Ying Mun Chin

@u5957473

Likes sitting at the front :)

146 posts

Today was the last day of class, it’s really been a fun ride for me and it’s probably an experience that I’ll probably reminiscence about after graduation. My project has been coming along nicely, in the morning I just managed to fix the biggest issue that I’ve been putting aside for awhile which was for the experience to support two simultaneous controllers at once. This issue had to do with me testing with one controller for the longest time to the point where when I introduced it to a second controller, a lot of the movement calculations and inputs would stop working. But I managed to solve this by making the second controller less-smart in the sense that only one controller was in charge of all the logic and managing the player’s state while the other controller was basically just feeding in its player inputs. This meant that there was great dependency for the right controller to function properly so if the right controller somehow stops working and gets deactivated while in game, then the left controller will also not be able to do anything. But even so, restarting the game would basically set the left controller as the primary controller so it could be fixed with a simple restart as all things should be. Looking back at this project, it’s really something that till this day I never thought that I could pull off and I’m glad that I invested the amount of time that I did because looking at my peer’s impressions and reactions of it over the course of the project have been rewarding to say the least. We also had a guest lecture who have experience with game development that I was really keen on meeting and just having her talk about game development in a school environment is a bit odd given the context but I really enjoyed it because the things she mentioned were also things that I had to subconsciously deal with in my own game developments in the past XD Having the pleasure to show my work to her as well as the lecturer for the first time was quite exciting but it wasn’t all that I imagined it to be. Upfront I immediately realized that the game was one was targeted for people with an “adventurous“ heart. I say this because the pacing of the player’s movement in the air and even on the ground were maybe a little too much for them. I feel like my testing procedures were liable to the expert bias where the select few of people in class that have repeatedly helped me test my project have become experts themselves as they’ve had more time to adapt to the gameplay. With that said I’ll have to look into implementing some sort of tutorial or beginner system before I submit this piece so that it’s playable for newcomers.

I got a bit distracted today from what I initially planned to complete. I was supposed to look into vehicles and how they implemented in the Spider-Man PS4 game in the sense of how they moved around, what dictated their movements, how they interacted with the player and specific characteristics and behaviors, etc. But while watching gameplay videos I realized something that I didn’t initially get to witness when I was playing the game for the first time. What I saw was the stereotypical superhero landing in which the player would land on a surface after a fall and assume the three-point stance. But the thing that caught my eye was how a crater was generated at the point of impact along with a bit of rubble and dust in the area as well but after a short while it’d fade away as if nothing happened. So from that, I took a detour from my half-baked automation script and revisited particle systems and see if I could replicate something similar. I first got the dust particles to disperse in a donut formation from the point of impact, which was fairly doable but then when it came to the crater I was a bit stuck. But upon closer inspection it seems that the game just overlaid a very realistic 2D plane on the player’s feet to make it seem like there was damage done to the ground, which explained how effortlessly they were able to pull off reverting the ground back to it’s original polished state. I followed this concept and basically just displayed a crack image below the player and that was that. But when I was testing the effect, no matter how I adjusted the attributes of the particles it felt a bit out of place in the way that it didn’t feel like it was giving the "oomph” that I was looking for. I then watched some actual super hero landings on YouTube and it seems that some of them give off this shockwave from the landing that might be caused by the sheer force that’s generated upon collision. I then went back to visually implement this and I felt it really completed what I thought was missing in my first attempt. With this effect in place, I set it to trigger when the player landing after getting a fair bit of momentum as well as when they perform a boosted jump that launches them high in the air.

Welp, it’s the final stretch. Week 12 was meant for me to add final touches and explore some things with automation with vehicles and pedestrians. So far I borrowed a package from Unity that featured low resolution cars that fit well with my city textures so I added them on the lecturer’s spline path animation controller script to just get a feel of how the cars add to the whole city feeling. I feel like it breaks the monotony by having things other than yourself move in the city so it doesn’t feel too deserted. I think it was wise for me to have took the time to add the road textures because it just added that extra bit of realism, especially when you’re in the air and details just flow right past without you noticing much of it. I know I’m not too concerned about how people will think about the city background, however I hope players will appreciate that at least there was an attempt made that is a little bit above the bare minimum of having everything just flat out one color. For the vehicles themselves, after I saw them moving in game, I felt that there was an added expectation that the user would be able to interact with them, like maybe hop on top and hitch a ride or maybe grapple towards or pull them out of motion and into the air. But this mechanic definitely screams another week or two worth of work so although I feel like it’s quite neat, I’m a bit disappointed that I won’t have the time to do this properly. I feel like the whole calculation of how the vehicle will move after it’s being pulled and thrown will have a similar if not greater complexity than how I implemented the swing earlier in the project. Currently, because of how I placed them on the spline, buses, big rigs and other long vehicles have a little bit of difficulty when turning because they look like they’re drifting half of the time no matter where I set their center point to be. I think this will be one of the challenges that I’ll have to deal with as I implement the automation script with vehicles. Just thinking about it right now makes me feel that it might be a little bit of a reach to do both cars and people.

In this video, Nintendo Labo Director Sakaguchi Tsubasa talks about the Nintendo Labo's VR Kit. Before this, wasn’t too familiar with Nintendo Labo besides being cardboard add-ons, conceptual mini-games, however upon watching this video and reading more into the Labo lineup, it’s surprising innovative to say the least. The thing that makes Nintendo Labo kits shine, or for me at least,is their Toy-con Garage programming software that comes included with the kit. Unlike traditional programming language, Nintendo opted for a visual programming ecosystem where there’s no manual typing involved as the code is purely drag and drop. Objects are represented as nodes and relationships can be made between them by dragging and connecting their respective edges.The Toy-con Garage also supports a 3D edit mode where you can move the switch around and the display visualizes the code in 3D space so that you can see a stripped out developer view of the project you’re working on. With that said, Sakaguchi mentions that all the Labo mini-games were also made on this very platform so that each game could be edited in the Garage as he showcases later in the video. I feel like this essentially unlocks a lot of possibilities with how the Labo can be used as people could change existing games to fit their preferences or create their own games with fairly little programming experience. Even though a lot of programming conventions have been abstracted away so it’s much friendlier for younger audiences, I still feel that it’s not something that kids are going to dive into right away. This is probably applicable to most adult users as the idea of programming is very foreign to many who havn’t come in contact with it first hand. With that said, it’s a good attempt at getting a wider audience introduced to programming as well as VR for that matter.

“Sony's official video comparing performance of PS4 Pro vs next-gen PlayStation https://t.co/2eUROxKFLq”

Came across a tweet from Wall Street Journal’s Takashi Mochizuki, which had a video teasing the PlayStation 5 loading times for games. Well, PlayStation calls this exercise “comparing performance of PS4 Pro vs next-gen PlayStation”, so it’s still uncertain what the next PlayStation console will be called however we do know that this comparison is with the latest high-end model of the PS4. It’s also hard to distinguish whether the quality is on par, better or declined based on the visual quality of the video but we’ll just have to assume that PlayStation won’t settle for anything less, being as big as it is. As for the video itself, the loading times are remarkable fast, With the “next-gen PlayStation” loading 4 scenes within the time frame that the PS4 Pro can load one. These type of speeds are very reminiscent of the remote cloud gaming platform Nvidia’s GeForce Now and Google Stadia. Essentially the console experience is achieved through having the physical back end hardware residing in the cloud with the service provider facilitating the management and maintenance of the gaming hardware. This means that from the consumer’s point of view, the emulation of the game is digitized and all they need is a compatible controller or imput method and device with a screen to stream the game on in real time. Although this sounds quite innovative, there are downsides to it, notably the latency in-game, which is largely dependent on the customer’s network connection. So although the loading times seem to have been properly been given steroids because higher-end gaming hardware can be used for processing without conventional restrictions, but the lack of a stable and reliable network in the present day presents concerns for whether the input refresh rate can come toe to toe with the current generation lineup. But then again, given the advent of 5G approaching fairly soon, which China paving the way, I think this is the perfect time to invest in cloud services and remote processing. As for the application to VR, with all the hardware and rendering done in the cloud, the user merely has to stream the output and given the bandwidth of 5G, it would definitely make portable high-end VR rigs a possibility.

Today, I worked on special effects using Unity’s particle system package and when I was watching gameplay of the Spider-Man PS4 game, there were instances where when moving at high velocities both in the air and on the ground, there were animated lines flashing on the side, which gave a really neat comic-book feeling where they tried to convey the direction they were moving in as well as how fast they were going. I managed to implement this concept of “speed lines” into my project so that players get a similar sensation with the games. But also I noticed that they help obstruct a bit of peripheral vision which often times have noticeable delays in rendering leading to a somewhat laggy feeling. So as the player holds down on the track to moves, the player’s speed steadily increases and after a threshold, it will trigger the “speed lines” to appear. A challenge of this was to make the speed lines face in the right direction. The implementation behind it was fairly similar to my automated vision rotation script which regrettably got no where so I was faced with a bit of a roadblock. After spending most of the day looking at it’s documentation and use, I managed to solve the rotation distortion issue by resetting the orientation after each time they were deactivated. I think this was such a simple fix that I feel like if there’s time, I’d like to put it on the top of the list of things that I’ll be revisiting closer to the end of the project. This implementation worked well enough that only a little adjustment was needed to make it work in the air during swings and launches. But I hope that players can appreciate how the speed lines look from the side and from the back because it’s something that you normally never get to see because the camera is always facing in the direction of motion, hence it’s a little be surreal to be honest, even for me haha

After seeing everyone’s project yesterday, I was inspired to work more on my city... well there’s actually not a lot I can do but I just added a few more interesting skyscrapers and spent more time shrinking the city so I can add more things elsewhere like roads, which I completely forgot about. Before doing the roads, I had to finalize the layout of the city because changing it down the road would be pretty difficult. That aside, I’m adding road textures to make the player feel more like they’re on the streets and it also acts as a visual indicator for the player to get a sense of how fast they’re moving based on how blurry the broken lines on the road get in the player’s peripheral vision. Also, another reason for me spending time on choosing the right textures for T-junctions, corners and intersections is because I’m planning to add road vehicles later on. Hopefully the cars aren’t as heavy as the textures on the buildings but I think I’m going to have to bite my words later on. With the roads all laid out, I think I can implement a script that can recognize the road layout and build a line map over it that vehicles can traverse randomly. But I’ll have to see because this would also be no easy task and given the remaining time frame, I feel like I’ll have to focus on fixing my current problems before I create more by starting something new haha Overall, I feel like the roads do their job, although they look a bit odd from accommodating the blocky layout and also not having sidewalks built in them.

Today in class... well it was another round of walking around to see how everyone was doing :) Met up with Yilin and she finally got her teleport feature working across her various levels through scene changes in-game. Turns out she stumbled upon it by deleting the SteamVR player prefab in one of the scenes and it just magically worked, thankfully it was resolved without much difficulty and with a fair bit of time to spare before submission. She also has a fox character modeled and animated properly, which was moving around using the lecturer’s animation path script. Run’s group seems to have their gameplay slowly coming together. When I checked up on them, they were working on a script for the evidence box that counted the amount of evidences and the quality of them. I stuck around with them to watch how they were coding and I have to admit that it was pretty painful not being able to use Unity’s depreciated Mono Develop software to code on Unity 2018 and onward. It was a nightmare when Visual Studio didn’t seem to recognize the script in C# and therefore it didn’t mark the OnTriggerLeave( ) function with a red line but I’m glad I was able to see that it was OnTriggerExit( ), given the amount of time I spent working on collision logic with my own project XD But the coding issue aside, I was amazed at the quality of models in their project, the artifacts and furniture in the house had a consistent style to them, which was all visually appealing to me. Shortly after we listened to a guest lecture, which I was really looking forward to; they talked about the use of modelling and 3D / VR visualization in enterprises like the train simulator, the oil rig model and several applications for the Australian military. Honestly, it was pretty overwhelming when they showed videos of their work, showcasing their obsession with perfection, which really wasn’t my strong point haha. I understand how important it is to get every bit of detail replicated in digital space but I really can’t imagine myself doing that for a living. But on the other hand, bringing the models to life was definitely in my ballpark and I hope to talk more with them when they visit us again for our project presentations. After “class”, I had a glimse of Erin’s colorful cat cafe, which was the first time I’ve ever seen their project take shape. I also met David in the VR room doing some testing on his workshop environment, which is also coming together nicely.

I managed to solve a fair bit of problems with my wall climbing implementation yesterday regarding detaching the player from the building while overriding the collision logic. Firstly, when the player is near the bottom of a building, simply pressing down would create a smooth transition to the player backing away from the building once they’ve come in contact with the ground. Secondly, when the player is on the side of a building, the web shooter properly works but instead of a normal swing, they’ll be launching towards the targeted location instead. Finally, the player can jump off the side of a building intuitively by triggering a jump just as they have when they’re on the ground, by squeezing the grip, they player will effectively leap off the building. But to make sure that the player doesn’t stick onto the building after they’ve jumped off, a horizontal change in velocity has to happen, therefore when the player jumps, they’re propelled away from the building. This means that the directional logic of how the player’s controls had to suit whichever face of the building they choose to climb was used to determine the direction of their jump. Through some testing in the open world, I realized that I had unknowingly made an additional skill accessible which was the “wall to wall” jump that I demonstrated in the video. It’s a pretty sophisticated move in video games that can just be achieved by climbing on a building that’s facing another building and holding the grip button would just do all the magic. I feel like this wouldn’t have been possible if I was merely moving the player’s position away from the building horizontally until they’re in mid air, which makes me appreciate how I’ve gone through all the trouble to create an artificial velocity component, even after not being able to use Unity’s built in RigidBody forces :)

Today I went back to implement the wall climbing functionality where when the player is next to a building wall, they snap onto it and can then resume moving in relation to the surface of the building which they’re linked to. As the description suggests, it sound simple but the logic behind it had a few degrees of complexity because the player’s movement controls can no longer be the same or else they’d be moving through the walls if they attempted to move forward. As such the player controls need to be conditionally tilted at a 90° from one of two axes based on whatever way the player is facing towards. Since I had already thought about this in my previous proof of concept game, I understood that rotating the player is pretty disastrous, which is why I chose to keep all buildings rectangular prism shaped. In that sense, I could manually deal with four possibilities, which was for the player to face either North, South, East or West. This meant that depending on what way the player was facing, I could directly bind the player controls to suite each of these four scenarios so that in each and every one of these cases, pressing “up” on the touchpad would correlate to the player moving up the building with the same applying for the other directions respectfully. But after this was done, there was several problems that arose, some of which were simple enough to solve like at the top of the building, the player seems to fall back down due to gravity from a change of state. This was resolved by adding a forced jump when the player reached the edge of building top, as seen in the video clip. But there were additional functionalities that I had to build, which covers how the player gets unattached to a wall if they’re at the foot of the building or if they just want to jump off when they’re no where near an edge and what happens when they try to shoot a web while on the side of a building. All these issues were not as straightforward for me to fix as the collider interactions between the building and the player seemed to love overriding my attempts at unhooking the player from the building XD

Looks like Google is back at it again with their Google glass, this time around it seems that they’re targeting end users in the occupational and business settings. Google glass was originally a prototype back in 2013, they released it properly in 2017 but it didn’t catch on, mainly due to having various flaws and issues. Because of what it is, simply wearing the google glass in public was a direct breach in people’s privacy due to the presence of a camera built into the glass that many might not be initially aware of. Because of this and the possibility of the user recording what they see, there has been bans on the use of Google glasses due wearers making people around them feel uncomfortable. But targeting this product to enterprises will definitely alleviate these problems but it would be interesting to see how they deal with it when they reintroduce it to the public for day to day usage. That aside, the Google Glass is an effective tool in the sense that it increases the efficiency of the wearer by passing information to them hands free so that they have both hands accessible to them to carry out whatever task they have to do. This is especially beneficial for individuals whom work in a hazardous workplace such as construction work or machine assembly as seen in the video. Having the display placed at the corner of the wearer’s vision makes it so that Google Glass doesn’t impair the user’s line of sight, allowing them to maintain concentration on the work at hand and maintain awareness of their surrounding, increasing employ safety and lowering risks associated from the occurrence of mistakes and incidents. Dr. Chen also notes that physicians are spending more time facing the computer than they do with their patients and having the glass means that they can put more of their attention on their patient while the Google Glass provides them with information they need about the patient in real time. It also facilitates expert guidance by a professional stationed at a remote location seamlessly via it’s video sharing capabilities. Overall, this technology is quite ingenious and as Mrs. Gulick concludes, it’s a tool that doesn’t replace people but rather makes them smarter, faster and better at their own job.

I’m not too crazy about tattoos but when I came across an ad for the InkHunter mobile application, I knew it was something worthy of sharing. InkHunter is an augmented reality software available on mobile devices that lets users visualize tattoo designs on any part of their body that they’ve marked with a “neutral smiley face” ( ‘_’ ). I think this is incredibly useful for tattoo fanatics or even people who are uncertain about whether they want one but is too afraid of the consequences of whether it might look good on their skin or drastically different from what they imagined. Digitally projecting tattoos and having the ability to alter the design via personal uploads, manipulate the size, angle and other attributes of it. This gives the customer more choices to choose from and when shown to a tattoo artist, it would also reduce the amount of deviance that occurs due to miscommunication or misinterpretation. Since it’s augmented reality, the design also follows you in real time under your mobile device camera so you can really experience how it will look from all sorts of perspectives, which is a much more rich depiction than simply Photoshoping a tattoo onto a picture of your respective body part. I feel like it’s a pretty useful tool that you never knew you needed because especially for something that’s going to be semi-permanent or at least fairly difficult and costly to undo, it has great implications for what it’s worth.

I’ve expanded the city to 1000x1000 Unity units in area and it seems to be the biggest mistake I’ve ever made so far in this project. The city was what I wanted it to be, an open playground with high and low buildings so the player can try out their abilities but the issue was when I tested it at the end of the day, the experience was way too laggy. I thought that it was something else that I changed which caused it but turns out when I disabled all my buildings it was smoother than a baby’s bottom. I tried to try a build on the computer and it was experiencing the same level of jaggedness as when it was in the Unity software. I moved the build to the lab computer in the other studio, and a different issue occurred where the SteamVR for the HTC Vive setup was updated by some user and when the build or the project is played, the experience was appearing correctly but with a depressing amount of frames while through the VR headset, I could only see the default dark sunset background from the updated SteamVR. It was at this point where I realized that there’s just too many unnecessary components that Unity is keeping track of and doing math and rendering on. With that said, it’s painful to say but I’m forced to compromise on the expansive aspects of the city because I’ll have to scale down the game, just enough so that the experience still feels borderline fluid on the studio computers, well at least on the one in Studio 1 that still has a SteamVR version that’s compatible with Unity 2017′s projects :/

I got a bit tired with city building so I went back to add some functionality into the experience. This time around, I implemented the grappling effect where the player is launched towards the location of wherever they choose to shoot the web. The player can choose between launching and swinging based on whether they’re holding the grip buttons. Besides being one of Spider-Man’s innate ability, it’s also helpful to get players out of weird situations or to a higher altitudes for more action. But what I realized was that the controls might actually be fairly sophisticated. Because of the range of abilities available in the PS4 Game, given that a PS4 controller is used, there’s much more button and therefore button combinations to exploit for special actions and interactions. With HTC’s Vive controller, there’s a limitation to how actions can be mapped to the controller. The grip button is one of the main three buttons beside the touchpad and the menu button that we could bind so naturally I would be using it for this purpose. I’ve had the pleasure to become familiar with the grip button because I’ve been using it for the jumping action in this project as well as the first project in the semester. I also have had a few people trying out my project and so far I’ve discovered that they have the most problems with the grip button because of how it’s positioned on the controller as well as how unfamiliar they are with it. I think this is the case because most of the class seems to be using the teleportation prefab that was introduced earlier in the beginning of the second term. But it seems like it takes a few minutes to get used to after I’ve personally showed them where it lives on the controller.

Today in class... well it wasn’t really much of a class but we got to work on our projects which was nice. As for me, I was getting a bit restless with my project so I just decided to use the time to check up on how other people are doing, just to keep my mind fresh XD Everyone’s project was starting to take shape and it was kinda exciting to see how it’s going a few weeks before the end of the semester. Yilin’s little prince story was looking pretty cool, she started using the particle systems package that we went over last class to make planets more vibrant and they really do glow in the darkness of space, which was a huge step up from the last time I checked in. She was also working on one of the next chapters in the story that was set in a grassland environment where she’ll be putting the roses and the fox. Currently there seems to be a problem with the teleportation prefab not being able to work across scenes when the player switches to a new scene through scripting but it’s something that can be overcome by maybe staying within the same scene and enabling / disabling certain objects for each environment. Next I met Run’s group and it seems like they’re doing an escape room detective type of game, which is pretty neat but they’re facing an issue with how when the player tries to hold an object, it’s positioned incorrectly in relation to the hand and even if it looks alright when the player is holding it in the left hand, it somehow goes wrong when he tries it with the right controller. I haven’t really looked too much into configuring the way SteamVR2.0 animates their hands but I’m certain that they can implement a script that can apply an position offset to the object only when the right hand is holding onto the object. Finally, since Erin’s group was the only one left in the room, I talked to them for a bit... I initially thought that they were doing the IKEA furniture project but it turns out it was the Cat cafe experience, which was still pretty neat. They had the cat animations done at the time but it was just a matter of setting how they would be triggered in the game. I feel like this would require a lot of state change management which is what I’ve been doing for the past three weeks but I think they’re in good hands because her partner came from an IT background like myself, so it should work out just fine :)

Currently, I’ve been trying to construct my city from basic blocks with simple textures. The textures themselves don’t seem too visually compelling but the purpose of it is so that it feels kind of like a city but at the same time it can be used as a visual indicator of how fast the player is moving, especially when they’re very close to the wall when they’re climbing buildings. This was a problem for me during the testing phases because a plain shaded color doesn’t tell me much about the direction or velocity of my movements so having a texture on the buildings breaks the monotony of it. Also I’m not too concerned about the design of the textures because when you’re in the middle of a swing, you notice less about the subtle details but the only time when it gets more attention is when the player is on the ground. As such, I’ve just made the base blocks of buildings as a variety of stores and shop fronts to just give them a bit of character. As I’ve learnt form my experience yesterday with using Mapbox, I made sure that with my own city I had my buildings fundamentally rectangular prism shaped while being positioned and aligned on a grid, with equidistant spaces for roads, enough room so that the player doesn’t become claustrophobic and also for there to be cars in place if I do plan to have any in the future. Also because of the nature of Spider-Man and how fast he can get across a city, I need the city to be quite immersive and big for the player to not feel like they’ve covered the entire map in a few moments. With that said, I’ll have to try to balance the amount of textures and combinations of building types that I don’t make the city too repetitive and dull. I hope that every inch of the city has a bit of uniqueness that the player can come to recognize as they spend more time inside the game. Because this city isn’t going to be photo realistic to any real city, I have the flexibility to include fancy skycraper designs of my own and of well known ones in real life that I’ll try to replicate with the constraint of only using square blocks :)

For my project roadmap, this week was meant to be allocated for me to build up the environment within Unity, which basically covers the creating the immersive city. Instead of directly jumping into modelling Manhattan city, I decided to look into city-generation methods and one of them was Mapbox. Mapbox is a package which allows you to instantly bring a flat layout of a city to life by raising buildings and properties up to their height stored in Google Maps’ API. It also has a map editing studio on the browser so that you can cherry pick the components of the map that you want, whether you want labels on cities or roads, bodies of water, buildings, bridges, etc. For now, it seems like my job is done but upon closer inspection, when it’s not running, the main view is basically empty and only upon running the project, does it instantly generate the city that. Although it’s great that you can randomize and change the texture style of the building and also set the generator to add colliders to buildings. But there are several issues with me using Mapbox. One of which is that it’s a pain to add things in the project without actually being able to see where they are unless you run it. Even if you run the project and make changes to it, all the changes are only temporary and gets reverted when you stop the project. Secondly, when I try walking around in the environment, the textures doesn’t seem to match the scale of the scene, in the sense that the size of a window is somehow two stories in size, which isn’t very realistic. Finally the models that are generated seems to have been done fairly imperfectly with an emphasis on it being only viewed from top-down. This means that there are some buildings where if you look from bottom-up in the perspective of a person in the city, you’ll see gaps in the polygons, which is just really weird. On top of that, eve if you keep the geolocation coordinates constant, some buildings miss out on getting generated so you end up with a large empty gap in the middle of the street or just a component of a building missing. Buildings also are not always perfectly parallel or perpendicular of each other, meaning the wall climbing component of my script won’t work properly as well because it requires rotating the character, which has always ended up as a bad idea. Unfortunately, all of these unsolved problems just means that I can’t afford to use Mapbox if I want to move forward, which means I’ll have to start creating my own city tomorrow :(

Ying Mun Chin @u5957473 - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag