Hi Everyone!

Busy week and a lot accomplished. Last week I extended the universal cursor system to be a mechanism of capturing and becoming NPCs. I programmed that in a modular way to make that a simple process, and it was. Aside from a little bit of code this involved making two new animated cursor types: one for capturing a character as an avatar and one for releasing the character. Whole process only took 2 days so now the UI looks and feels good. Can’t get easier than point and click. No menus.

I spent another day making sure the AI does what I need it to do and can be easily manipulated to do new things. That went as expected and it’s ready to go for adding new behaviors.

I spent one day fixing reported bugs. One was particularly challenging to fix because it involved patching my event system. There was a logical fault in the way the cursors work that didn’t disable the UI cursor on VR systems if you stopped using the cursor in a specific way. That then caused you to be able to trigger the “mouse over” events in buttons with your face. This is fixed, now. How some of you find these bugs is a magical power I wish I had. Some of you folks should take up speed running <3

The rest of the week was spent extending the avatar system to accept quadrupedal characters. Initially I thought it would be best to go with a temporary solution that had quadrupeds exist as kind of “code islands” that you interacted with like a tool or a vehicle, but after setting it up, I realized it would be a lot better/extensible to use the stuff I programmed in to manipulate the bipedal characters instead of writing similar programs for quadrupeds. To do that, I needed the Besti SDK to understand quadrupeds. That made it a bit more complicated which ate up a bunch of time. As of this morning I’m still working on that and making a general solution for quadrupeds rather than a one-off solution for these specific quadrupeds. It’s faster and easier to make a specific solution, but it’s better to ensure that BestiSDK functionality works now just so it’s easier to make new character designs and clothing in the future. Doing it quickly now would save a couple days of time, but add two to three weeks of work down the road.

In any case I think I’ll have that done in the next couple days. Functionality as an avatar is ready which was the hard part, so all that’s left is adding the required fields to the Besti SDK module so new quadrupeds can be set up procedurally and externally (right now everything is manually wired up in the editor.) Once that works I’ll make a video demo so hopefully on Monday.

In news not related to progress on Besti X/eqCy: GLORIOUS news has come from Oculus in that they have finally opened up the passthrough cameras to developers and allow us to add 3D graphics to your real life environment as seen through the passthrough cameras. This is something I’ve wanted since day 0 on the Quest, because it has a pretty decent 3D view of the world outside the VR headset. I looked at it briefly and came up with a dozen ideas of how to make something lewd with it, so as soon as I get a chance, expect something obscene in augmented reality. Facebook says those go back on sale TOMORROW after the giant recall they did (the foam was making people sick) if you’re interested in picking one up. The strap is lousy but it’s replaceable, and it’s really the best bang-for-your-buck headset out there.

That’s it for now! Emails today for the rest of the day and I should be back coding tomorrow. <3