Level Streaming + Some other things (Patreon)

Hey everyone,

We recently Tweeted a clip of Unreal Engine 4's Level-Streaming system, and wanted to elaborate about it on here to explain what this means for Virtual Novel.

To get the technical explanation out the way real quick, UE4's level system allows for many maps or levels to be added into one 'master' (or 'Persistent') level, and loaded in and out during gameplay - with no loading times.

For Virtual Novel, we've always planned to have very detail rich environments and suitably immersive graphics, because that's one of our favorite things about VNs and Anime. We would never want to compromise on those aspects of Virtual Novel, despite it being a VR game and so unfortunately a lot harder to run than normal!

We also hoped to be able to offer Virtual Novel (specifically Takayama Highschool's campus) as a single, huge explorable map to allow for freeroam gameplay, but we weren't sure if this would be possible because of the strain that many buildings with enterable interiors in VR would have on people's machines.

With Level-Streaming, we can split up the campus and large buildings into smaller individual sections (as in the clip) and these can be loaded in and out during game-play. Depending on how far away you are from a particular building or level, the fully detailed version of that building or level can be replaced with a lower detailed version that will be super light on the CPU / GPU. This is similar to the LOD (Level-of-Detail) system where props and NPCs turn into lower detail versions depending on your distance, this should all be a seamless process and difficult to notice in-game. Except Level-Streaming, as the name implies, can load and unload entire buildings and map sections from the game for massive performance gains.

This will hopefully allow us to push graphics and details without compromising the school campus, which is perfect for us as Takayama Highschool is made up of a 210x150 meter (230x160 yard) campus containing two school buildings, a gymnasium, a family diner style cafe, a 400m running track and many sub-environments like the pool, the roof garden, courtyard and tennis courts. 

Thank you to new Patrons!

I don't know where this influx has come from, but to new supporters, thank you so much for helping to make Virtual Novel a reality! -

In January, 6 new Patrons joined us and within the past 6 days of Feb alone, another 6 of you joined to make a total of 12 new Patrons so far in 2017. New Patrons, feel free to email us if you'd like to request the NPC test build that rolled out at the end of January, we're still taking benchmark results so if you'd like to help, your results would definitely help us out. Also feel free to comment posts and stuff, and to say hi / where you found out about us if you'd like!

The near future -

We're going to polish up our navigation and interaction systems as we mentioned in some other posts, this will be for the Vive, Rift+Touch and Rift+Xbone controller. We'll be giving out very small test builds, nothing fancy, but we will be taking feedback from Patrons on what options you'd like to see, and fixing up any bugs you come across. We'll have more news on that when we've talked about it more on our end but it should be very soon - there won't be an email sign up for this one so keep an eye out for notifications from Patreon.

Thanks to everyone and your support! Please spread the word about Virtual Novel if you think that any of your VR / Anime friends would be interested in checking us out, and follow us on Twitter if you're not already, we really want a ton of Twitter followers, they are like candy to us :). 

Our websites: http://virtualnovelgame.com/ -  http://virtualnovelgame.com/jp

Twitter: https://twitter.com/VirtualNovel

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/virtualnovel

P.S.

We added a Blog tag for when we do these kind of bloggy posts; the ones that contain info about the game and such, if anyone wants to quickly find them.