This cycle has been mostly focused on Overte and Overte's future. After careful consideration, I have decided to focus on Overte moving forward with my VR related content. I am still eagerly waiting for what ever comes next in the chapter of Neos, but I would be wasting time if I was waiting for it. As much as I want to create for Neos, I just can not be certain that what ever I make will be there tomorrow. With Overte, as early as it is, it is at least something tangible I can create for and provide support for. This is something I just can not do with content that I don't even know exists. Also, with what seems to be "known" about Neos 2, it looks like it will suffer from similar performance issues as current Neos. Overte is a fork of a project was was built to be performant for hardware nearly a decade ago. Even with groups of people of over 20, I was able to reach 120 FPS (The cap of my headset) without an issue! My computer lags after three people in Neos, and my computer heats up like no tomorrow. Neos is by far the best game/software/whatever it's called I have ever used; It's no question Neos rocks! I just can't build on something I don't have.
Another large part of this cycle was working on Project Exclusion. I got a lot of work done on Exclusion in just the first day! Most of the character controller was done, and I had a hyper small dev map made as just an area to exist in.
⮺ Overte
⮺ Character Smoothing
In Overte there was an issue among me and another user after we had noticed there was too much smoothing for controllers and other tracking points. Hands, Legs, Arms, everything! After this user looked though the code they found existing scripts that would have allowed the user to control the amount of smoothing and what type of smoothing to use. After I looked into it, I saw that these scripts clearly were not finished. Not only were they referencing repos that no longer exist, one of them also tried to use a type of smoothing that was not properly supported. I created pull 579 to Overte to create a fully functional app that uses a valid smoothing method which we can use to "fix" the smoothing issue.
⮺ "More"
This is another fun one. After a few small discussions, the Overte community and developers came to the consensus that the more app... needed more. I decided to take it upon myself to redesign the whole "More" app that would allow the easy addition of thirdparty repositories. With pull 591, this should hopefully be merged with the master branch of Overte.
⮺ Project Exclusion
Before I get to the point of this section, I would like to mention I lost all progress on previous work I had for Exclusion. It wasn't exactly valuable to me since those works were just made to teach myself how to actually do the things I wanted to achieve, but it still kind of sucks just a touch. I have no clue what happened to it, for all I know I stuffed it in a wrong folder somewhere, but for now most of that is lost. :^) I'm actually storing current work and all future work in a Git repo on a server so it won't happen again.
Here is the first day worth of work of Exclusion! These pictures are not in chronological order so there is a lot of things moved around in some places, these pictures are group by level. The first two levels are of the first map I created for this game demo. I'm not too sure what It is supposed to be, but It's kind of like a street with grass instead of pavement. This first map, or level 0, was created to test the Cyclopes level editor. It took some doing but I finally got it to work for me. It took a while before I found out I should have probably downloaded the addon from source instead of using the latest release. It is a bit challenging to work with even with the latest commits, but it is a little bit faster than building a level using raw blocks.
These two pictures show level 1. This is supposed to be a rough lobby area for the player and their party. Them and their group can just chill here until the host starts a mission. This is another "less than basic" map as I just need it to exist at this stage of development.
The second picture shows the level select UI. I have been experimenting with diegetic UI, I quite enjoy the idea of having physical elements in world showing the user basic HUD stats. In this example I tried to make a level select screen, however I never got it to work. In my hours of testing, I did have plenty of time to think. A in-world level select may not be the best choice. It could and probably would be fine for most people, but someone could easily step in front of a user trying to use the screen and block their view. I may try and tackle this problem again in the future, but for now I think I may just have critical components like level-select as a standard on-screen ui. There are several solutions to most of the problems I have thought of when it came to this UI issue, so I may reverse my reversal of going with standard on-screen ui, but it's still in limbo.