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Week 11: Oculus Launch Pad (Due September 3rd Midnight)

Anonymous
Not applicable
Please share your Week 11 update. Please note Ebony is out on vacation until September 5th. 
54 REPLIES 54

ItsAllMe
Explorer
Hey!  
The plan is to submit everything by next Monday b/c I leave for a trip on Tuesday.  There's a lot of projects but that's just the way I like it, if there were only one, I'd be bored.  It also helps that I'm not an artist or dev (I'm in the producer role) so I'm handling the business side while they're doing a lot of hard work.  You always think there's lots of time, they're working like crazy to get it done.  I'm working like crazy to get my side polished.  They told me today they have it running at 60 fpm.  All is well!
-April 

JDakotaPowell
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Week 11

Posting early so I can dive back into the production hole!

Using a reveal to achieve a tilt brush type of effect on the opening splash screen. It's as if an invisible artist is drawing the scene for the player to enter. In this opening scene, the user learns how to use the Touch controls:

skf7pesoyvbu.gif

Evolving scenes to serve story and theme. So in the first scene, when the storyteller appeals to the player to open the box, the user reaches for the box, the box falls apart and another box lies within. The player then realizes that each pad in the asylum is a box. For each box begins to change from drab grey into a color. The mind can be box to either entrap (become a prison) or open up and embrace the imagined world. 

nzeryncloawd.gif

Honing Scene 2, when the player descends into the land of the dead, I played with perspective... so that the stone gods scale up and over the user's head. A fountain of blood gushes forth to cleanse the player of sins. He/she can then proceed to Meng Po's place, the last pit stop before the next life.

rnust072wghe.gif

Find that teaching the user the controls before starting an experience... is one of the trickiest parts of VR design. Lack of standardization of controls can be frustrating when playing multiple games. Agree with Gabor, if you're going to grab something, think about using the grip button. Make this stretch as easy on the player as possible.

May not get to the end game on this round, but certainly trying (hoping)... and we shall see. In the meantime, hats off to those folks who've already had their pieces reviewed, it's quite an achievement.

Lauren
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Week 11 - Crab King VR

This week was a continuation of last week, and in the beginning I focused on lowering the number of SetPass (draw) calls.

After some great conversations in the OLP Discord chat, I realized that I hadn’t been using the Frame Debugger to the max. I went through all my plants, and disabled Cast Shadows and Receive Shadows. That gave me a small boost in FPS. Next, Tania and Tyrus pointed out (ha) that my point light may have been causing an issue too. Disabling it (and later deleting it) jumped my FPS up to 90 in the editor! Finally, I disabled Realtime Global Illumination and my FPS hit 100 in the editor. Instead of using the point light to make my characters look brighter, I just turned up the intensity of the directional light from 1 to 1.3. Unfortunately, all this optimization still resulted in about 30 FPS on the device, but at least it was an improvement. Currently my FPS is about 130 in the editor.

My draw calls were down to 20–30, which is great, but my tris were still extremely high (around 447,000). Tyrus suggested using Blender’s decimate functionality, so I decided to look into it. I don’t have very good 3D modeling skills (or a lot of time) so I decided to make an investment and buy the Automatic LOD asset from the store. The asset also comes with the Mesh Simplify tool, which helps developers reduce the vertex count of their models in the Unity editor.

Mesh Simplify seems to be the tool I needed. After a few hours of messing around with it (my first run took about 8 hours just to save), I started to get the hang of it. I reduced my tris down to 70–80K which was great news. Then I tried to replicate this in other scenes. Surprise, I had forgotten to check “Enable Prefab Usage” on the Mesh Simplify script, so I had to go back and check it. This process seems to take several hours to finish. I ended up canceling and just copy-pasting the environment to the other scenes. My FPS ended up at 60!

I also decided to try and add some finishing touches to my demo this week because the end of the program is coming up and I wanted to add some Post Processing and other effects. I imported the Unity Post Processing Stack and it was really easy to use. I made a profile that includes Color Grading and Vignette, and assigned it to all my cameras. That gave the objects’ colors a more unified feel (since they had all come from different sources), and added a slight dark ring around the edge of the screen. That should come in handy when it comes to not making people sick since my frame rate is a little low at the moment. Unfortunately for me, Post Processing is not good for mobile VR, so I disabled it.

Before and after post processing

Next week, I hope to focus on my proposal and budget.

aa_lique
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LIQUE Story Studio (aka Angelique) 








Weekly Blog Post Sept 3rd

Project: Zodiac Circus

I am posting early, so I can focus on finishing and the job ahead.
I lost this week basically because I was so determined to test out the grueling and torturous upload process which cost me the loss of valuable production time. I didn't want to wait until the last day to do this. And glad I didn't, because now that I know what I know by going thru the upload ordeal, I would not have made it.  There were just things happening that I had no clue about and couldn't find or google the answer for. My advise to everyone - DO NOT WAIT. Test with a small scene. We shld have done this process weeks ago.

Finally, after 4 days of errors, Thursday on a 4 hr call w/Angel & Genius, Lauren Frazier, assisted me through it. We had tons of errors and frustrations but after 4 hrs, God bless her patience and kindness, we were victorious with uploading a test to the Alpha Channel. It is not the finished piece, only the test so that I can check performance. i have more enchanting graphic details, animations and assets I want to create and include. However, now I feel I have to cut corners. As I am learning as I go, there is so much I want to add to the project as well as learn about in terms of optimization in Unity but I don't have time.

Besides the victory of achieving an upload, i added the lovely music by composer and friend Steve Sandberg. And wow what a difference!

And now is the proposal to complete. Fortunately not too much extra to add but needs polishing and to address issues expressed from the critique.

Stay strong everyone and try to schedule a breather this holiday weekend. Thank you, Lauren Frazier for your assistance and genius, I wld not have achieved this upload.

These are this weeks goals:
  • to get the fishlaphon working. Can
    you get it functioning? Each fishkey raises its head and emits a
    separate sound when it is gazed upon. I'll try to get it animated to
    move up when it is targeted.
  • the whirlpool Portals have to be made (want to do at least one) Need gaze control function
  • get the infoPanel functioning w/movie clips (don't need gaze control) Might need help to implement Movie textures
  • Depending on the download time and performance, I want to add more to the environment: assets & architecture (but I am already 307 tris and 75 draw calls) 
  • Splash screen (with credits listed) preloader/Opening Scene
  • Get the Scene switching to work, some kind of UI: simple 2 button (enter Pisces and Main Entrance) Discuss w/Will about function & placement; Need gaze control function
  • To optimize: Use Mesh Baker? I'll go thru optimize what I can and reduce the larger textures to 2048. Use Mesh Baker?
  • Create a cubemap when finished
  • Next weekend : work on Proposal and testing, upload the FINAL on Saturday Sept 9th.
  •  

    tifa_ain
    Protege
    Week 11 OLP Post

    Not much to say - Gabor previewed the proof, and that was awesome feedback. So, I was able to ask the developer to tweak a couple of things. I feel like the proof of concept is solid, and ready to submit to the Oculus store.
    Most of this week was dedicated to working on my scripts. Part 1 needed some revisions. Finished that and moved on to Part 2 - from the husband's perspective. I was able to get to a 3rd draft of that, and I feel like I got a very good read on the character. Just sent those to my producer so she can do a budget breakdown.
    Still wavering on the choice of a camera - I want a sony a7s rig due to all the low light scenes. DP is suggesting the z cam s1 Pro, and the Insta 360 PRO, is in consideration too. It might come down to what's easiest to secure. Also, Radiant Images quotes for rentals are kind of bananas!
    Started doing some research for similar projects in the store, and found an awesome series called, Nuvision. It integrates graphics and "real life" really well.
    I am super excited about this medium and really thankful for this process. I am even already thinking about my next VR project - a meditative app floating on lights, or a stop motion 360 music video.

    Happy 3 day weekend, all!

    sberky
    Protege

    Dev Blog 11

    So we are getting down to the wire with Oculus Launchpad submissions. I’m really worried about getting my app built and working in time. I have finalized the video assets, but I’m still having lots of trouble integrating them into video players in Unity. It takes so long for them to upload, then I need to transcode them, then for some reason the audio seems to be dropping out of the build. The good news in that we finally got gaze interaction working on the board scene, but we ran into issues there too and it took way longer and some crazy workaround to get it functioning properly. We have all the components of the app coming together, but now it’s all about getting the Unity project to work and create a build to submit. I’m planning to spend all of next week troubleshooting this, but it’s really stressful timing because I just started teaching at Emerson College, and I’m moving apartments on Thursday.... I’m doing my best to get this done, but it’s so much more complicated than I originally thought it would be and we’ve run into a ton of bugs and issues that slowed us down. I just hope I can submit something presentable because I worked so hard to get things to this point. 😕


    kenmcgrady
    Protege
    I had made goals last week. Here's the latest:
    • Develop the menu system for students to log in and select their project. I am currently assuming the student is logged in currently, but I know that will change. This is completed
    • Export my assets for my Underwater Scene to an asset bundle so I can download and run the scenes where necessary. This is completed, but it needs a little tweaking for the Gear VR.
    • Deploy to the Gear VR (I know, I am late on this). This is completed, but the controller needs to work.
    I'm getting excited as it's getting close to the grind. I signed up for a conference in October to test things out. I know that a lot of work will be needed to get a proof of concept needed for that. My goal is to apply for Oculus to aim for funding when to produce a solid MVP to ask for further funding. I am receiving a lot of affirmation from many individuals who are excited, and I'd like to make my experience real and get people testing it out. I hope to share a video of how it works next week!

    AnwarBey
    Protege
    We were finally able to get the game into alpha channel in the oculus store. YAY
    4tc7bbo9lc03.jpg

    We have been white-listing people left and right, definitely getting lots of feedbacks.
    qwj5930kd9gh.jpg

    Touch controls. We are trying to get touch controls to work.

    It would be amazing to get some feedback from the oculus developer crew. Please do let me know if that is possible. CHeers.-Anwar

    brendachen
    Protege

    Final stretch! The project is almost done.  Just putting all the assets together and adding the final touches! Super excited to be nearing the finish line.

    Since this week is a long weekend thanks to labor day I have some extra time off from school to work on the project.  My teammates and I will be using this time to work to finish the project this weekend so that we’ll have a week to playtest and debug.  Hoping that everything can be done by this Monday.  Very stressed at the moment, but if we achieve our Monday goal I’ll be able to calm down a bit.  Deadlines are always very stressful.

    Looking forward to completing this project and checking out what everyone else has been up to!