Jan 15, 2018 - VR Lightsaber slices & dices!


The lightsaber finally does something! It cuts stuff! Just in a nick of time I managed to merge the MeshCut script with my lightsaber thing.

Just cutting wasn't enough so I added a little sound effect. There should be cool sparks and some more interactive audio but I was way too excited that I got this far so I hastily posted it on Instagram. The instagram post is badly framed and the audio is too low but it manages to get 10 views per hour so I'm happy ;)

(This is the original badly-formatted version of the video posted above)
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bd1e-rbnqu9/

Other than the obvious problems, I find the video oddly satisfying to watch over and over LOL!

MeshCut mods:

The edits I made to MeshCut include adding meshcollider and rigidbody components to the new objects but also, and most importantly, I found a way to center the center of mass which apparently isn't a very simple thing to do. Well, it kind of is, now that I figured it out.  Since I'm using a meshCollider I leveraged off of the bounds.center member of the meshCollider class like this:

            rb.centerOfMass = pieces[1].transform.InverseTransformPoint(mc.bounds.center);

In the above example:
pieces[1] is one of the two cut pieces (GameObjects) returned by the MeshCut.Cut() method.
rb is the rigidbody component attached to pieces[1].
mc is the meshCollider attached to pieces[1].

Just to go into depth about the mesh cutting script, I'm disappointed in the performance of it. With a cube it works great and it cuts almost instantaneously, but with a denser object, the script loops through every vertex multiple times and for each triangle it double-checks the normal direction which is very costly. I need to speed this stuff up!


Off Topic: Music

During my sluggish return to productivity after the holidays I found myself distracted by an old jam session from last summer that I forgot to mix. My band mates were visiting from the west coast last June so we decided to have a jam when I got out of work.
We recorded on an Edirol 4-track field recorder. In one jam we needed 5 tracks, sax, drums overhead, kick, guitar, and bass. In order to record that I played through the first section on the saxophone and then switched over to drums, but first I moved the clip-on mic from the bell of the sax to the kick drum.




What i'm playing:

Gorn... is... amazing! 

If you don't mind all the cartoony blood and gore, that is. This game is everything I ever wanted in a VR game and I think it's perfect! Check out this trailer:

Star Trek Bridge Crew ... is ... awesome!

A totally different experience from Gorn, Bridge Crew is one of the best multiplayer games I've ever played. My first time through with random players was pretty hilarious. I decided to play as helm but I knew the controls on the Aegis starship, not the original Enterprise which is what we ended up choosing. My shipmates patiently waited as I steered the ship into asteroids and spent 5 minutes (felt like forever) looking for the button to select the destination for impulse drive.

Watch this bridge crew go mad!


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