Easier building in the new desktop mode, community playing with face tracking

Hello everyone and welcome to another of our weekly updates!

We  have some more good news for the desktop users! Building in the new  desktop mode is now significantly easier, with gizmos and LogiX now  being much more friendly to mouse and keyboard operation. Not only that,  but VR users benefit from those changes as well, as they add new  workflows there as well!

The new desktop mode and things around  it also received more polish in form of small additions, tweaks and  bugfixes based on your feedback, so some of the initial pains should be  gone! The input bindings have been adjusted too, making Shift the sprint  key again, with Z toggling the sneaking on and off instead.

There's  still more to come to make the process even easier, notably UI aligned  and freeform camera, which will remove some of the clumsiness of working  from the first person view.

We're also seeing some cool uses of  the Vive Facial Tracker in Neos, from silly avatars to people producing  some machinimas and cool videos. Check out the community highlights  below to see it in action!

Building made easier in the desktop mode

In  the last week, we have focused on improving the building process in the  new desktop model, specifically making the Developer Tooltip and LogiX  tooltip much easier to use. To achieve this we have introduced new  behaviors to both, that benefit both desktop and VR users.

The  developer tooltip now has a new interaction mode for gizmos, using  projection based on the direction the tool is aimed at, instead of the  position of the tool. On the desktop, the projection mode is used  automatically. Coupled with the cursor becoming freeform on interaction,  this makes gizmos behave in a more familiar way, similar to tools like  Unity, Blender and so on.

https://youtu.be/yiACBm3ynDQ

In VR you can toggle between the old behavior and the new, with the  projection mode being particularly useful for manipulating gizmos and  moving, rotating and scaling objects over large distances with ease,  without having to scale yourself up, or fly too far.

The LogiX  tooltip has gotten similar treatment, with new behavior to allow  connecting wires using the laser, in addition to the tip of the tool  itself. On desktop, this is essential to being able to easily connect  the nodes, but it expands the workflow in VR as well.

Specifically  on desktop the cross gesture to disconnect wires uses projection mode  as well, with small tolerance (10 cm at the time of writing) to allow  dealing with spatially arranged wires.

https://youtu.be/0TtkGOYqSPY

A lot of other smaller behaviors have been changed, tweaked and fixed as  well, particularly positioning of spawned inspectors, nodes, grabbing  things, assigning references in the inspector and so on, making the  building process on desktop overall much easier and less frustrating.

There  are still some major features planned that will further improve the  usability on desktop coupled with the changes above, notably UI aligned  camera as well as freeform camera, which should get rid of some of the  clunkiness from editing in the first person view.

New default avatar, improvements to desktop and fixes

Alongside  making the building process easier in the new desktop, we have also  applied numerous tweaks, fixes and other additions to the desktop  experience, as well as other general features.

For example the  motion blur effect has been made configurable for in-game cameras  (including the streamer camera). The key bindings and their behavior was  also improved based on general feedback, as more things keep falling  into place, based on general feedback we have made the Shift key the  sprint again, with Z key toggling sneaking on and off, since it's used  less often and more in editing scenarios.

We introduced a brand  new default headset avatar as well, with a custom design and optimized  assets! It even shows the user's profile picture on the front! The hand  models have gotten a refinement and optimization pass as well.

We  have also made some improvements to the cloud API and increased the  database throughput due to increasing load with the growing community,  which should ease some issues with slow responsiveness and messages not  loading in some cases.

Community Showcase

Facial Tracking in Neos

With  the new facial tracking craze, and finally hitting the shelves for the  rest of the world we figured it was only a matter of time till folks in  the community got their hands on them! Folks now can see where the  facial tracking can really shine in personal projects, cinematic  environments, or even just for casual expression! Thanks Jax, Froppy,  and Reactant for giving us some nice showcases for Neos! Can’t wait to  see what folks will make!

https://youtu.be/ytKluoY_7b4

https://youtu.be/fqcVx9YgFKE

https://youtu.be/Law325rtnYE

https://twitter.com/i/status/1376727150976466945

Ocean View by VRtualis

Feeling  the warmth of the room, and the chill lofi in the background, you enter  the map just feeling at ease and all anxieties melt away. A new map by  the VRtualis team, another environment for folks to use as a cloud home,  or for users to just hang in! This map just oozes quality for folks who  just want to relax in a nice environment. Thanks VRtualis for keeping  the effort up!

Creator Jam 98 NotSims

Creator  Jam is at it again! This week it was one of the first 24 Creator Jams!  We had the JP and English Communities each have their own crack at the  Creator Jam theme this week which was NotSims! People focused on  building environments with Guhehe’s Building Tool making some wonderful  environments! Check it out and see what folks made! Thanks CJ Team!

MetaVerse Easter Meetup

Happy  Easter from the community everyone! This week we had a nice community  easter party! People searched for eggs, ate some chocolate, and got  really sleepy and took some naps!. So hopefully you channeled your inner  bunny this weekend! (With bunny ears of course!) Thanks to everyone who  came to hang that day! If you are ever new and want to just meet some  folks, come to a meetup! You won’t regret it.




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That's  all for this week! If you'd like to keep up with the latest  developments, definitely check out our official Discord below, we post  in the #devlog channel as we work on things and #neos-updates as we push  out new builds. You can also see the release notes here on Steam, with  list of all the changes.

Our goal is now adding some extra polish  to the new desktop mode, particularly the different camera modes and  working on some other features as well as time permits. We'll have more  for you next week, so stay tuned!