Nightly Build

Pushing the boundaries of spare time

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Unity shaders are difficult and I should share more of them online as I do them. Here's my "Bubble Glow" shader: https://gist.github.com/JScott/7a8c034c5eec80df83c3a6b0c09251d9

It makes objects transparent except around the edges, like a soap bubble. It does this by calculating the proximity to the rim and setting the emission and albedo appropriately.

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Hose

Hose by jscott on Sketchfab

I made rope a while back by using a screw curve and attached an object to it. That felt clunky and required 3rd party plugins that I don't have anymore so I wanted to try something new.

My first attempt started from a simple cylinder. I cut away everything but the walls, used the Solidify modifier to extrude them out into a tube, and set the right general shape. From there I used the Loop Subdivide (ctrl+R) to make ridges and scaled them out which gave sort of a stacked tube look. It didn't look bad but it wasn't actually a circular tube so when I tried to create the hose end it turned into a mess. I tried to fix it but it was too difficult to get the correct proportions and essence of the shape.

Starting again, I did something like my old approach: the Screw modifier to coil an upright circle. It wouldn't taper but it was dead simple to create. I faked it by getting messy with 3 different screw objects with different diameters. The troublesome ends got tucked in by hand except for the top one which became the hose head. Rotating and moving the different objects before merging them into one gave it a messy look, the ❤soul☮☯ of a beautiful garden hose.

After some tweaking I'm pretty happy with it. It took a few hours to do but most of that was looking up how to frame the object. I learned some useful tips (alt+right mouse to loop select!) and everything fell into place quickly with the right tools.

It could also optimize the face count (614!) but I don't need to so I won't. It already captures the low poly aesthetic well enough.

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Another gamedev vlog! It's feeling more and more like I want it to, sort of like Sonic 1 in 3D. I already have an idea for what the first levels are going to be like and I just need to flesh it all out.

It might be time soon to start shouting out for 3D and audio artists to collaborate with. I might want to block out the main character in Blender or something first to give it some identity first though.

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I have a few Vive Grip things to finish up but this project has been sneaking up on me. Every since I got out of university I've wanted to make a 3D platformer to share my love of exploration and I guess after watching ShayMay's Sonic Spitball for the third time it finally caught up to me.

Obviously things are pretty rough, especially the camera, but the mechanics are more or less all there and I've started building levels around it.

I should really finish off those last few Vive Grip things though...

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Speak of the devil, I somehow managed to forge this today :O

The best recording tool for the job was ezvid but it only saves directly to YouTube and automatically adds background music. I had to download the video, remove the audio, then load it into a different computer so I could use iMovie because free video editing for Windows is kind of garbage. I have plans for 3 more videos but this roundabout process might kill me.

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Hey guys did you know what I've been working on Vive Grip for months? v2.1 coming out soon and I just realized that I never posted about it here. If you do HTC Vive dev then you should check it out!

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Oculus Exclusivity

A lot of people were really up in arms about Oculus Rift exclusivity deals. Some people say it's an affront to the PC gaming industry and hurting consumers. Others say that it's just media drama and the natural order of business. Whichever side you fall on, why is that we're suddenly talking about this now?

To answer that we should probably first talk about why this is newsworthy in the first place. People are upset about something that's commonplace for consoles but avoided in the PC market. Since the days of Doom there's been a view of PC gaming as a united platform where you can play a game where and how you want as long as you meet the minimum technical requirements. However, the Oculus situation playfully dances across the line of a technical requirement: it provides a new piece of hardware to enable VR but it's not the only VR display in town. In fact, the Oculus and HTC solutions are very similar to the end consumer despite what either company might say. Oculus' exclusivity deals seem like a business-driven change to PC ecosystem expectations which is a good catalyst for outrage.

People weren't always concerned about this though. Lucky's Tale, Henry, Farlands, and more were all Oculus exclusives at launch and no one talked about it. It wasn't until Oculus introduced an ownership check that people were up in arms, stemming from the Revive community. It wasn't until Oculus responded to Revive, a big company taking on a small community of paying customers, that people really started to take notice. It makes for a great David and Goliath story and the journalists ate it up.

Oculus has since backed off their policy and silently removed their DRM, a triumphant conclusion to the media's story. LibreVR removed the piracy-enabling DRM bypass from Revive, a moral we can empathize with. Everything is back to the way it was. There may be some fallout to deal with but I don't really hear about this story anymore and ultimately not much has changed.

A win for the little guy? VR visionaries dodging a PR bullet? The PC platform casting off the shackles of business? A big shift in an early, fragile market? Whether any of these conclusions are accurate or true, it made for a few entertaining weeks.

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virsh console is a jarring experience. If you're running a Linux VM with libvirt, consider using virsh lxc-enter-namespace instead. I'll show you why and how.

The left screen shows two shells connecting to the same VM and you can already see that:

The escape method departs from shell norms (exit or ctrl+D)

It forces you to explicitly log in each time without telling you

The second connection doesn't display anything and writes to the first

What you can't see is that:

You need to explicitly log in but it doesn't tell you

Going over 80 characters messes up the display

I assume that these things are done for compatibility reasons as libvirt is popular and broad in scope. However, when it's not being annoying it's brazen and dangerous in how it runs against the grain of your expectations.

However, virsh can also run your shell of choice within the VM with lxc-enter-namespace. It will your expectations by leveraging your shell's familiar environment. The tool I built on the right is using that on the back end. The images above paint a stark contrast, I think.

To do this, I use this line:

sudo virsh -c lxc:/// lxc-enter-namespace <vm-id> --noseclabel -- /usr/bin/sudo -i -H -u <user> -- <command>

If you leave <command> blank then it will just load up your user's shell.

I would love to know why this is so difficult. Why can't I just run virsh shell <vm-id> --as-user <user><command>? I suggest that you toss that command into a script and use it instead of virsh console.

This trick has saved our team a lot of pain and opened up new possibilities for automation. Hopefully it helps someone else too.

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Removing. Replacing.

I have a love/hate relationship with removing and replacing content during development. It has to happen. It helps make the game great. It's more than a little painful.

Here's my first try at creating a core bit collection that's interesting:

That's simplistic and beautiful but I'm not using it. In the context of the game, it introduces problems. Where do you go from there? What's the transition? Will it always be this long? Is there always space above you? It makes a lot of assumptions for such a simple effect. The rest of the game doesn't fit.

That's two days of work, unused. I might find a place for the effect later but right now it has no purpose and it was difficult to do. I can't know that until I do it though, there's just no way. That's the line of exploration you walk with creative work. You have to love the journey of making itself.

I still don't know what will be the replacement. There's only one way to find which fit works, if any, out of my next good ideas.

My computer broke after that which put me on a week-long hiatus. I feel better today though after this knockout addition: git commit -m "Giraffi Stone Zone".

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Look at all these mcguffins! Finally making some real progress with making the world not entirely empty.

I actually have all the little glowy bits I want now. I have ideas for some alternate collectables and extra zones. Of course, there's also the characters and dynamic conversations I want to add to (hopefully) create an extra dimension to it all.

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Cardboard Controls+

v3.6.1 of Cardboard Controls+ is out on the Unity Asset Store! I don't think I've mentioned it here before but this is the Cardboard input SDK that I made and that my Cardboard games run on. Check it out if Cardboard is your thing!

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Here's a bit of work I've been doing over the week.

First, I started borrowing a striking feature of @jaytholen's Dropsy: image-based communication. It leverages that part of our brain where our imagination fills in the blanks, helping me tell a good story without being a great writer. It also seems like a really good candidate for alternate storytelling in VR where it's really challenging to display text, especially a lot of it.

Second, I can now fade in and out of scenes. This was shockingly difficult with an equally pace-palmingly easy solution. Most traditional solutions involve a GUI Texture, which doesn't work with the Cardboard platform. I found a VR-centric solution that accounts for both cameras but it is hopelessly complicated and has a weird API. In the end I just made a plane object in front of the camera that changes transparency. As usual, if you have a GUI issue in VR then you should probably translate it to an in-game object.

I'm diving into audio now and I've finally got my workflow set up. I'm terrified of the thought of creating a game soundtrack. Let's start with simple sound effects, keep doing research and sketching, and see where it takes me!

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Zero-crossing audio

I just spent 4 hours learning a very simple audio lesson the hard way. Maybe I can save someone else 4 hours by sharing.

After searching every combination of "fl10", "unity", "crackle", "pop", and "loop", I finally came across this Unity question. This was a great find after digging through countless threads of people wondering why they got skips from processing huge song projects with 1GB of RAM.

At this point I open up Audacity and load in my exported file. When I zoomed in reaaaaal close I noticed this at the end:

After deleting the zone between the last zero and the end, I noticed a dramatic improvement. See if you can tell the difference by letting the end of these two files play:

It might be subtle here but it's a lot more distinct in your game audio.

I might also be able to do everything in FL Studio but I haven't figured it out yet. It seems that either way I would need to reimport the audio to chop the end off and Audacity is a lot more straightforward for that. Isn't this the kind of thing that FL Studio should handle for you?

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Things become so much more lively when you throw them in Unity and start adding systems and shaders. I really love how some of this is graphically coming together.

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Trees are fun. I still need to fluff out the leaves a bit I think but it's a good start. I also made a shader to have the leaves' mesh undulate in the wind.

Tree by jscott on Sketchfab

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3D modelling? Ah shoot, I spent all afternoon making a Mario level instead.

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[nightlybuild]

A goofy little mailbox thing. I'm not entirely sure what I was going for with this or if I succeeded but you just gotta keep making.

Mailbox by jscott on Sketchfab

I did get a bit more comfortable with textures and texture painting through this. I was inspired to try vertex painting like you see here: