Friday Facts We have decided on releasing blog posts every Friday. This way if you don't follow the dev channel or would like a more structured read of what we have been doing, you will be able to find that now every week. It will be posted in discord and on our website at LavenderVR Steam news posts One thing we aim to correct now, is the fact we've been keeping our news and changes only on Discord, in a single channel. This is something we are going to change, first by posting blog posts every week which are mirrored to Steam news. Then after we finish up some tooling, we will also display automatic change logs and version numbers as they go up. We haven't decided yet if we are going to include the nightly changes or not. As we currently ship several nightly builds a week, but have yet to push any to beta or main branch in a while. June: UI, UI, UI UI Framework Change, again. One of the most painful parts we've all been putting off on the team is the UI. No one wanted to take full responsibility for it, or if they did, they then got swamped by other work and no progress was made. In the past we have tried many different frameworks, UnityUI, PowerUI, Ngui, Ongui, CEF, and none of them have been what we have wanted. But now we have found a system that works well enough, its expandable and will be easier to maintain. We are moving all of the UI to Unity's new UIElements. So far in our tests they have worked great, have been very stable, and very easy to develop with. We hope to hear your feedback on the new UI soon. Overall we think this is going to be the best change we can make, and a change that doesn't require any outside libraries any more. Which means build times and size should be reduced as a side bonus. Style The UI style is something we are still working on and would love to hear some suggestions of what you guys would want to see in the new UI, or anything you don't want to see. We are currently aiming for something, somewhat tron like, but still feeling out the space. I've made a few material dark theme UI's using UIElements now and they can look quite nice in vr/desktop.
UIElements uses a CSS like styling system, so we should be able to rapidly develop this with your feedback. Porting Porting UIElements over and finishing the library (its like 75% done) to fully work in worldspace/vr really changed my plans for this week. I've ended up spending most of the week on RnD for the UI framework and structure to be able to continue and rework later as needed. Currently most of the old OnGUI based placeholders (World selection, hosting, avatar selection) have been ported, but nothing final. This is done now to prove that both UIElements and our UI framework structure will work out in the long run. Ram: UI Stand While working on the new UI Framework, we decided on all UI within the main menu should be grounded built into models in world space. The first piece/model I've finished up is the UI Stand, which will be used for Teleport locations throughout the mainmenu and the inital VR Login menu / Prompt.
The stand itself has provisions for the UI render target to be placed within the actual models body.
We've also included some space below the display to host a UI based vr keyboard below the UI prompt. This is if the display needs some text input or not. We did our best to make sure the model was both pleasing and ergonomic for an average sized human (Accessibility settings are on the way). There may or may not be a hidden skin for the UI somewhere... NO2: Galaxy and Auth changes The past few weeks I have been working on our server side auth re-write. This should remove most if not all of the headaches with the current system. I have been working on this for a while trying to make it so there are no more issues going forward and to expand it later if we need to. This has also involved me re-writing some of the galaxy to be compatible with the new system. As a result of this it has reduced the complexity of the API by quite a bit and should be generally more stable in the future. It also has allowed me to change the runtime to .net 5 which has been a fun change over. It comes with many runtime stability and speed improvements. Along with the web api and auth changes I have been doing a lot of administrative tasks that I have been putting off for a few weeks and a general clean up of our services and backend systems. I will try and post more about this as the changes start to go live, and hopefully this new format will be better since I have not been the most active in the dev channel since I enjoy long form posts vs short updates. Aside from that I have been working on some rough website mockups for a new version of the website. We are not sure what we want from them yet and this is not a high priority, we should be able to share at least something in the next few months. I also wanted to mention June is currently doing most of the game development right now. I have not had much time outside of what I am currently working on and other obligations to work on the core game. Hopefully this will change in the next few weeks after things calm down. We hope these blog posts are helpful, maybe even enjoyable to read. Thanks for your support - Lavender Team