Merry Christmas! / End of the Year Update

Thursday, December 25, 2014

Merry Chrismas!

I figure I should post one last update to close out 2014. So what have I been up to?


Well, in the past couple months I've really felt the need to take a step back from the VR community. I haven't spoken much about it, so I'm sure a few are wondering what happened to me. Honestly I'm still not ready to talk about things, but I'll try to at least say a little something.

The community has changed, and has done so in a way that doesn't agree with me. My tollerence for the way I felt treated shrank more and more, and I just felt that to not risk damaging the few friendships I've made, I should take a step back before I reached a boiling point. The timing sucks as I'm so cut off from the community now, that now when I'm finally able to attend the only trade show that comes my way (CES), theres no point in going (to meet people IRL). Not that I ever heard anyone I know say they were going, but I figured some would declare so as it drew nearer.

Another thing I should probably mention now that I've had a couple months to try talk myself out of it is, I'm declaring that I'm no longer doing VRChat content. Again, I don't want to go into detail on my issues, but I'll just say that I tried hanging in there as long as I could, but hit a tipping point and I now need to move on and look forward.

Which brings me to what I've been up to. As I said, I need to look forward. So I buckled down on the project I had active at the time and started devoting all my time to it. That project is the one I tried showing off thanksgiving day. I have no real name for the project yet. I just call it Desktop Texture for now. A brief description of it is, its like VRDesktop, except its a Unity plugin.

Since then I've made progress with it. I ended up putting aside or scrapping altogether the goofy input method. I've since gone the route of just having the Unity game/app run as a background window, and let the user interact with the desktop more naturally. It sounds like a no brainer, but this comes with some issues. I've also since worked on support for DX11 in addition to DX9. But currently only support Win7/Vista. Win8-10 will be later. First I have to solve a issue with DX11 and Multi-Threading. I'm trying to give the devs who use the addon as many options as I can and let the load be split to another thread if so wanted. The virtual screen should be able to hit 60FPS with as many setups as I can get. ATM its incredibly picky what setup you need to use to get the optimal experience. Win7, DX11, Aero Disabled, single threading. Only that provides the experience I want right now. Multi-Threading would allow Aero to remain enabled. I believe when I get proper Win8-10 support that would be less picky. ATM I have no plans for Linux/Mac support, but will be open to looking into it in the future.

I think I hope to bring this plugin to the Unity asset store. It won't be much, but I've spent almost a year now working on VR, and have nothing to show for it. I want to make a career in VR, and I need to take at least some steps towards that.

The only other thing I have going on right now is a game, though I haven't worked on that since diving into the Desktop Texture project. It's to early to say much about. It's a solo indy game. So I chose something more friendly with that in mind, and something I would want to play. So I went with a puzzle game.

I'd really like to be doing games that are more story based, but that's harder to do by myself. But soon I may start working on some stories for the day I hopefully DO get to start working on such games.

Again, Merry Christmas, and while I'm at it, have a happy new year! =)