Demonixis Game Development

My personal blog about games I develop for Demonixis Games

[demonixis]

After few hours of battle, C3DE is working again on the Android platform!

There is a bug with GraphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget, when you pass the null value it crashes... So I can’t try the deferred renderer, the post processing, etc.. For now ;)

[demonixis]

Hi there, I'm working on a PBR implementation into C3DE, a game engine written in C# powered by MonoGame. My work is based on the excellent website LearnOpenGL.

[demonixis]

Not sure how it’ll end but the game runs very well on the Quest!

[demonixis]

Hey!

Today I’m proud to show you new screenshots of the remaster of GunSpinning VR with Unreal Engine 4.I spent some time to write C++ code to support mobile and PC. Now it’s time to recreate the two levels in the mine. All other levels are almost done. The city, the forest, the farm... It’s almost ready.

Thanks to Unreal Engine 4.21, Windows Mixed Reality is natively supported without the need of SteamVR or UWP :-) That means the Win32/64 build will work with your Windows MR headset with no loss in performances! The 3dRudder is also supported out of the box on Windows.

What about UWP

Unreal Engine doesn’t support UWP export but I've some ideas..

Microsoft has released a tool to package a Win32 app into an UWP app. This works only for Win32 apps, but it seems to work well. I’ve to check if the native Windows MR support will work too. If yes, the UWP Win32/64 build will be replaced by this one. Unfortunatly I can’t use this version on Xbox One :’(

Finally there is a fork of UE4 made by Microsoft that support UE4 4.19. It's not very active but if they update the fork to 4.21, I'll be able to publish this version on UWP for Windows and Xbox.

In all cases, the Unity version is going to be update in the coming weeks. I just have to test it correctly. It'll come with a lot of fixes, enhancements and of course: Motion Controller Smoothing!

What about PC, itch.io, etc.

The UE4 build will replace the old Unity version. You'll still be able to download the old version.

What about Android

I'll try to push it on the Oculus Store, if it's not accepted, I'll push it on Itch.io.

demonixis.

[demonixis]

Yes, this is a likely GunSpinning VR remaster made with Unreal Engine 4. 2/8 levels are almost done, but I've still have a lot of work to do on all UIs. However, the basics are implemented! Some features I love in Unreal Engine 4:

Sound Cue

Foliage

Construction Script on blueprint, it improve the workflow when building levels

The animation workflow (including montage)

Optimizations on VR for Android

[demonixis]

The WaveVR SDK (used for the Vive Focus Support) uses a dual camera setup. It's the same setup used by the first SDKs of the Vive and the Rift when Unity didn't support VR natively. It's still the case for some VR vendors, for instance Pico and WaveVR.

The problem with this kind of SDK (or the lack of native integration...) is that performances are bad because everything is computed twice. The native integration in Unity compute shadows once and have good optimizations when SinglePass Stereo/Instanced is on.

GunSpinning VR uses a lot of Post effects (aka Post Processing) and I believe that every 3D games have to use them because it's necessary. The Post Processint Stack V2 doesn't work well with this kind of SDK so I've started to make my own very light post processint stack for dual camera SDKs.

Starting with Unity's Fast Bloom, I added an ACES tonemapper and few optimizations, allowing me to use Post processing effects on the Vive Focus with a descent framerate. As you can see on the screenshot, the left eye have the effect and the right eye is clean.

[demonixis]

Thanks to all the optimizations made recently, the game works finally not so bad on VR mobile devices! Those screenshots was captured from a Vive Focus but it also works on the Oculus Go :D This version uses the desktop scenes, not the mobile scenes, so we can expect a big boost in performances!

[demonixis]

Hi there,

Today I want to introduce a two new features in one. The possilibity to use only one weapon. For instance you only have one controller. The induced second feature is that you can enjoy the game using RiftCat on a Vive Focus or an Oculus Go!

Optimized for RiftCat

I just tried the game on the Vive Focus using RiftCat, it’s fantastic! Thanks to the Inside/out tracking and the standalone headset, I was able to walk in the city in real.

That makes a LOT of sense to concentrate my efforts on standalone headsets with inside/out tracking. I would love to play this game on a stadium, be able to visit the entire city, the mines...

Unfortunatly, the Vive Focus SDK is not very good for now, I really hope they’ll integrate it into unity.

[demonixis]

Today I tried something, compiling the game for the web. With a very small changes, it runs very well, almost out of the box. To be clear, I don't have plan to release the full game on the web. However, I'll release a demo on my website. That way people will be able to try it and play it when they want.

For now the mouse doesn't work but I'm pretty sure it'll be easy to fix. For the record the game runs very well with the following enabled features: - WebGL 2.0 required - Web Assembly (fast loading) - Linear Color Space - Post Processing (Bloom + ACES Tonemapper)

demonixis.

[demonixis]

What has changed

Some comments on the Microsoft Store are about users that have problems to get the game running well on their PCs. Also to be able to work on an Android device, some things was removed.

Weather System

A lot of options from the main menu

All fancy skyboxes

Volumetric Fog

Dynamic Fog

SSAO

Few other black boxes...

But hey, does that mean that the game quality is worse Oo'? Absolutly not! Actually the game looks better than ever. Do you know why? Because..

A well tweaked exp² fog looks really good

Adding more dynamic lights improves A LOT the quality

Having more specular reflections makes the game nicer

AO is backed in lightmaps

Better tweaking of the post processing stack

So yes, the game looks better, it also includes a new locomotion mode, and... I've two big news:

The shoot system is new and filtered! NO MORE shaky guns (promise!)

The animation tree of zombies is new! I'm not a mecanim expert but a zombie can attack and walk at the same time! Animation transitions are so much smooth.

TODO

I need to stabilize the code, mainly because of this new locomotion mode. I don't have a release date, I want to release it before the end of the year.

demonixis.

[demonixis]

Hey there! Long time no see. Today I'm coming with some news about GunSpinning VR. First I would like to say a big thank you to all of you guys who played the game. Tomorrow is the first anniversary of the Microsoft Store release! Yes one year. But why no news for months? Because I had to take some rest. Having a day and a night job is exhausting! Since I'm back from Chicago, I'm working again on the 2.0 update which is different of the actual game.

Graphic changes

The game runs on Unity 2018.3 and uses the latest Lightweight Render Pipeline. As you can see on the screenshot, zombies looks more realistic! The good thing with the lightweight SRP is that performances are better. Actually everything is better since I've switched to Unity 2018.3 and Lightweight SRP.

On the PC, the game is targeting DirectX11 (Windows Store) Vulkan(Win/Linux) and Metal (Macos). On Android (yes) the game targets Vulkan only.

All terrains was recreated to embrace the new Terrain API provided by Unity 2018.3. That means two things. First it's GPU friendly and second, performances once again, are better.

There is a limitation in the current beta of Unity with the Lightweight SRP that prevent us to use more than 4 realtime lights. I hope this limitation will go away soon because the game looks really better with more mixed lights.

Welcome back Android!

Because of all those optimizations, I've readded the Android version in the development pipeline. It's unclear for now, but my main dev target is the Oculus Go and probably the Oculus Quest. I'm not closed to the DayDream platform. However it's not planned to port the game on other headsets if they're not natively supported by Unity (for instance Vive Focus). I've no plans for a flat Android version.

In the end

I'll try to post regular update, because that's what I did in the past. I don't forget Microsoft Store/Xbox One users, because you'll have a better integration of Xbox Live (because the plugin is better now). There are also many other improvements, keep in touch to learn more about them.

demonixis.

[demonixis]

Hi there!

It's been a long since I posted, to be totally honest, I needed some time out of my projects. I'm back to finish the 2.0 update of GunSpinning VR, this time with new motivations:

Performance

Visual Quality

Visual Coherence

Better/Enhanced Gameplay

To achieve that, I started to use the new Lightweight Render Pipeline introduced in Unity 2018. It has some limitations but it allows me to have the best ratio between quality and performance. That's true, the game is now much faster. The current public version uses a Forward Renderer with all lights backed.

Today all lights are Mixed, that means backed and realtime. Particles use also realtime lights if possible! Thanks to that, the visual quality is really better and the performance are great, thanks again to the Lightweight SRP. The Light SRP is limited to the subtractive mode for lightmap backing, that means no fancy specular effects.

To be clear, on my dev computer (i5 + 32 Gb + GTX 980) I can use many realtime/mixed lights at the same time and the FPS is about 250! In VR it's capped to 90 FPS.

So yes, I dropped the volumetric fog and other screenspace effects such as SSAO (Now AO is backed in lightmaps).

[demonixis]

Hey there!

I’m working on the next update of GunSpinning VR that introduces a new FPS mode as well as the 3drudder foot controller support.

I’ll make a video about those two features later, but the purpose of this post was also to show you that the game runs well on a 2012 Macbook Pro! As you can see the volumetric light is enabled and the framerate is just fine. Of course you’ve to downgrade a bit the quality. But it works well!

[demonixis]

Well the first step of my raytracer is now done. I can move the camera, start/stop the realtime preview and tweak few parameter in runtime. The next step is to add boxes and multithreading!

[demonixis]

A quick video of my raytracer with different paramters.

[demonixis]

Hey! It’s been awhile since I wrote something here. Yes I’m still alive and today I want to show you a tiny subproject: A Raytracer written in C# using MonoGame!

It’s very WIP and SLOW for now, I tried to use a Thread to speedup the rendering but it’s not enough. I’ll try to use a compute shader or maybe a standard shader to speedup the rendering.

You can get the sources from GitHub here.

[demonixis]

Hey!

The next GunSpinning VR’s update is very cool because it’ll introduce a new way to handle movements. Today you’ve to validate the teleportation, I know that some of you don’t really love that.

The new system is called FPS Mode, it’ll show a teleporter on where you’ve to go. You can choose to move by yourself using the gamepad or controller, or shoot on it to be teleported at this place. Easy right? Of course, you can disable the artificial movement if you want.

The system is ready, now I’ve to prepare all levels and add some colliders ;)