Sometimes restarting from scratch is an option...

Oh well, i already said it in the last post - with the new built i essentially started from scratch. Sounds terrible, but so far it made loads of stuff much better. I learned so much about optimizing a scene that I think I can get the game to a constant 90 fps with virtually every halfway legit combination of VR headset and gfx card.

I also studied loads of whitepapers and "best practice" tutorials to learn more about which features to avoid in VR games to minimize stuff like VR nausea, motion sickness and so on.

And i did spend much time looking into controls. Best move was to have ALL controls canned. I now finished a new teleport control and I am currently working on a "flying" control, so you can finally use the analog controller sticks to navigate through the scene.

I also finished implemeting a "grab object" mode, so you can now grab a vase or coke can and thus interact much more with the scene. 

And yeah basic haptic feedback also implemented, so you can feel it when you pick up a can of coke.

I also finished the very first in-game menu, but I am still not so happy with the look & feel of it. This still needs much more work. But it is a pretty cool feature once it's implemented. So far it will only be an "action menu", so you can go to the phone and have a menu pop up to call your girlfriend. Or you go to the TV and turn it on. Or turn on lights. Very basic but i feel it really adds to the immersion - come home to your nice apprtment and at first turn on the lights, turn on the TV and then call your girl.

Originally i wanted to do a public demo with the old HAVR built - but somehow I'm glad i didn't since the new "Samarkand" development branch has so much more potential and looks so much better.

I really want to have a new test built finished next week, but i have decided to not put pressure on me any more - i spent so much time compiling "half assed" builts in the past and i think it just ate up so much time and confused testers, wasted bandwidth and so on. I don't wanna condemn it because at that time in that phase it was crucial to me to get feedback about what worked and what didn't - that old curse to develop for VR without having a VR headset.