modification.

Pop-ups now also work in VR. The game menu interface shall no longer be based upon tabs and children tabs, but will be displayed in a single, full window.

Cobble VR Animation

I created procedural animations alllowing me to animate Cobble's body in VR through a variable number of trackers.
Full body tracking is not implemented yet but I stumbled upon some code examples I could rely on to implement such body tracking later on. The pelvis' tracking is simulated form the hands and head's positions. I added small latencies in the animations to make movement more credible. Starting from those elements, Cobble's body animations shall be created from VR controllers and their position : hands, body, and head.

Legs are animated using inverse kinematics in order to correctly position them, as well as paws, on the ground, while rotating them depending on the floor's inclination.
Fingers are animated either through Valve Index's finger tracking or from the player's actions, for example, when Cobble rubs his hands together or when he hold something.

I also worked on client / server replication. The following video shall explain it by displaying in red shapes the positions and informations collected by the server, and thus visible to other players on their client in multiplayer.

Cobble desktop animation

I worked on Cobble's locomotion animations. There are three locomotion types : crouching, walking, and running. Each locomotion type has six animation cycles, one for each possible direction.

VR Traveling gameplay

I started updating VR movement through locomotion. The player will be able to move around the game through teleportation and linear locomotion by walking, running and jumping in-game.

It works so far, but remains unfinished. I shall need to work on collisions with the environment and will need to optimize the current code.

Other

I created a system to manage surfaces that is more powerful than the one in version 0.3 : when the player moves around in-game, the sound of footsteps and visual footprints will change depending of the ground type, of the impact's strength and / or interaction type.
Another example that works with the same system is when a player rubs their hands in VR against a surface.
Lastly, I went through a huge code refactoring in order to optimize the game's code further, as well as to work on rendering settings in-game. I shall talk more about those in the next Dev Blog.