Skunkfrakker & Veelicious
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Monday Update! Hi Everyone!It's Monday! Servers are updated,…
🕑 Added 2020-06-22 23:24:00 +0000 UTCMonday Update!
Hi Everyone!
It's Monday! Servers are updated, but I don't have any new builds this week. EVERYTHING took longer than it should have and what I scheduled to take a single day (avatar creation in the Besti SDK) ended up taking the entire week, and I was even working on it until this afternoon. That's just part of development sometimes, and sometimes it works in the opposite way, too.
Usually when this happens it's due to feature creep, and it was this time, too. They're cool features, though. Here's what I did instead of finishing the build:
- I put in a new forearm rotation system to allow your hands to bend and move more realistic way. Right now if you look at your arm and rotate it, you'll see that the two bones in your arm cause the end of your arm towards your wrist to rotate more than it does higher up on your forearm. Besti X now implements this twisting bone behavior, so that's pretty cool, and some fun mathematics. This gives a significant improvement to the feeling of physical presence. This is completely done and implemented.
- I worked on the physical touch system. In Besti X in VR, your avatar exists in the same universe as the other objects and characters in the scene. Instead of being able to push your hand through things like you can in Besti 9, your avatar representation obeys the same rules as the rest of the objects of the scene. Because I can't physically stop your hand due to the nature of VR technology, when there's a significant deviation from what your real hands and your avatar hands are doing, I use the ghost hands to represent your real hands. When they are capable of converging again, the ghosts fade out and your avatar's hands come back. If you're using a pony avatar without fingers of course you have hooves instead of hands, but it's the same idea. The whole concept here is to give you a visually convincing experience of touching a friend. That touch data is also useful for the AI to use, too, so it's a very good thing to implement. This is prototyped and awaiting implementation.
- I redid the math involved in avatar assignment to permit leg and pelvis tracking. This was always part of the design in Besti X, but I actually wrote the code for it this time rather than just designing it. Pelvis and foot tracking is now ready for tracking data. Full body tracking is pretty niche and not something I expect many people to use, but I'd like you to be able to do it if you have the setup for it. You can do this on SteamVR with a webcam or a Kinect so it doesn't have to be a huge barrier, but I think it'll be cool for some upcoming plans. This is prototyped and implementation's about half done.
- I worked on the Besti SDK tool for bringing in avatars. Everything works but it needs a friendly UI. Right now it's too complicated so I need to automate a bunch of behaviors, ideally in a "wizard" type of pattern where I walk you through steps. The back-end of this is done and working but it needs a front end UI.
- I made a new bipedal avatar skeletal structure/model for use in Besti X. Done and implemented.
- I worked on the rideable friends code, so you can ride around on large friend characters if you want to. This is about 20% done.
So lots of stuff. This week I'm not going to be doing any complicated coding I'm going to be working on content updates. I have voice packs, graphical improvements, and more that I'm working on and will be finishing to have a big release on Monday. I always have the last build of the month be huge so expect it to be so.
If you've written in this week thank you for your patience! I'll be answering you on Tuesday or Wednesday depending on how many letters are waiting for me. It's been taking two days/week lately so I expect that to continue. Thank you for your patience. <3
