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Hurricane VR Physics Interactions

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I love the foundation of physics interactions in Half Life: ALYX and I want my VR ARPG sandbox to essentially work the same way.

Hands shouldn’t go through objects. Grasping and interaction should feel natural like real world objects. Things should seem like they have weight with some requiring two hands to move. This kind of interaction is important and creates a sense of presence.

Hurricane VR is a physics interactions framework that has everything to achieve this. There is also a companion physics based rigid body controller that integrates with it called HexaBody VR. Together they form a starting point for BONEWORKS or Blade & Sorcery levels of interaction.

I have been working with both frameworks and highly recommend them. There is a significant learning curve with them but they are well written and actively being developed with a great community on discord.

These assets are definitely bringing next level interaction to VR developers!

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Valem VR In Unity Channel

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I recently found a great channel if you are interested in learning the new Unity XR framework. Valem is really cool and he has a series called Introduction to VR in Unity – UNITY XR TOOLKIT that provides a nice foundation for basic cross-platform VR interaction. This is excellent for beginners and is pretty easy to follow along. I just love listening to this guy!

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Alien Assimilator Crash

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I have been having fun building out the damage system for Alien Assimilator. During the assimilation run the human army is attacking your ship and as alien overlord you need to protect it fighting off various units like a wave shooter. However at the same time you must keep consuming material to power the shields, weapons, and other systems along with harvesting humans from the city – with your ultimate goal being to harvest as many as possible.

The ship is a simple working system with a variety of modules. These include lots of things like blaster cannons, snatcher beams, shield generators, matter to energy converters, energy storage cells, and thrusters to keep you aloft. If you lose to many modules your ship is going to start to fail ultimately crashing. There will eventually be a variety of designs with different trade offs to unlock – probably even a Borg Cube like one! I will also probably have a simple editor to make your own designs as well.

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Unity Development

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After four amazing years at Wayfair doing really cool XR projects I am now moving on! I am hoping to find some new and exciting projects to get involved in. Going forward I plan to work on some of my own concepts while looking for freelance Unity development opportunities!

I have many years of experience with Unity and leading XR platforms and devices – SteamVR, Oculus, Magic Leap, HoloLens, Google Daydream/Cardboard/ARCore etc. I also have plenty of experience doing mobile development and performance optimization with Unity including on standalone devices beyond phones like Oculus Quest and Magic Leap One.

I am willing to take on any project. I am reliable, detail oriented, and passionate about what I work on. Check out my LinkedIn profile to see more about my skill set, past projects, and published experiences.

If you need help with a Unity project feel free to contact me via mike@pixelatedramblings.com or reach out through LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook.

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Alien Assimilator Humans

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Lately I have been trying out ideas for what the humans should look like in Alien Assimilator. After getting some inspiration from lots of voxel characters and looking at voxel games and their art styles I have settled on a style that I like.

I will be working on a lot of different ones following this art style. I decided I wanted a very simplistic design so that the vertex and triangle counts would not be extremely high. Plus these guys are little maybe a couple of inches tall on the ground so you won’t see lots of detail unless you get close to them.

They are modeled in MagicaVoxel as a body, head, arm, and leg. I put them together via script and do simple movements for the legs and arms while they wobble walk. They just wander about and look around right now. I plan to add some more states to them – one is to run around in circles hysterically waving their arms in the air. They can also turn into a rag doll and float when being snatched by the assimilator.

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Diagrams.net

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Another open source gem I have been using for a while is called diagrams.net (previously draw.io) which is a great free diagramming tool that I wanted to share with anyone who hasn’t already found it.

It works really well and integrates into Google Drive and many other services providing numerous diagrams right out of the box. I particularly like it because it is really easy to share diagrams from Google Drive.

It has a nice set of UML diagrams which I am used to and also a large variety of other diagrams for all kinds of needs. Here is a simple flow chart for Alien Assimilator showing the game flow.

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Optimization in Unity

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Here are a few links that I have found helpful to get a great overview of optimizing graphics and code in Unity. There are so many great tips in these that you can’t really take them in all at once and I often go back to them when I am dealing with performance issues.

Best practices from the Unity manual:

Tutorials from the Unity learn site:

When I have time I want to add a Unity Tips page to the blog and start putting these kinds of links in it. There are also some good general links in the sidebar.

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Alien Assimilator Destruction

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I have been making a little progress on my alien assimilation game. I have it working with SteamVR 2.0 now with some initial core mechanics. Basically you can just blast the city and pickup the debris which fuels your ship. You can also collect humans which just say funny things at the moment – they will eventually give you power ups as you collect them!  The goal will be to assimilate as many humans as possible within your limited invasion window while keeping your ship powered and defending it from the human army trying to take you down.  It’s pretty simple at the moment, but the explosions are satisfying!

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Playing Lost Loot Again

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Just relaxing a bit after the holidays and decided to play Lost Loot since I haven’t tried it in a while.  It still runs beautifully on the Rift and is so much fun.  There is something nice about just sitting back and relaxing with the controller and wandering the ocean looking for treasure in VR.  It may not be perfect but it is a fun little game and those megalodons in the depths are still scary!

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XR Dads

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So the www.xr-dad.com  site launched and is exactly the kind of stuff I go through with my 8 year old son!  Some good resources here from Alex and Logan for us XR Dads.  I ended up meeting both of them in person at LEAPcon and they are great guys!  So I can officially vouch for them. 🙂

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Unity Hub

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If you are not using Unity Hub to manage all those versions of the engine you have installed you should get it now (download is at the end of the linked Unity Blog post). I have been using it for a while and find it almost indispensable for managing the installs, related components, and launching the right one for various projects.

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What’s Up With Lost Loot

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You can likely surmise from the absence of posts over the last two years that the update to Lost Loot stalled and lost momentum.  I ran into too many issues with performance around the terrain and the trees that made it just not workable and I couldn’t reliably meet frame rate on minimum spec machines.  Another big reason was that I felt the third person miniature approach I switched to was ultimately the wrong direction and dependent on a controller that wasn’t the future of VR where room scale and hand presence is the standard.  I may jump back into it once Unity revamps the whole terrain portion of the engine but that may be a while!

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