Over the last week, I've been working on making a completely functional door and placing it in the model of the Game Design room. I started with the prefab of a door from the VRTK kit and I used the same scripts on the model that we had for the door. After, I created duplicates and oriented them correctly, putting them in the right doorways. I had time afterwards, and I realized that every model in the room actually had a pivot point in the center of the room. So I communicated with Abi, and we decided in the end that every interact-able object should be exported separately, and in the very center of the scene in 3DS Max, allowing the scripts attached to them to properly function. Next week I will:
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For the last 2 years, I've exclusively learned and worked with Unity to make games. I first learned basic 2D games, and soon after 3D ones. I have so much experience with it and I believe that it's a very good platform on which one could make some amazing games. However, as I dipped my toe in the waters of VR, Unity suddenly popped up with all these problems which could each give me endless frustration and weeks of my time to fix. This year I don't know that I'll have the time to go through and fix every VR problem Unity throws at me. On the other hand, Unreal Engine 4.2 appears to be optimized for VR, and even has an editor that is accessible from within VR. I haven't seen many people having all that much trouble using it, and I've even taken a couple tutorials on the node based "blueprint" style of coding, which is pretty interesting, and looks not too difficult to use. Unity has given me non working controllers, controls that function wrong, trouble with coding, obsolete scripts, and out of date resources directly from their asset store. I'm still debating this, but I'm definitely seriously considering switching to using Unreal Engine for this project.
For the past couple weeks, and since the beginning of the school year, I've learned, if nothing else, one major lesson. And that is that when you've started a digital project of any kind, you absolutely cannot change the version of the software you're using. It doesn't matter how much that icon beckons you, or how much the program itself is telling you how unreliable the version you're using is, you just can't update. If you do you can run into all sorts of problems, from having some parts of your project not work anymore, to having the entire format of the project be obsolete, and given that it's a new version, it's not like you have any know how of updating the format or coding. Also, whatever resources you're using might no longer be compatible with the program after you've updated. This is what happened with me in Unity earlier, and I've learned from it.
Although I was away from school 2 days this week from being sick, and considering there was a half day on Tuesday, I got a good amount done on the VR Project this week. I spent much of it working with Abi on figuring out how to both optimize performance by removing polys and re-centering pivot points on all of the game objects in the scene. At this point I'm also pretty clear on the basics of how to use most of the Unreal 4.2 interface. I took advantage of the built in tutorials in Unreal which were actually pretty dang good. And although I still haven't figured out how we are going to set the pivot points such that the given scripts will work, I believe that if it comes to it, we can probably remake some of the game objects or work with some of the assets from VRTK. Next week I will do the following:
It’s 3 weeks into the year-long VR project, and I’ve made the decision of looking into working with Unreal Engine. After finding out that we have to remake all the pivot points of every object in the Game Design Room file, I realized that I was gonna have a lot of time on my hands before that’ll be done. So, I went ahead and started doing some of the basic interface tutorials for Unreal, and I got a couple of them done before realizing that it was quite a learning curve to work with. Next week I will:
We've finished with week 2 of working on this VR game, and I've finally gotten the version of VRTK that we needed, as well as a version of SteamVR Plugin that we needed. The moment that I finally got those controllers to appear in Unity was definitely the highlight of my day, as when it happened, I just sank to the ground and laughed. Anyway, I then also went ahead and decided to try importing one of our basic game assets, a keyboard, into the scene. I did so, and added a collider and a rigidbody. Although, when I did this, the collider was placed in the scene around 3000 units away from the keyboard gameobject. So I decided it should be fine to just move it back over, right? Well, I was wrong, because when I tried to pick up the keyboard in VR, it then went flying into the distance, presumably around 3000 units. I had to communicate with one of my team members about getting the pivot point on the keyboard model fixed so that we could successfully use it. Afterwards, I was able to pick it up and wave it around. Next week I will:
So far in my groups year long VR project, I'm a week in, and I've worked on finding a solution to a problem I've been having with the VR machine I've been using. The problem I've been encountering is that the controllers just won't show up in the current version of Unity. And while I did solve this problem over the summer with a package called VRTK, when I got back to school, Unity had updated, and using the VRTK package no longer was viable, as it was out of date. But just when I was about to give up on VRTK, I was looking through the reviews on the Unity Asset Store, and I found that someone, less than a month ago, had figured out that the version of VRTK that can be downloaded from the asset store is more than a year old, and the official current version can be downloaded from their official website. Now, I had planned to have this problem solved by earlier this week, but I know that it can be solved as early as Monday of next week. Next week I will accomplish the following:
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AuthorMy name is Ryan Hiemenz! I currently go to East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina! I love to program, but I also really like to do level design, writing, and animation for games! Categories
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