The XR project - part 3

 

Multiplayer

Lots of work has continued to go into getting networked multiplayer up and running. We still think that this possible feature is worth all the effort we put into this. VR is fun by itself, but even more fun with your friends. Even if it does not work out, the rest of the game is still here and will be fully playable.

Body tracking

Additionally, in the process of working with the Oculus Movement SDK’s body tracking, there seems to be an issue with compatibility between the Oculus plugin and Coherence. The issue is still under investigation, and we have correspondence with an expert at the subject. Finding a solution to the problem is important as the immersion gained from body tracking in a multiplayer setting would be massive.



The body tracking in the Movement SDK uses three-point body tracking to list hand and torso movement as points or joints. In Unity’s case, we utilize the OVRBody and OVRCustomSkeleton monobehaviours. These provide us with bone poses and poll for body data to animate a skeleton.

Minigolf

Since the last blog, development has focused on two areas: direct interaction with the golf club and on the golf courses.

An important part of immersing yourself in VR is the interaction you have with objects around you. Since the golf club is one of the most important bits, a lot of attention was given to the hand grab positions on the golf club. One particularly problematic area is the interaction between club and ball. We’re still working on getting it to work well.

 



Other than that, when the ball falls in a hole the flag attached on a pole will change color to indicate it.

Pool

We were quite lucky that there happened to be a good-looking pool table along with cues and balls available as a 3D model on cgtrader.com for free with a royalty free license. The model is most likely intended for digital renders in Maya or 3ds Max, but that does mean it includes all the textures and UV-mapping already. This saved us some time, but since it was not made for game engines, it lacked the proper model hierarchy, which for us meant that we had to do manual collider setup. Unity thankfully provides mesh colliders which made this relatively painless, although there still is some weird and janky geometry that has caused a few issues with the physics.  



Additionally, the cues are the main source of direct player interaction, which means we had to set up hand-interaction with them.



We have already gone into some detail about the Oculus Interaction SDK last week. Using that knowledge we set up our interaction points on the cue and we were good to go.

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