Road to Beta

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How to add a custom VR controller to the Steam Workshop

I had some serious trouble getting the Steam Workshop stuff working for VR, and I’m likely not the only one.

Install Steam VR on your system (even if that computer won’t be running your VR rig) It’s OK. It will allow you to edit your workshop content. I found it easiest to start with a controller that was already built, so download one like the horned controller and ‘Browse Model Directory’ and search the folders until you find it. I then copied this folder elsewhere and overwrote the content.

Run Steam VR and right click on the label to get the menu, then go to either ‘Upload New’ or ‘Modify Existing’ The trickiest bit here is where it asks you to specify which model. I mean I’ve got a bunch! What it actually wants is for you to pick an ‘.obj’ file which shares the same name as the ‘.json’ file which in turn specifies all the model names that are actually loaded. The Thumbnail File should just be an image prepared to show what whatever you’re making will look like to those that might want to download it. This is what people browsing the workshop will see. This is a similar process for lighthouse and environment models. Some gotchas I’ve encountered: Don’t miss that comma in the json after ‘thumbnail:”thumbnail.jpg”,” Bad ’.json’s are bad. Material (.mtl) files with no texture don’t seem to work. All textures have to be in 0-1 uv space. mtl -clamp off seems to just break. Since there’s not lighting anyways, environments need to have all the textures and lighting etc all baked in. This is what’s messing me up from getting the contraption stuff done right now as we have so much custom shader stuff, setting up a bake in Maya is a bit tricky. I’m sure I’ve broken and failed to get models working in 20 more ways, but this is the majority of how I’ve dealt with this so far.

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Our VR Development Setup

We’ve had a lot of people writing in asking what we stream with and how we’ve setup our room for VR development. Let’s do this with a nice cellphone shaky-cam video!

The room is approximately 4m x 5m large, with a playable space of around 3m x 3m. 

Parts list:

- Red “3rd Hand” poles - C-clamps for mounting - Lumix DZ1000 camera - Battery-door clearance plate for camera - DC power adaptor for camera - HDMI to Display Port adaptor - AVerMedia Capture Card - Rode swing-mount microphone arm - Studio Lighting (not pictured in video) Follow-up video coming soon will show the room in green-screen mode.

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How we made a stretchy goo ball. What should you do in a game when you have a ‘ball’ that you can’t allow the player to throw away?  Well the obvious thing is don’t let the player throw it. Everybody ‘wants’ to throw it, so all our solutions to avoid doing that were unsatisfying. What we need is to let the player think they’ve thrown it, without letting them actually do so. What we decided to try was to make the ball stretch out and snap back to where you released it.

How do I program the physics of that though??? Well, you don’t. Lie cheat and steal. That’s what tech-artists do best! We only want to do this on the art, note the collision, snaps and greater part of the object don’t actually move. -Cheat : So we’re going to point the ball in the direction of the throw. You should be able to convince your friendly local programmer to feed you a vector indicating the magnitude and direction of the throw.  Hint: In unity you can ‘set’ the `.transform.forward` parameter of any object! -Lie : So a big advantage in implementing this is that we’re using a  uniformly coloured ball. If you aren’t, then you could always do some uv-fakery, but that’s tougher. In Fantastic Contraption, objects only throw when you’re above a certain velocity, so that’s going to be our min throw. We’ve somewhat arbitrarily set that to ‘25’ and I also arbitrarily set max throw strength to be 4X the min. Steal : pretty simple code to get the values from the Animation curve and settings. (ditto for throw distance) protected float GetThrowTime(float magnitude) {  float normalizedMagnitude =  (magnitude - Globals.settings.throwStrengthTrigger) / (maxThrowStrengthForTime - Globals.settings.throwStrengthTrigger);  float throwTime = Mathf.Lerp(minThrowTime, maxThrowTime, throwStrengthTimeFalloff.Evaluate(normalizedMagnitude));  return throwTime; } AnimationCurves are awesome for adjusting interpolations for anything and everything. I’m adjusting the time the stretch takes, and the distance it travels based off these curves and min and max values set below them. My tween uses the curve shown above, and my custom tween system to move the joint furthest out on the edge of the ball. You can see there’s a good ‘hang time’ section in the middle there, and a nice little ‘wiggle/ settle’ at the end. There’s also a scale tween on the second joint that mostly does stuff during that big bump which is the major part of the throw. You could use a Unity animation I think, but setting the far value and making sure scaling sets it to be the right time length might be a bit of work. I also have an adjustment based on the size of the ball so that giant goo balls barely stretch out when thrown. It’s a pretty ‘special case’ solution, but it might spark an idea or be useful to you somehow! Any questions or comments, hit me up here, or on twitter @mrlinds

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Oculus Walrus by mrlinds Just back from GDC in San Francisco where we were showing Fantastic Contraption on the Oculus for the first time ever. We also had a great time in the IGF booth and at the Valve booth.

Our own Dr. Kimberly Voll gave a multitude of talks and even I was honored to present Contraption as part of the Experimental Gameplay Workshop.

Phew, what a busy trip.

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Podcast 1: The language of mixed reality

Communicating about virtual reality is hard. Tune into our very first episode of our new podcast, Road To Beta, to find out more! Subscribe through iTunes Subscribe through RSS Or listen directly:

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Indie Game Fanart break : GangBeasts by mrlinds Gang Beasts is insane stupid chaos fun. Flail around and knock out your friends. PM :  Boneloaf Games  2014 Code : Made in the Unity Game Engine. Art : Fun costumes and simple 3d levels. Design : Bad controls is good controls. Audio : We unknowingly left this game running in the office for a week when we suddenly heard a splash. Turn on the TV, and someone had fallen into the water.

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Bug Report : King Creative Block

From the depths of despair rises a shadowy form, wreathed in flame. A Massive burden that weighs down the imagination, stifles creativity and blanks the mind. While normal creative block leaves you staring blankly at a wall, this is the kind that makes you crawl back into bed and pull the blankets over your head.

All hope is not lost. Perseverance will see you through.

HP :  sigh, 2000 I guess? Attk : should I even bother? 25? Def : .... 25 Speed : 0.1f; XP : 5000 Special Attack : ennui ( Nullifies all special moves for 1d4 rounds) 

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Bug Stories : The Magenta Quad When a shader has an error, any objects in the scene which have a material that uses that shader will display as pure magenta (#FF00FF)

On one game I suddenly noticed that there was a sprite that was displaying as pure magenta, so I went to look and see what shader it was using, as I assumed I had inadvertently broken something without noticing.

After looking into recent change logs, and likely trying a couple things in the shader to see what might be causing this error, I finally did what I should have done right from the start and looking at that specific object saw that an artist had made a texture with a big Magenta swatch on it as ‘placeholder’. No fault of theirs, but trying to not seem too annoyed I asked that they may wish to use a different color or something that doesn’t shout error to someone working with shaders. 

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Level 1 Scene 2 What would Molydeux? What kind of game are you going to make? What features are you going to have? What’s the hook? What’s gonna knock peoples socks off? You are faced with a mountain of questions that need answers yesterday. You may: A - Decide randomly with your trusty D20. B - Decide to clone whatever’s hot on the top of the app store C - Barter D - Whip out the ‘Epic Masterpiece Game Design Opus’(tm) you’ve been painstakingly scribbling in your notebook since grade 7. E -Jam with the coder and use your basic coding skills to make a few prototypes based on a couple ideas for mechanics you both think are doable. (Roll 2D10 for inspiration check)

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Bug Report: Creative Block Creative Block is big, tough, and slow. It can strike in any field, and once it has you, it can be super hard to get out from under its weight.The only way to make it past is to keep at it and chip away. Particularly vulnerable to cooperation and sudden bursts of inspiration. HP : 100 Attk: 15 Def : 18 Speed : 1 XP : 300 Special Attack : ugh, I totally can’t come up with anything...

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Unity/C# coffee break Color Rotation:

So last time I told you you could rotate a color. Doesn’t work like you expect? And a vector could have negative numbers in it! What in the world is Negative blue? And what if I made a vector with a 2 in it? What kind of color is that? We will address that when talking about High Dynamic Range (HDR) colors, and more interestingly ‘Glowy bits’.

Yeah, well that’s a bit crazy cool subject called ‘color spaces’ Easiest to think about is Hue/Saturation/Value, which is where a rotation makes more sense.  http://beesbuzz.biz/code/hsv_color_transforms.php details using a colorspace called YIQ to do hue rotations that preserve ‘luminosity’ Luminosity is basically a number that details how ‘bright’ a color looks. For example, pure red (1,0,0) is way brighter than pure blue (0,0,1), but they both have the same vector length in RGB colorspace. HSV as well.  An exercise to think about this is to de-saturate an image you paint in only red and blue.. Take every color and take its average. So red == 0.3333 blue == 0.3333.  If instead you ‘weight’ each color with a Luminance value, (0.22, 0.707, 0.071) you would end up with something that wasn’t a uniform grey and would look more like one would expect.

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Indie Game Fanart break : Snakebird by mrlinds

Super fun and challenging puzzle game. Slide your snakebirds around, collect all the fruit and leave no bird behind.

PM :  http://snakebird.noumenongames.com/ 2015 Code : Assume in house engine? Art : Simple and pretty. http://noumenongames.com/snakebird-development-images-and-history/ Design : Great puzzle and level design. Hard but fair. Audio : Whimsical and chill music with nice little 

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Dev Profile : Audio

This lone gun-person likes to strike from afar, frequently offsite even. Often off doing who knows what, when the call goes out, Audio must ride in with guns a blazing to save the project, only to ride off into the sunset alone once more. Sometimes audio does the job so well, barely anyone even knew they were there. Lvl : 2 HP : 20 Attack : 1D12 + 1 Def :  Speed : 11 Alignment : True Neutral

Special Attack : D20 bomb.

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Level 1 Scene 2 : Meanwhile... While the coder is facing a few bumps on takeoff, the artist must face one of it’s deadliest foes right out the gate. ‘The blank page’  Level - blank HP : 1 Attk : 20 minus your imagination level Def : blank Speed : blank Special Attack : Spawn Creative Block (every round not attacked) Exp : 150 You may: A : Stare at the wall blankly and fidget. B : Browse the internet for ‘Inspiration’ C : Curl up into a fetal position and despair D : Roll for inspiration. E : Barter F : Giver ‘er

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Bug Stories : Stories about issues and battles hard fought in the life of a dev. Once upon a time in a big company far away the office was hooked up with one public phone line that rang on all the phones around the office. One evening many moons into an unending crunch, the phone started ringing and no one seemed up to volunteering to pick up the phone. Somebody else’s problem. One dev decided the best solution was to enter an issue into the bug tracking software. “The phone is ringing” I think the bug bounced around the office, and any time the bug was resolved, it was dutifully failed and passed on to someone else. Maybe that game still has a lonely “the phone is ringing bug”, lost in bug tracking limbo.

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if you picked A, subtract 1 day from Time and repeat 1-1

if you pickd B, gain 1 coffee, subtract 1 day and repeat 1-1

if you picked C, add 100XP, add 1 month, lose 6 months of your life and repeat 1-1 with new Companions.

if you picked D, we can get on with things.... 

Level 1 Scene 2 : HELLo World

You fire up your computers and Coder starts madly typing away. You just want to hammer out the skeleton of something to iterate upon, but already you come upon a small group of enemies. You face 5 syntax errors Attk:1 Def;0 HP :1 xp:0(code), 1 null reference exception Attk:2: Def:2 HP:2 XP :NAN (code), 1 lvl2 distraction Attk :2 Def : 3 HP : 4 XP:5 (PM) 

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Unity/C# coffee break

Vectors are everywhere. A Vector is just a series of numbers. Unity has a few different types of Vectors. Vector2, Vector3,Vector4. Color is also a Vector, which leads somewhere quite interesting, but I’ll get back to that later.

Vector3′s are all over the place in 3D, as you can use them to define points in space. They have X,Y, and Z coordinates.

You can rotate a Vector3 by multiplying it by a rotation value called a Quaternion, which is a special type of Vector4. Questioning Quaternions too closely leads to madness, so let us accept them as the magic that they are and never speak of explaining them again. so just make them using ‘Euler’ angles () Quaternion.Euler(0,0,90) * Vector3.up; //==(-1,0,0)

which tells us: 1 : Vector3.up == new Vector3(0,1,0); 2 : rotation is counter clockwise, and in degrees. 3 : rotation is around 0,0,0 when done this way. Vector3 is a type used in transform.position/transform.localPosition of objects, but it is also basically what a mesh vertex is. Just a point in space! It is also used to represent the transform.scale of objects. Scale vectors by multiplying them by a single number. Vector3.one * 100f == new Vector3(100f,100f,100f);

Scale a vector non-uniformly by using Vector3.Scale. ‘Move’ a vector by adding or subtracting to it. It’s easy and fun to test these operations by moving objects around in unity with code. Try making a default script and in the Start() function add a line which sets: "this.transfrom.position = new Vector3(10f,10f,10f);”

What may not be obvious is that Colours are vectors too! Coding is very American, so don’t use any ‘u’’s in code. 

Color.white is similar to Vector4.one. Colors are red green blue and alpha, and can easily be converted back and forth from Vector4′s, or even Vector 3′s if you don’t really want to worry about alpha right now. Many interesting things happen when you start mashing up math and colours. Try some stuff with them and see what happens! example for a script to put on a sprite object:  var sprite = GetComponent<SpriteRenderer>(); sprite.color = new Color(1f,1f,1f) * 0.25f; sprite.color += Color.red;

//bit convoluted here... sprite.color = (Color)(Vector4)( Quaternion.Euler(0,0,-90) * Vector3.up ); sprite.color.a = 1f;