Since getting back to almost fully operational status, I’ve been playing with an alpha of some mo-cap software, Mindshow. It is a lot of fun, and the ‘Mad-Libs’ aspect of it could be a great party game. I did a short recording of myself explaining how I got my dev PC back on track:

So, yes – having Oculus software installed with my odd combination of hardware & software (plus aRadeon driver update that bluescreened every time I tried to install it) made for a unhappy system. Unity slowed to a crawl – it reminded me of early dial-up internet: click on something, go make coffee, come back, click; go do something else. It made dev work impossible, and since Unity refused to build – impossible to show off a demo.

Bitching about it on the VRTK Slack channel did yield some steps in the right direction; comments about the new USB 3 card I added got me looking in the direction of the Rift I recently was gifted by Oculus, and after I uninstalled Oculus home, my problems vanished. The downside is, I truly love working with Oculus Medium, the program could easily be the Photoshop of VR sculpting and until I find a viable way of getting everything to play nicely (basically waiting for Oculus / Unity / AMD to update their $#!+) I’m outta luck with the Rift. Shame, cause I also enjoy Lucky’s Tale, too.

So: BACK TO FREAKIN’ WORK.

https://youtu.be/dpc0sgpUrj8

So, the video show some of the newest work – I got the very cute bee modeled, animated and I had a moving version that used the components and Playmaker scripts copied off my roaming monsters – until the bee started killing the player – oops.

I’m also getting into Timeline, Unity’s new editor, built like non-linear editors like Premiere and Hitfilm. Since I’ve used software like this for decades, taking to it should be fairly easy. After watching a tutorial and downloading DumbGameDev’s awesome Playmaker plugins, I was animating my fish in the pond in under an hour. Curious about how else I can use this new feature.

I’ve also been exploring using Substance Painter 2 as a way of texturing my level – trying to use Blender has gotten too clunky to try and paint in, especially since my level has to be broken up into chunks to avoid Unity’s 65K poly limit. I hate having to dive into learning new software while on a project, but Blender’s limitations are slowing me down – and I feel like I’ve lost a lot of time already and GDEX is coming up sooner than I’d like. Planning my first public display will soon take precedent over dev work.