News and changes during May

Today I have a few news and public announcements. Normal status posts will resume next week.

Outsourcing new sessions

Some of you might have seen me rambling about this on Discord already. I take too long for session creation. Coming up with an idea I like and writing the script is hard for me. Extremely hard. It takes me days or weeks of pondering to come up with an idea, then it takes me the equivalent of a workday to write the complete script, and I need to be in the perfect mood to be even able to do it. 

So, what does this mean? I won't stop creating sessions, but I need to do it at my own pace. But I promised my supporters and myself to create at least one session per month and, well, the April session is far from completion. To keep my promise, I'm in the process of outsourcing the creation of sessions, in parts or completely. Basically, I'm comissioning hypnotists from the community to create for me, and the resulting sessiong will then be released to my supporters here first, just as if I did the work myself. From time to time there will be sessions where I actually did all the work.

This has another effect for MMM, I will be able to focus my mind more on the development again. My progress has still felt quite slow for May so far and if I'm honest, trying to prioritize the super-late sessions made it worse.

Oculus Quest

I received my Oculus Quest a few days ago, on its official release date. Wow, I love it. I suspected it for years, but a headset with 6DOF tracking with two controllers, also with 6DOF tracking, as a completely standalone idea, is what we needed! There is just no hassle in setting it up, there's no need for an expensive computer which the headset needs to be tethered to, you just put it on, maybe update the play area (which is done very quickly) and you fire up your app or game. And what this is capable of is clear, when you see that games like Robo Recall and Beat Saber, SuperHOT and other games are there that could only be played with a pc-tethered VR setup up until now.

But you also want to know if MMM will run on it and when. Well, I'm working on it. I'm convinced that supporting the hardware won't be a big problem. After all, I already support devices like the Rift and Vive as well as the Oculus Go. But there remains the problem that Oculus is even more strict with the storefront for the Quest now. MMM is only availably through 3rd-party stores that sell the keys for activation on the Oculus Mobile storefront (GearVR/Go). With Quest, I have to request access to Quest-specific development documentation and storefront beforehand, with project proposal. So, let's hope that I can convince Oculus that a polished version of MMM is worthy. I'll keep you posted on my progress.

MMM v1.2

Well, I still have this planned for June. It will have a much better importing process (in every way). Apart from that I hope to be finished in terms of features very soon so that I can give it to Alpha supporters and start on the polishing. I hope to improve in terms of visuals, audio effects and performance. MMM does feel rushed in several areas and I think I can definitely improve the overall quality.