Huntress Hole Progress (Patreon)

Hey Gearheads!

As mentioned in the last post, I recently discovered that the new Unity previews only worked on Oculus headsets.  Turns out that as great as the VR tools in Unity 2019.3 are, they completely wipe out Open VR usability, which would be fine if I was just building for the Oculus, but I know you guys have other headsets too.  I test on the Oculus CV1, so it's completely on me that I didn't catch this earlier and to you non-oculus folks, I'm sorry you got screwed here.  If any of you would like to join our beta team to help catch things quicker in the future, let me know.

That said, since about Friday I've been testing like crazy to get things working on the Vive.  I backed up the project and started stripping the XR components from it, which is required to be able to enable the previous version of VR compatibility which works with all headsets.  After stripping all that out, I noticed a lot of instability across the board and realized, in the long run, it'd be better to rebuild it so everything is proper from the get go.

So while I was hoping to have a build ready Monday/Tuesday, instead, I've had to change plans and start rebuilding the project.  Fortunately, this means I have the opportunity to shrink things down, pulling out just the Huntress Hole content for now.  That'll make it easier to bring in new people for the more advanced features like interaction and AI.  We won't lose all our progress either, which we usually do in one of these rebuilds.  Since the versions of Unity are the same, I can bring over about 90% of what we need from the other project as the VR part, while foundational, only makes up a small part of everything.

After spending a couple of months getting the Huntress Hole to a nice foundation, then hopefully we'll have some news on the Open VR component of Unity 2019 and we can just update the project for the Galactic VRA experience.  Though it'll be just as easy to roll the dance performances into the Huntress Hole, which I'll run a poll for to get your take on it.

All in all, it's been wild and a struggle and going back to basics sucks, but it's far for the course with such a rapidly advancing technology and we're finally moving back in the right direction.  As we've been figuring things out though, we've also been working on additional content.  You've gotten a taste of the full-body tracking we've been testing.  We've been testing character interaction, working on the new mini-game and additional props and animations to add-in.  We've also been continuing our work on optimization for a higher FPS and faster load times and that's just the stuff related to the Huntress Hole.

The current goal is to have something significant, even if super basic, ready for this weekend.  Since this was all done because of the VR that's the first thing we want to nail down. After that will be controllers, hand models, basic grab interaction, Huntress Hole demo room, adding characters back in, touching characters, full-body avatar (if able to get it running smoothly) and then getting into the full Huntress Hole setup.

Call to Action:
Again, if you have an Open VR device (Index, PIMAX, Vive, etc.) and can help out, comment here, in a dm or on discord and we'll get you in on the beta channel.  Discord isn't a requirement it just really helps.  Either way, you'll get an early version of the weekend build regardless of your support level.

Thanks for all the support and look forward to the great things to come.