Monthly Report: September

Quick update....this month I had been a bit more busy than expected with my real life job, we are coming near a major project milestone, so stress level goes up, meaning I couldn't do as much VaM work as I usually do. Also no vacation days or legal holidays I could use this month. Not to mention the weather being too good to stay inside ;)

Still, I found some time to work on VaM stuff:

• Benchmark project: Added UI and code to ask the user about whether Asynchronous SpaceWarp (Oculus) or MotionSmoothing (SteamVR) is enabled and showing this on the result screen. I could not figure out how to read this from the system, so I have to ask the user. Also to raise awareness so you turn it off for the benchmark as the result is useless otherwise ;)
• Benchmark project: Then I implemented a feature to save a screenshot of the results screen rather than saving the results in text form. This should make it much easier to share results in forums and I can use colors and better formatting to highlight the important things.
• SkyMagic: I spend half a day failing to figure out why diffuse global illumination does not work correctly with SkyMagic. This was pointed out by AlexV and FCG on the Hub. I think it has something to do with the spherical harmonics not being set correctly. With the current version you just get the diffuse global illumination from the Museum sky. However, manually generating spherical harmonics from the cubemap doesn't seem to work for some reason. If someone wants to continue to thinker with this, find the details here. 

Additionally I "had" to buy a new PC, because I could use a deal offered by my company for long-term employees to get like 1/3 of the components value for free. While I'm still waiting for some chassis fans to arrive, by now its all assembled and I'm mostly setup again for the important things. However, VaM does not start at the moment...it just crashes instantly on startup. Yay. Tried the obvious things like reinstalling already, no dice. Googling the error message it seems to indicate some general trouble Unity games have with AMD processors. However, I can't be the only VaM user who got a Ryzen 7 5800X. I will try to figure it out on the weekend. But until then I obviously can't work on VaM stuff :(

Otherwise, the plan is still to continue with the plan outlined last month.

Edit: Issue found...it was of course Citrix Workspace which was causing trouble, that's a remote-desktop software I occasionally have to use. Uninstalling that, starting VaM (or whatever other Unity application you may have) once, rebooting for good measure and then reinstalling Citrix seems to have done the trick. So, back to VaM stuff on the weekend!

Cheers, MacGruber