sgthale

Preparing for Custom Items Part 1

The beta has been so far a great success in release. OpenXR has definitely alleviated the problems with input mappings and buttons related to various VR headsets. Here are some of the funny things you can do in the beta:

In VR or keyboard mode you can slide down the hill using the platform:

As for a VR only glitches, you can jump on soccer balls for this:

2021-04-09 05:14:51 +0000 UTC View Post

Viva Pre-Release v0.9c

code: obstacle course

This beta is for showing off the upcoming VR physics support. It uses my own custom solution like Boneworks where your body is also a physics body. I've prepared a small course for you to mess around with. You can spawn some of the older demo characters to see how the full charact...

Finishing VR Settings

Good news! The community has started to get their feet wet with the new modding tools! It is certainly miles easier than it was in v0.8 to port over new characters. Here are some of the new models people have recently uploaded:

At the moment the only mods I've seen are character mods. It will probably take a bit more for actual gameplay mods to start coming in as people do need time to get used...

Beginning VR Settings

The new VR rig has been integrated into the UI system! There is a new menu UI pointer that appears when you use the controllers in VR:

A nice white glow will appear on the menu when you hover over the menu. Players have the ability to switch between VR and Keyboard mode while in the game. This will be helpful for when you want to edit your mods and then jump into VR to test them.

You can ...

Finishing VR Implementation

Big devpost today. I'm still really happy that we are doing away with SteamVR for the controller bindings. Let me summarize the history behind it with me in Unity:

>Viva Project implements SteamVR back in v0.5

>SteamVR was an unofficial solution to the growing problem for developing in the VR ecosystem with new devices popping up every month (2019)

>SteamVR as a result is a mess and hardly worked, bindings had errors

>Viva Project implements OpenXR for v0.9...

Beginning v0.9 VR implementation

Seems like the last Beta was released properly. Now we wait for people to start the early versions of their mods and get comfortable with the tools.

I've started the VR implementation. I had to upgrade to a newer Unity version. However, controls will now be properly supported WITHOUT STEAMVR. I know SteamVR was causing some huge pains. All of this is thanks to OpenXR which is only available in unity 2020.1.

Here is some progress for today's devpost:

2021-03-19 10:03:38 +0000 UTC View Post

Viva v0.9b Pre-Release

Code: avalanche

Build #2 is out now and in a stable enough version to start creating the early phases of your custom mods! You can now properly import custom models and animations and scripts! We have 2 YouTube mod tutorial videos which you can see in the NEW DOCS WEBSITE

The latest game launcher download ...

Continuing Player Interactions Part 6

I did a decent amount of feature additions the past few days. They will be some of the last new features for Build #2. First, some UI changes:

There is now an ACTIVE tab that displays all the characters that you currently have spawned in the map. You can hover over each button for a quick preview to see which ones they are. Clicking them will delete them. In the future there will be a dedicated delete button and instead the button will display properties.

2021-03-09 10:12:39 +0000 UTC View Post

Code of Conduct for v0.9

Regular development posts will resume tomorrow. I wanted to talk about the implications of a fully moddable game platform.

As you know, Viva is going to be implementing custom mods for its next release. It will allow custom models, textures, behaviors, and maps (maps in the future). This massive customizability opens the game to anything. And I mean anything. Therefore we wanted to clarify some ground rules.

We will be hosting mods at the moment on the 2021-03-08 09:44:33 +0000 UTC View Post

Continuing Player Interactions Part 5

I've been gearing up to release #2 and have implemented a few more quality of life things.

First to finish up the wiggle algorithm from the last devpost, the characters will now attempt to wiggle their way out if they become stuck. Example:

Every single time is different as the wiggling forces are completely random. This is to ensure that it is compatible for unstucking itself in lots of ...

Continuing Player Interactions Part 4

There were a bunch of stuff I did in the past few days. I brought back several behaviors back into the game as mods.

First, I brought back the wave mechanic. Currently she waves if you press F as usual but when VR is integrated, wave gesture triggers will instead trigger this animation. It's a mod so the user can modify it if they want to.

I also brought back follow mechanics. This one wa...

Beginning Character Grabbing

I've been dealing with some pain points of development concerning physics. Most of the work I've also been doing is backend work so I don't have much to show today but I will be showcasing funny attempts at grabbing ragdolls.

The main problem with grabbing ragdolls is the fact that it creates a huge chain of joints that Unity has to solve every physics tick to remain together. What this means is that Unity has to work hard to make sure the chain of legs, arms, and hands that are being g...

Continuing Player Interactions Part 3

The past few days I added necessary features that were needed to fully bring back headpats.

Facial animations were necessary to make the behavior feel more natural. Facial animation shapekey are now supported in the mod tools and can be set in the character inspector. Whenever you make a character, you can  specify the name of the shapekey that corresponds to that facial animation:

N...

Continuing Player Interactions Part 2

I've done so much work in the past few days it's crazy. I do have some headpat stuff to show! Let's run through first what I did to the player.

As I said earlier there is a new player character controller for ragdoll physics. The controller now properly handles steep terrain and allows the user to run up walls a bit if they go fast enough.

Another thing is the new runtime animation system...

Beginning Player Interactions Part 1

I have received 130 poll results from the "How comfortable are you making mods?". The results are as follows:

What I can tell from these results is that most people who play this game are not modders. This is totally normal. However, there is a sizeable chunk of people who seem to be very interested in making modifications. Overall I would say a quarter are fully capable to produce mods for the...

Viva v0.9a Pre-Release Beta

Finally, this is the first public showcase of the upcoming set of mod tools. This pre-release includes everything talked about so far in the devposts and includes 3 basic characters for you to create (The assets are done already, just teaching you how to put it together in-game). Additionally I included a video tutorial in case you don't know what to do (This isn't the same as a YouTube Viva video. That will come later). Please watch it!

2021-02-06 03:47:26 +0000 UTC View Post

How comfortable are you making mods?

This poll is to gauge how many users would be interested in using the new mod tools. I intend to make the code, texturing, and modeling as dummy proof as possible so please do not worry if it sounds complicated.

Finishing Scripting System part 8

The past few days I did tons of bugfixing, code digestion, and eyeballing everything to make sure it is ready for this week's first Beta Pre-Release. I've finished writing the scripting system (not the API). The system itself is very robust and allows for some fast iterations for modding. What this means is that it allows users to really crank out code quickly and test it as soon as they save the file.

Here is an example of the system in action:

2021-02-02 11:19:04 +0000 UTC View Post

Continuing Scripting System Part 7

I have the new spawn menu ready to show off and a short showcase of features.

First, the custom runtime animation system now supports blending so animations can be blended for more complex effects. In this example I added v0.8's locomotion mechanics to blend between standing and walking:

Next, I finished the spawn menu that will be used by players who just want to spawn characters and not...

Continuing Scripting System Part 6

The past few days I did lots of bugfixing and back end code digestion. There are many changes and some new logic to show off.

To finalize the root animation from the last devpost, you can now manually toggle on/off an animation's root animation. This is useful for when you don't want an animation to move the character. Additionally you can now specify the "body set" of an animation. I will explain what this means below.

2021-01-24 08:40:05 +0000 UTC View Post

Continuing Scripting System Part 5

A great deal of progress was done! First some notes on the custom animation system.

The animation import system now supports root translation deltas which means that animations that move the character's root, will translate as a single fluid motion. Before in the older viva versions, the character's movement cycles were animated in place. Like so:

The problem with this old method is that ...

Continuing Scripting System Part 4

This devpost I don't have much to show visually since I was busy getting realtime modding to work. But things are progressing well. I do however have 1 example of the mod API.

The following is a script that was added to the character. The script continuously pushes the hips of the character upwards.

Kinda looks like zero gravity. Here is what the script code looks like:

2021-01-17 09:34:43 +0000 UTC View Post

Continuing Scripting System Part 3

I am back from my vacation and I did a few more days of work on the game. I've been working on the UI of the scripting system. Here's how it's gonna work:

The game will use C# for runtime mods. That means that the game will compile new code at runtime for the game to use. The benefits of this are extremely fast code execution (because it's compiled), and not having to deal with script-type languages that require manual binding to game actions (Like LUA). I will provide easy premade func...

Continuing Scripting System Part 2

I got more work done on the editing system for creating characters. I worked on an easier and better way to edit textures and models during runtime.

In the older Viva game versions, clothing customization required the user to paint a PNG and then drag and drop that texture onto the game to upload it. This works well for the majority of clothing designs but it was annoying when painting designs that required accuracy and constant drag and drop after every picture save. In comes the new b...

Beginning Scripting System Part 1

Before I start to implement a way to write code into the game, I need to build an easy UI for the player to navigate and use as tooling for mods.

This is where the creation suite comes in. This menu will help you understand what you imported by providing you information of the contents. By loading textures, models, animations, this menu will populate with their contents so you can then easily edit them or attach logic for modding.

Currently it provides thumbnails for textures:

Finishing Physics Space Animations

I apologize for posting once every 5 days the past couple times it was Christmas and I had life getting in the way. However I've been working at the same breakneck pace and achieved another milestone. I am now ready for custom scripting.

First what I worked on the past few days. With the completed model & animation importing + generic animation conversion + ragdollifying, I hooked up the Viva physics system. This is the system that was used in v0.8 to get all the animations to work ...

Finishing Animation Importing part 2

There was a ton of stuff I had to finish up on the animation importing side of things. As I said in the last devpost, I was having difficulty translating rotations. This has been fixed and now animations are imported properly at runtime. Such as this example:

The next step I took was making these character animations generic. By this I mean being able to apply the same animation to other charac...

Beginning Animation Importing Part 1

I've been very busy debugging and making fbx animations work. The problem I am dealing with is reading the animation data and translating it into a Unity runtime friendly format. Currently I am experiencing some rotation issues.

Compared to Unity, Blender uses a different axis when it comes to rotations. This makes the raw data behave differently when imported. This is what I am trying to achieve:

2020-12-15 09:53:47 +0000 UTC View Post

Finishing Ragdoll Editor Part 3

The ragdoll editor is complete and now properly creates a ragdoll from a specified fbx:

I tested a Chino model to stress test variety on the new fbx importer. So far everything is running very smoothly! I made sure that the ragdoll joints are more robust than the lolis in v0.8. Ideally pulling their hands won't make them spazz out anymore. The ragdoll editor automatically attaches colliders, &n...

Beginning Ragdoll Editor part 2

I finished some more work on the ragdoll editor and am now working on collisions.

As I said before, the first step in making your character is ensuring the game knows what bone is the corresponding bone for the ragdoll. This is the ragdoll editor. I added mirroring so you can clearly see what your ragdoll's hierarchy looks like as you build it:

As you hover over a bone it will tell you wh...