Update December 2022

Happy Holidays! Thank you for your support, it means a lot to me! 

We have been adding collision to the buildings... and fixing small details. 

More characters are being modeled and this is progressing well as usual!

In terms of 4D Toys:

I added support for rotating the slice in 4D Toys. As I was saying before, obviously the tech was not the hard part... There was a bit of hard-coded stuff about only moving in W, but that was easy to fix. The part that took longer than expected is turning the slice while you are holding an object in your hands, and having the object rotate with you. In VR it was fine, but the mouse/touch code was written differently so that it feels better to interact with the objects... For example to make it easier to hold a stack of objects.

My solution was to keep the current system for as long as possible, until you are holding an object while rotating the slice, and then it feels a little bit less good to interact with the object... Probably zero people will notice.

There is still kind of a question of which point should the slice rotate around? In Miegakure it's obvious that the slice rotates around the player character, and that feels great. In 4D Toys there is no player character, so technically you are the character. 

But if you rotate the slice around the camera center, the world will often disappear from your slice. You can always move along the 4D to bring it back but it may feel confusing to just lose sight of the level. Also, if you are holding an object, your rotation may make that object hit the side of the level.

I think that if you are holding an object in your hand it should probably rotate around the object. And otherwise, maybe rotate around the center of the visible level, or something. The only time it could be better to rotate the slice around the camera is in VR mode while the level is very large. 

I also brought over the arbitrary tetrahedral mesh / sphere collision code from Miegakure to 4D Toys, and improved it to make it cleaner and faster. This benefits both Miegakure and 4D Toys, which is great! You can see the result in the "120 Cell and Sphere" Video.

I am making some terrains pieces, as you can see in the "Bridge" Video, which also features rotation. I basically just re-used and improved some Miegakure code I had for generating extruded shapes, it only took a couple days... I have plenty of ideas for terrain pieces, but if you have any requests let me know!

Anyway... I will post a video of the windmill trailer here soon! 

[Sorry that Patreon's video embeds are not great]