Like the headline implies, been feeling like I’ve been stuck in the longest traffic jam known to mankind.  Side work has taken a lot of my dev hours – 4 paintings and a logo will do that to even the most unencumbered man.

I have had the fortune of joining a dev Slack that centers around a set of tools for VR creation. The VRTK Group has been amazing in their support, ideas, helpful suggestions, weird humor (heck, I even got an amazing voice-over line from one of the devs)

The other, not so great thing about this group is that its impacting my wallet. I just found out about Final IK, and amazing rigging tool that just added VR support. When the Slack members started passing around this video:

I just about freaked out, because this kind of player controlled interaction would be PERFECT for my BUM experience. I could use some of the VRTK scripts for grabbing objects, I could have the player control the homeless person, grab a cup, and if I get the input from the controller, make a change rattle sound & trigger NPC’s walking nearby to either drop a coin or make a disparaging remark.

Now, before I get too far ahead of myself – I’m still stuck at getting the Final IK solution to work – as you can see by the video below, it looks like the player is swinging from a Jungle Gym:

not to mention that from the VR vantage point, the player is seeing the inside of the avatars head. Not overly selling the idea, but yet again – one step closer.

Been a long month of no dev.

The missus went on a vacation with her family and I had charge of the two boys for 10 days, solo. As often as I say that being a SAHD is the toughest thing I’ve ever done – doing it by myself was even harder. My hat’s off to all single parents, you are doing a herculean task under the most trying of circumstances.

Add to the actual time the wife was gone, there was plenty of extra kid watching time as she was packing, researching side trips, getting paperwork in order, etc. That and Son #2 has been waking earlier- which cuts into my dev time, and my sister-in-law commissioned 3 paintings for her husband – well, maybe I can squeeze in 5 minutes of dev stuff here and there.

What I have been working on, is a potential “Half Life Stories: VR” game, something to experiment with and potentially something to try and convince my local dev group to try and push to finish and release.

I’ll most likely be seeing my folks in a week, so I can scour their photo collection for more bits to add to the “Shore Road VR” project – which has stalled because I have zero reference photos of the old back dining room and back porch, as well as the upstairs.

I’m also trying to soak up a ton of new knowledge, since I discovered my library grants full access to Lynda.com, and tons of Unity, Blender, Photoshop tutorials.

I just wish I had more time.

Sometime things just seem to fall into place.

I treated myself to a little birthday gift. I was looking at trying to incorporate Papagayo lip-sync data into the .MHX2 rigs and was getting nowhere trying to get the humanoid models to:

A) accept .dat targeted lip-sync data

B) accept and merge multiple motion caption files

C) export all that to Unity and look nice

For whatever obsessive reason, my brain cannot come up with game ideas that involve characters that are static blobs / robots with very little animation / monsters with one or two simple expressions, meh and pure volcanic rage.

Nope – I have to have humanoid NPCs – somewhat realistic, and certainly with enough responsiveness and emotion on par with Saturday Morning Cartoons… Talk about a challenge.

So when I encountered lip-sync packages on the Asset Store, I did some research and settled on LipSync Pro. Having a bit of animation experience I knew the more phonemes a character has, the more realistic dialog will be, and LSP seemed to fit the bill. It even works with Fuse characters, which aren’t as impressive as the .MHX2 rig – which works beautifully with Tore Knabe’s Realistic Eye Movements.

So I installed LSP, downloaded a Fuse model and amused myself with some impromptu dialog recorded from my three year old. I got big laughs from the kids when I showed them a sample of a truck drivin’ redneck dude asking for treats because he used the potty.

Suffice to say, I was impressed with the results and began wondering how else I can use this. I started rebuilding my VR Bum sim because I was getting atrocious frame rates so I’m pulling all my assets back into Blender to see how many polys I can slash off everything and optimize the level. Sovereignty is on hold until I can get some new dialogue recorded and I have a ton of 2D game design before I can start on my platformer based on my kids artwork.

I was scrolling thru some old projects when I happened to see my old 3D animation work folder and I searched it for things that I could adapt into a VR diorama. And lo and behold, my ‘learn Blender’ project  – a music video for Mojo Nixons “Ufo’s Big Rigs & BBQ”

So, I’m chopping it down to a minute length – adding various animations to the Fuse character, a background and will add some 3D animated video to it so it looks like the Fuse character is delivering a performance in front of a screen playing highlights of the song.

I asked on /r/vive if people would like to offer feedback on a WIP and they seemed pretty desperate for any VR content, so that, coupled with the itch / drive to put something out there, will have me busy for a while. VR is only going to get bigger and more crowded, so the quicker I can get my name out there, the better. Here’s hoping its worth it.

So, all Dev work has ground to a halt with the arrival of my Vive.

I’ve been delighting in room tracking (even though my office is standing room only), I’ve been amazed at tracked controllers (now I REALLY want a VR version of Thief, after playing the Longbow demo in The Lab – being able to actually use a bow to shoot water arrows, or use a controller as a blackjack would be indescribably satisfying)

But, with my many an hour spent agog in VR, its hours less spent developing my own work. So, after dragging my feet a bit, I fired up Unity to see what I could do to convert my DK2 projects over to SteamVR.

Its a completely different way of doing things.

I completely broke all of my experiences and in the case of my BUM simulator, broke my level geometry and have to scrap and rebuild it all from scratch. Because I discovered something wonderful.

In the Steam VR examples is a IK scene, that allows your controllers to control virtual arms, attached like real arms would be in the virtual world:

Ye gods, if I incorporate that into my scene, you could shake your cup to rattle it! I am so excited this possibility exists  now the tricky part – figuring out HOW to make it work. My google-fu yields nothing – not any teases on how that got made or how I would adapt it to my character  and if I would have to rebuild my character from scratch, or simply rename parts of it…

On top of rebuilding everything else too…

Last week the Cleveland game devs had a Level Up workshop, focused on Unity and Playmaker – so I signed up, enthusiastic that I could unlock some more of the mysteries of Playmaker and game mechanics.

I was not disappointed. Our moderator, Bill, jumped in with a basic endless runner prototype using primatives and simple FSMs, and soon our cubes were colliding and jumping on command. It got me thinking about the platformer I want to make using my autistic son’s artwork.

I showed the kids my work the next morning, and they gleefully smacked the spacebar to make the little cube hop on command. I started up Audacity and recorded their delighted sounds and snuck them into the FSM. Their eyes grew wide when they heard their own voices yelling ‘jump’ when they hit the spacebar. I made a few more tweaks to reset the level if the player cube got knocked off screen.

I can see how this sort of game is so popular for beginner devs – its quick, easy and has an iterative cycle thats easy to add mechanics and playtest. It makes me question if I shouldn’t focus on one as a means to generate quick income. The HTC Vive is going on pre-order next week and I could really use the money.