Small features and big problems

Well it's been a while since the last updates i posted here and that doesn't mean I've been idling all the time.

Actually i like good news. Good news as in "visible progress", i really like to show some new built that everyone can use and be like "Ah yeah that's awesome keep em coming!".

But sometimes you need to do more work under the hood. So even while i can't and don't wanna make this a list of all my failures, problems and setbacks i wanna keep you at least a bit informed what happened and what actual progress i made.

You may have noticed that the last built codenamed "Samarkand" (Sounds pretty mysterious, eh?) included a whole new appartment. Many of you have been testing that and the good news is that it worked pretty fine even on weaker gfx cards, so i kinda did a cut and decided that i wanna continue with this scene as a base for all future releases.

While this scene works pretty well for you as the end user it was a nightmare for me as a developer since it constantly made my computer run out of memory, take like 20 hours to compile the lights and performed so slow in the editor that for a while i thought it would be my source that would come up pictured when i look up "sluggish" in a dictionary.

It took many days of hard work to get this down to a point where it would still look good, have all assets and furniture and cut down some complexicity so much that now the scene consumes roughly a quarter of the memory it consumed before. And yeah it will obviously also run much better for you as the end user. I know big companies do it the other way round - they optimize the levels at the very end before it goes to shipping the complete game. But i don't have money to buy a super computer with like 64GB of RAM and a myriad of processors, so in the end that was the only way. I can now compile the lights in like an hour instead of 20 hours - which really is helpful for making test builts. 

Also i was struggling with controls (again!). It would be cool to have teleport, walk around, roomscale VR, handling menues, switching speed and doing loads of debug stuff with the motion controllers, but let's be realistic - they actually have less than 100 buttons. I have had some obscure controls like "Hold right trigger and press left shoulder button" and they did not just conflict with some stuff (So you would accidentially teleport when selecting something in the menu) but also noone knew how the controls worked - including me.

So in the end i had to can pretty much everything from older builds and start from scratch.

Yes there were some aspects in the older HAVR builts that were at least not "completely unreasonable" - for example "parts" (not including controls) of the main menu and scene selection were quite OK and i think there's a few mistakes...errrr...features i would do again i guess.

And yeah - VR menus - I am working on that. I have some prototypes that look halfway like where i wanna get and as soon as i got the controls working as they should that will come next.

Blah blah - TLDR:

The Samarkand appartment stays. Pretty much a complete reboot. I will add motion controller support that actually WORKS. VR menus will come. Patience will be required.