Decision time!

Hi all,

Looking at the recent posts from various people, it looks like we are closing in on a project idea.

Please can you reply to this post with answers to the following questions:

1) What should the project be?
2) What is your primary skill area?
3) What is your secondary skill area?
4) How ambitious should we be?

For example, my answers are:

1) A game that switches from first to third person in the blink of an eye, that also uses eye tracking to solve puzzles (when in first person) and control the character/weapons (when in third person).

2) Primary skill is programming (eg. C++/C#/etc)

3) Secondary skills are project management and Unity

4) Not too ambitious, I think we should aim to build one scene/level with a wish to more if time and resources allow.

Once we have enough answers and skill sets covered we can start planning.

Cheers,
Adrian

1) Definitely a game imo, and your example seems ok with me

2) Primary Skill is Level designing (forgot to mention that i can use Unity as well )

3) Secondary Skill is programming (C#)

4) If we set the project to be very simple (eg. not too much programming, modelling, or even animations) we can easily expand upon the game, even by implementing a simple updater.

1) A game too. Of course I'm ok with the idea  
2) Primary Skill is programming (C++/C#)
3) Secondary Skill is programming   , I can work in Unity, Blender, Maya (I'm not a artist though, so I don't promise a good result, but I can help doing basic modeling, rigging and stuffs like that). And I can do a bit of project management too.

4) Yeah, I think the first goal here is to make a simple scene, with no texture and no complicated objects (maybe even set enemies as sphere in the beginning) and see if a simple gameplay is fun and doesn't give sim sickness. I'll help us see if the game is a good idea. If that's not the case we can easily find another project because we didn't spend months on it.
There's still some work to do. We have to find some fun mechanisms for the puzzles, do some programming and level design. And we can also start thinking about the story of the game.

1) I'm still kind of leaning towards an HID driver... but the gamer in me says other wise. Game it is.
2) I'm a hardware guy. Electrical Engineer to be specific. Everything from analog and passives to micro-controllers.
3) I have some experience writing software. Mainly VB and simple stuff on the PC. Did some C# through MS-VS a while ago. Mainly ASM and ANSI C for micro-controllers nowadays. Not that I couldn't potentially help on code, but I might end up asking more questions then I'd be help.
4) Agreed. Keep it simple to start. You can always go crazy and expand it later.

Hi All,

We're a small indy studio of 7 Unity developers, animators and modellers also backing FOVE. While we are doing our own FOVE based VR experience, it'll be a nice distraction to work on something different for a few hours each week so happy to pitch in.  Look forward to hearing what you all finally settle on!

Hi All,

I have been thinking about how the First-Person/Third-Person switching would work.

To get a feel for what it might be like I have created a very simple Unity scene, this can be found at http://fove.adrian-metcalfe.co.uk

Just run it and press 'Space' to flick between first-person (on top of the tank) and third-person (looking from above the tank).

Is this the kind of effect that others were imagining?

yeah the demo kinda shows what i had in mind except the third person camera is extremely high above in the air also do you Guys think the switching should be like in the demo (hard and rough) or would it give less motion sickness if we used a smooth transition? just a thought

I had the same initial thought about a smooth transition from first to third person but then thought about the idea of using a long blink to trigger the change, in which case your eyes are closed. Try closing your eyes, wait a second, press space, wait a second and open them to get the same effect

@DigitalDoxy, cool, any help or advice is welcome. Just remember that it will be a free game at the end...

@Adrian Good, I like it! That's what I had in mind.

@Standtall

standtall007 wrote: the third person camera is extremely high above in the air

I like it that way, because I give the player a good overview of the scene.

standtall007 wrote: do you Guys think the switching should be like in the demo (hard and rough) or would it give less motion sickness if we used a smooth transition? just a thought

hard and rough is fine for me. If we decide to use blink to switch, the player won't see the transition and it shouldn't give motion sickness...

@all
Maybe it's time to open a git repo or something similar. We need to decide if we want to make a open source game or not. I'm ok doing an open source game but maybe it'll be easier to open a private repo for the moment, it'll give us more control. What do you think?

Also I think we need to attribute a role to each of us. Even if it change or we work on something else from time to time... It'll be hard to work if everybody work on everything...

I was thinking it was time to setup a repo, MttC can you take this action?

If we could have an area for trial projects too, like the one I have done, that would be very useful.

So everybody, are we ready to write a backstory, a game flow and decide what the first scene will be?

@_Mttc of course! i completely forgot about the blinking I am ok with the open source game idea too, and i also think it would be nice to have a closed repo for the moment, and when we're ready we could then make it more public.

@Adrian sure i am ready

@All just a thought (might have overlooked the answer)... are we definitely using Unity or is that still uncertain?

@standtall I think unity would be easiest as most people appear to have at least a basic working knowledge of it.

I am happy to take on more of the scripting tasks (in C#) rather than the modelling.

Hi All,

I have been having a play with Unity 5, as we have not said which version of Unity we are all going to use, the VR integration is much easier.

There were a few issues with my god mode switching not working as I was manipulating the camera position directly, you can't in VR, but it now works.  Please give it a try on your DK2 (if you have one). As before, see http://fove.adrian-metcalfe.co.uk

So the big question of the day is Unity 4 or 5?

Adrian

Cool! Works fine for me!

Like you said, with the DK2, Unity 5 is much easier to use. I think we should use Unity 5, it's already great for VR and it will get even better over time. I think most people already use this one. And it won't make much sense to use Unity 4 when the Fove will ship.

I'm setting up the git repo right now. I'll post the link when it's done...

G'day,
I am a C#, C++, everything else dev. The best thing I could contribute to this project is the framework around and integration of the Fove SDK. I'm interested to see what is required of the SDK and work out how to get all of that wired up. Game design and mechanics are not my forte. I can also play-test the game on my VR headset and give useful (problem descriptions, reproduction steps, suggested solutions) feedback.

Do we have a specific license in mind for the "open source" side of things? I don't want a repeat of the Minecraft/bukkit fiasco because the open source project was built on top of closed source software.
Maz

Yeah, GPL is out of the question. We wouldn't be able to use Unity, OpenVR and Fove's SDK... That would be bad

I was thinking of something more permissive like the MIT license. But we have to be aware of the consequences because it's really permissive. We may want to use something between the two, like LGPL or MPL, that forces the users to share all modifications of the code...

But maybe it's better for the moment to use standard copyright. And maybe open it in the future. Because we have to be really careful that our license is compatible with Unity, OpenVR, Fove's SDK and all other libraries that we use... We also need to make sure that the license is compatible with additional files like meshes and textures...
What do you think?

Personally I am okay with any license so whatever is chosen is okay with me. At this point it would have to be as restrictive as the most restrictive choice by any member of the starting group. If you don't know or aren't sure at this point, reserve all your rights and if all contributing members decide to make it open later then you probably can? Going from open to more restrictive might be more difficult.
Maz

1) I love games, so I'm in for a game, personally.
2) Game design and system balance. Lots of heavy number crunching for sim games and RPGs.
3) Scripting, prototyping and tools development (Unity, Unreal, Python, Lua, etc...)
4) Less than AAA-ambitious, but more than Minecraft-clone? That range is probably pretty vague... I guess it depends on how much art we can get. Unity tends to do a lot for you if you have the art to match. I'm thinking a simplified art style would work better for time and for not requiring massive art resources.

@aberrantwolf Cool! All of this can be usefull And I also think we should go with a simplified art style. We don't have the means to do otherwhise

I propose that we keep the repo closed at the time being. We'll mostly do small scenes and experiments, that's not usefull to open that. When we'll have something to show (backstory, small scene that we all like), let's have a vote to decide the license.
Just keep in mind that you're the owner of the work you do (art and code). So while the project is closed source, we won't be able to use it without your permission.

Ok, so other than knowing that Unity is a platform for developing games, can anyone point me to some good tutorials or youtube videos explaining Unity, what it is, how to use it?

I really would like to try to be of some help but in terms of this kind of dev. enironment I'm pretty much a fish out of water...

Hi l_c_r_ant,

Unity has its own tutorials which are very good. That is where I started. If you download the latest version of Unity 5, be aware that not all of the tutorials have been updated to show the latest interfaces/code, this caught me out earlier this week.

I am no where near being anything other than a beginner in Unity, despite having been a developer for 20 years professionally, but I have found that I can build quite cool little game scenes in unity without too much trouble, I just google what I want to do with 'Unity3d' in the search and usually find something in the forums that is exactly what I need, the user community is very good.

Have a play with unity and I am sure you will soon find your feet and be able to contribute to the project. The more the merrier as they say.

Adrian

Between Unity's tutorials, their docs, and their support forum (which uses the StackOverflow backend, I'm pretty sure), you can find out pretty much everything you need. Google is my constant companion when doing Unity stuff.

Unity is pretty easy to use, and is quite powerful and yes you can definitely Google just about everything you need help with i have learned everything i know regarding unity from googling it

Cool! Well hopefully between all of the other things I have going on currently I'll get the chance to try downloading Unity over the weekend and I get a chance to dip my toes into the tutorials.

As I said earlier, most of the code I write these days is all ANSI C for microcontrollers, but once upon a time I did also write in VB script and dabble in C# and C++ for basic PC level programs. Hopefully I won't have too much issue with learning unity.