July 7, 2019 - Saber Thing Demo released!

The Upload:

On June 17, 2019 I uploaded and published Saber Thing VR Tech Demo as a free demo on Itch.io with very little fanfare.  It was late on a Sunday night and I just wanted to put it out there so that I could move on with my life... and then it was out there, in the wild so to speak , mainly so it could be discovered by people.  Up until then I had been sending links to my dropbox to selected people and begging them to play the game. This worked up to a point and I was getting some positive feedback so I just bit the bullet and decided to release it...

Reddit response to demo:

On June 19, 2019 I posted in r/Unity3d, r/VirtualReality, and r/VRPhysics.  Someone else cross-posted my post in r/Oculus which I only recently discovered because I was looking at the itch.io analytics.  I was pretty overwhelmed by the positive response I got to the 3 or 4 posts I made, and some trended for more than day.  For the following 3 or 4 days I tried to respond to every single comment or question.

I get a lot of questions about how the cutting mechanic works and every now and then there's a disappointed "so you're saying it doesn't make curved cuts."  Sometimes when I have energy I try to elaborate on what it might take to implement curved cuts. I think I would need to fundamentally rethink how the cutting mechanic works.  Right now it tries its best to track the entrance and exit of a slice and then asks the cutting system to do its thing.  I think what people want is to be able to slowly burn a curve into an object so they can re-enact the scene in Star Wars Episode One where Qui-gon starts cutting through the blast doors (－‸ლ)



But a lot of comments are very positive and are along the lines of "this is a billion dollar idea!" and "why isn't Disney making this game?" I let it get to my head for a couple days and then the reality and depression sets in and I have to get back to coding ;)

Knuckles support:

On June 21, 2019 I visited VRBar in DUMBO and tested out my demo using Valve knuckles controllers.  I was super disappointed to find that the grips weren't registering at all so I had work to do.  I literally spent the next week on and off looking into this.  Since I didn't have the knuckles controllers with me all I could do was to expose every button push and joystick axis input to see what pops up the next time I get access to the knuckles.  Actually, this approach didn't work either because the native inputs in Unity do not pick up the inputs from the valve controllers.  I ended up writing a new input script to expose all of the SteamVR inputs.  This is where things get tricky...

I'm still using SteamVR v 1.2.3 because I've been using SteamVR 1.x for as long as I can remember and upgrading to 2.x would require rewriting the whole input layer including all of the fancy haptics code I wrote.  Yeah, I really wrote a bunch of fancy haptics to get every haptic event to feel slightly different.  This is the kind of crazy detail I like to put into my work...

Anyway, the good news is, while using SteamVR v 1.2.3 I am able to detect the valve knuckles grips as a button push which is good enough for force-grabbing the lightsaber and slicing your enemies. It's satisfying and works great.  You can even use it for the tossing mechanic.

The bad news is, I'll probably have to spend a couple weeks cleaning up the input and haptics scripts and then updating to SteamVR 2.x ... It's things like this that make being a solo dev very difficult.

LIV sdk:

(video from 1 year ago)

One of the reddit comments I got was from a popular twitch streamer that I am familiar with because of my involvement with the LIV discord and also because he dresses up as Darth Maul and plays beatsaber with a double-bladed lightsaber rig.

A year ago I started looking into LIV mixed reality because I thought it would be a great way to create media showing off my work.  I guess I lost interest after a while and removed the LIV sdk from my project file.  But now the famous ragesaq was asking me to install LIV support so I had to give it a try.

In theory it should be as simple as downloading the sdk, removing a redundant openvr_api file, and adding a script to an empty game object in a scene.  The problem is with testing it... I found it to be just as confusing as it was a year ago... It just doesn't seem to work correctly. I spent several days reinstalling the LIV sdk and testing it with the LIV compositor using a popular webcam and also experimented with the kinect v2. Both seemed to work except the final LIV output kept coming back with a black background instead of the in-game footage so I'm calling this a sort of failure, but I do think the LIV sdk is mostly working because it tracks the camera position in the quad view and renders the foreground and background correctly, it just isn't compositing it for some reason. Well, it's in the build, so maybe someone else can have better luck with it.

I'll revisit LIV when I have more time. What I'll do is submit the build to them for testing and maybe if I'm lucky they'll add it to the supported apps list and maybe that will help to get things working. But I have way more important things to work on in the meantime...

Disaster recovery:

Despite the fact that I'm developing VR games that only run in windows, I spend most of my time on my MacBook Air.  I was installing some new extensions to test this thing called ImmersedVR which would theoretically allow me to work on my mac in VR using virtual screens.  Sounds silly, maybe... but I'll never know because during the installation I managed to get my mac into a state where it would not log back in after a restart.  I had to take it to Apple where after indulging my many theories they convinced me to wipe the drive and start from scratch.  This really upsets me because as a former Mac Consultant from years ago, I used to be a pro at backing up and restoring machines.  This is called disaster recovery.

Back in the olden times, machines would crap out constantly, so reinstalling your OS on a reformatted drive was common.  The reason I'm so upset about this is that I was constantly backing up my mac using backblaze, but there isn't really a simple format/restore process... instead it's more like getting a new computer and then installing all of your applications and restoring all of your data over the course of several weeks.  If I had been keeping a time machine backup I think I could have saved a lot of time.  I have literal stacks of hard drives in boxes that I have used over the years for video footage. I'm sure I could have cleared off a terabyte to use as a time machine backup and saved myself this trouble. Anyway, backblaze is awesome if you have a few megs here and there you'd like to restore, but I requested a 300mb thumb drive which they have been supposedly preparing for the past week.

NY LLC and publication requirement:

I glossed over this in the previous post, but in order to get properly set up to release software online I decided to set up an LLC (Limited Liability Company) in NYS.  The strangest or most annoying thing about registering an LLC in New York is that you have this publication requirement which says that for 6 consecutive weeks you need to post an ad in a local weekly and daily paper announcing the formation of your company.  The funny thing is, because it sounds so annoying and is supposedly so expensive, there are a bunch of shady companies that start sending you mail advertising that they can take care of this stuff for you for the low low price of $750 or $1100 or something.  Some of them require that you hire them as your registered agent so they can move the company address to Albany where the publications are the cheapest. But to me, that sounded a bit complicated so I decided to dive into it on my own and see what happens.

First, I had to contact the Queens County Clerk, so I checked their website and their instructions say to send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to their address, with a copy of your filing receipt which I did... I waited a week and half and didn't hear back so I decided to pay them a visit.  I was glad that I did but to be honest, as soon as I got home that evening I found the documents I had been waiting for sitting in my mailbox.  They were identical to the documents I received at the County Clerk that afternoon instructing me to contact 2 designated local publications which were assigned at random.

It was a nice day so I proceeded to visit the two publications.  One was across the street from the County Clerk so I went there first.  It was a daily paper called the Daily Eagle. I filled out a form and paid $150 and was on my way.  The next stop was the Queens Chronicle, about 15 minutes away by car. They were extremely nice and their cost was $350.  The 6 weeks went by, and I received one affidavit of publication in the mail and picked up the other one in person.  So now all that I need to do is to send them with a Certificate of Publication and a check in the amount of $50 to Department of State.  And I'll be fully compliant!

What now? ...

So, I have a legit LLC now, and I have a demo of a VR project I've been working on for a long time... it's exciting and also in a lot of ways anti-climactic. I basically showed a small part of the world some cool shit I'm making and some people got excited.  I even gave a short demonstration at a Unity NYC developer group meetup a couple weeks ago and that was also really cool.  But I need to find a way to sustain this level of research that I'm doing or possibly look into smaller projects.  I think I'll try to get into some accelerator programs or maybe I'll take on some freelance work.  Shit just got real!

What I'm watching

Stranger Things 3 - binge-watched it in a single day :)

What I'm reading

The Contamination Of Sandra Wolfe (Z7 book 2) by Derek J. Goodman - I like these books so far even though I find them a little depressing ;) It's an interesting take on the zombie genre.

What I'm playing:

Bewildebots is an addictive puzzle game I'm playing on IOS. Also available on Steam: