Monthly Report: August

It's this time of the month again! I'm posting a report like this near the end of each month, reporting on what I worked on behind the scenes and what the vague plans for the next month are. It is intended to help you decide if you want buy-in on the coming month or not. 

SuperShot / SuperVideo

The majority of my time this month went into these two plugins. Due to some major vacation time lined up, I could spend WAY more time than usual on VaM stuff. There was a heat wave here locally and obviously the Covid thing, so there were not much other useful options than staying at home and doing some relaxing coding :)

Some of you might have noticed it was a 3 week EarlyAccess instead of the regular 2 weeks. This was because the more than usual amount of effort that went into it. 

The technical approach for SuperVideo could be the foundation for proper post effects, a replacement for the poor quality provided by PostMagic. However, this would need highly customized post-processing shaders and fighting VaM's internal render pipeline to get it working. So another major time investment, and I'm not sure it is actually useful when VaM 2.0 comes with it's own post effects. While a plugin creator can't, Meshed can "just" take ready-made effects for Unity and deploy them...that will likely be better than anything I can achieve on my own.

Maintenance Updates

Second half of the month went into various bug fixes for Life and IdlePoser, partially related to the VaM 1.20 release and people apparently being in a more bug reporting mood.

You might have seen that I tweaked the default volume with Life 10 when in VaM desktop mode. Months ago when I made the plugin I carefully tweaked the plugin to have a reasonable default volume. A few people complained about very low volume back then. Now recently the volume in desktop mode was suddenly very low for me as well. I did not change any local settings, so no idea why. Maybe some Windows update? Question: Is it better now? Please check the poll at the end of the post.

Upcoming

I'm not yet sure what I gonna work on in September. Obviously, I have tons of cool ideas, but I don't want to commit to anything specific just yet. 

Note that there is no more upcoming vacation I could spend on VaM for the next months, so my time budget will be back to more normal levels.

Cheers, MacGruber

How's the default volume with Life 10 in Desktop mode?

• Please make your system volume is reasonable first by trying some other applications. Youtube, Netflix, Spotify, various games, etc. Note that these applications might have their own volume sliders that could interfere. Also check that you don't have application specific volume settings in the Windows "Volume mixer". You can find that by clicking with right mouse button on the Speaker icon next to the clock.
• Try the Life02 and Life04 demo scenes included in the Life10 package. Default volume was changed in that version, so don't use the older versions.
• This is poll is for the desktop mode. If you would like to report on volume in VR mode, please use the comments.