Prop Hunt, DD Roleplay System, Airship Builder, Simple 3D Modeling Tool More!
Welcome again to the weekly update!
Our community has brought us a ton of new content! Users have recreated the Prop Hunt game from GMod, another group is building interactive D&D tabletop system called DelVR and there’s an airship game being built with crafting system and customizable ships. So many wonderful projects this week!
We’re getting very close to the UIX framework being completed and replacing the old Unity UI system! The 100% CPU usage issue has been mitigated, memory leaks from saving worlds fixed and the load/save process now uses less CPU and memory overall.
Our graphics designer has built a simple 3D modelling tool completely in Neos. There were some smaller additions as well, like new LogiX node for getting UV coordinates from raycast hit or internal audit log for helping diagnose cases of deleted or overwritten worlds in emergencies.
As always we will be talking about these new features during our weekly livestream, so please come join us! The livestream will be tonight at 3 PM PST (6 PM Eastern). We will be playing the Prop Hunt game on the stream so you can see it in action!
[h2]Community Highlights[/h2]
[h3]D&D GameMaster systems by DelVR[/h3]
DelVR is an amazing project brought to Neos by ChrisWarner103 and ToMo, who are seeking to give players an immersive system to play games like Dungeons and Dragons within VR. They have released their second devlog video, detailing the interactive GameMaster systems they have built. This video is a must-watch, this project is amazing!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h3]Prop Hunt - Medra and Creator Jam participants! [/h3]
Medra’s weekly Creator Jam had an awesome theme last week: re-creating the beloved hide-and-seek game Prop Hunt, where players would hide as an object while hunters would seek them out, looking for things that seem out of place.
This has been one of the best Creator Jams so far and everyone seems to love to play this game in Neos. Well done everyone!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
If you want to see Prop Hunt in action, we’ll be playing a few rounds tonight during our Twitch stream!
[h3]Buildable Airships - LucasRo & RueShejn[/h3]
These two have been hard at work creating an amazing way to build, using triangles and some very clever LogiX to create a polygon building system! Yet another amazing system to show that game development is not only possible within Neos, but can be quite fun! Awesome work guys!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h2]Progress on the new UI framework[/h2]
The new UI framework, internally named UIX (a joke combination of UI, UX and Neos’ naming scheme adding onto LogiX, BaseX, CodeX, PostX and others), is now heavily in its implementation phase!
The new system is already producing visual output and has most of the major building blocks implemented. It might not look as much on the testing videos, but there is quite a lot going on under the hood, as the system is designed to efficiently handle complex UI’s and layouts without significantly impacting the performance.
Any changes to the UI are collected and registered synchronously as they happen, with minimal amount of computational work on the main thread. The heavy lifting of propagating the updates, sorting items, computing layout and geometry is then done on background threads, spreading the work onto other CPU cores and avoiding stalling the main thread and freezing all the visuals.
The system already handles masking and has a clever way of splitting the layout hierarchy into multiple “graphics chunks” - mostly independent pieces that calculate their own geometry in parallel and isolate the changes happening within the UI to reduce the overall amount of computation needed for each update.
For example the root of a scroll region will become its own graphic chunk, so instead of having to recalculate the geometry to shift all the vertices, the whole chunk is just moved. Graphic chunks are also used to implement masking, naturally splitting the geometry into regions with their own stencil buffer parameters.
Because the graphic chunks can be easily dynamically created and removed anywhere within the hierarchy, we can also implement auto-balancing optimizations. If the system notices a part of the layout frequently changing, while other parts remain static, it will simply insert a graphic chunk at the right point in the hierarchy and isolate the recomputations only to the frequently changing parts.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h2]More memory optimizations and 100 % CPU usage fix[/h2]
After more reports of memory leaks caused by saving worlds, part of the save and load procedures have been rewritten to be significantly more efficient and work around a memory leak in a BSON library that is currently being used.
Thanks to this loading into worlds and saving them should now be smoother, taking less CPU time and significantly lower amount of RAM, reducing the stutters and the memory used when saving worlds will now get properly reclaimed, preventing the RAM usage from bloating over time.
We have also tweaked the video playback engine selection after the introduction of youtube-dl integration. This should significantly mitigate random 100% CPU usage reported by many users. The change will now favor native Unity playback engine to better utilize system’s native video decoding (including HW acceleration) when playing YouTube videos in Neos and avoid triggering the CPU usage bug in the 3rd party libVLC playback engine.
[h2]Simple 3D modelling tool[/h2]
Aegis_Wolf, our graphics designer, has built a simple 3D modelling device completely in Neos! You can build models out of triangles or quads, with vertex snapping and coloring and using several symmetry modes.
The built model can then be then baked into a single mesh and used as any other model inside of Neos, even exported into FBX or made into an avatar. Aegis is still actively working on this tool, so expect more additions and updates. If you’d like to play with it, you can find it in Neos Essentials or the MTC Art Room.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h2]New LogiX nodes and audit log[/h2]
We have gotten some new LogiX node contributions from Coffee! There are two new operator nodes x2 and x3 for quickly squaring and cubing numbers. There’s also HitUVCoordinate node under the Physics category, which allows extracting a UV coordinate from a raycast that hit a mesh collider, allowing for some potentially interesting applications.
Neos backend now also has an audit log for any changes being done to worlds and items. This will help us investigate worlds or items disappearing and provide a safety net to restore accidentally overwritten or deleted items and worlds.
However this is meant only for emergency use-cases. If you have important creations you don’t want to lose, it’s a good idea to keep backed up copies and versions of those. In case you lose something you can’t recover, contact Neos staff and they’ll be able to help you.
[h2]What’s Next?[/h2]
There is still quite some work to do on UIX, the new UI framework, namely layout components, interactions and implementing a proper set of components and behaviors so it can fully replace the current hybrid Unity UI system, but after the long design phase it’s finally in the last stretch.
We expect that the swap will happen sometime next week and usher a new era of lag-less inspectors and allow us to finally begin on overhauling the UI visuals and interactions to make Neos significantly easier to use for both new and existing users.
Thank you again for joining us on this week’s edition of the Weekly Update! We hope to see you all at our livestream tonight. And thank you again to all of our Patreon supporters and creative users, without you this project wouldn’t be the same!
Our community has brought us a ton of new content! Users have recreated the Prop Hunt game from GMod, another group is building interactive D&D tabletop system called DelVR and there’s an airship game being built with crafting system and customizable ships. So many wonderful projects this week!
We’re getting very close to the UIX framework being completed and replacing the old Unity UI system! The 100% CPU usage issue has been mitigated, memory leaks from saving worlds fixed and the load/save process now uses less CPU and memory overall.
Our graphics designer has built a simple 3D modelling tool completely in Neos. There were some smaller additions as well, like new LogiX node for getting UV coordinates from raycast hit or internal audit log for helping diagnose cases of deleted or overwritten worlds in emergencies.
As always we will be talking about these new features during our weekly livestream, so please come join us! The livestream will be tonight at 3 PM PST (6 PM Eastern). We will be playing the Prop Hunt game on the stream so you can see it in action!
[h2]Community Highlights[/h2]
[h3]D&D GameMaster systems by DelVR[/h3]
DelVR is an amazing project brought to Neos by ChrisWarner103 and ToMo, who are seeking to give players an immersive system to play games like Dungeons and Dragons within VR. They have released their second devlog video, detailing the interactive GameMaster systems they have built. This video is a must-watch, this project is amazing!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h3]Prop Hunt - Medra and Creator Jam participants! [/h3]
Medra’s weekly Creator Jam had an awesome theme last week: re-creating the beloved hide-and-seek game Prop Hunt, where players would hide as an object while hunters would seek them out, looking for things that seem out of place.
This has been one of the best Creator Jams so far and everyone seems to love to play this game in Neos. Well done everyone!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
If you want to see Prop Hunt in action, we’ll be playing a few rounds tonight during our Twitch stream!
[h3]Buildable Airships - LucasRo & RueShejn[/h3]
These two have been hard at work creating an amazing way to build, using triangles and some very clever LogiX to create a polygon building system! Yet another amazing system to show that game development is not only possible within Neos, but can be quite fun! Awesome work guys!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h2]Progress on the new UI framework[/h2]
The new UI framework, internally named UIX (a joke combination of UI, UX and Neos’ naming scheme adding onto LogiX, BaseX, CodeX, PostX and others), is now heavily in its implementation phase!
The new system is already producing visual output and has most of the major building blocks implemented. It might not look as much on the testing videos, but there is quite a lot going on under the hood, as the system is designed to efficiently handle complex UI’s and layouts without significantly impacting the performance.
Any changes to the UI are collected and registered synchronously as they happen, with minimal amount of computational work on the main thread. The heavy lifting of propagating the updates, sorting items, computing layout and geometry is then done on background threads, spreading the work onto other CPU cores and avoiding stalling the main thread and freezing all the visuals.
The system already handles masking and has a clever way of splitting the layout hierarchy into multiple “graphics chunks” - mostly independent pieces that calculate their own geometry in parallel and isolate the changes happening within the UI to reduce the overall amount of computation needed for each update.
For example the root of a scroll region will become its own graphic chunk, so instead of having to recalculate the geometry to shift all the vertices, the whole chunk is just moved. Graphic chunks are also used to implement masking, naturally splitting the geometry into regions with their own stencil buffer parameters.
Because the graphic chunks can be easily dynamically created and removed anywhere within the hierarchy, we can also implement auto-balancing optimizations. If the system notices a part of the layout frequently changing, while other parts remain static, it will simply insert a graphic chunk at the right point in the hierarchy and isolate the recomputations only to the frequently changing parts.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h2]More memory optimizations and 100 % CPU usage fix[/h2]
After more reports of memory leaks caused by saving worlds, part of the save and load procedures have been rewritten to be significantly more efficient and work around a memory leak in a BSON library that is currently being used.
Thanks to this loading into worlds and saving them should now be smoother, taking less CPU time and significantly lower amount of RAM, reducing the stutters and the memory used when saving worlds will now get properly reclaimed, preventing the RAM usage from bloating over time.
We have also tweaked the video playback engine selection after the introduction of youtube-dl integration. This should significantly mitigate random 100% CPU usage reported by many users. The change will now favor native Unity playback engine to better utilize system’s native video decoding (including HW acceleration) when playing YouTube videos in Neos and avoid triggering the CPU usage bug in the 3rd party libVLC playback engine.
[h2]Simple 3D modelling tool[/h2]
Aegis_Wolf, our graphics designer, has built a simple 3D modelling device completely in Neos! You can build models out of triangles or quads, with vertex snapping and coloring and using several symmetry modes.
The built model can then be then baked into a single mesh and used as any other model inside of Neos, even exported into FBX or made into an avatar. Aegis is still actively working on this tool, so expect more additions and updates. If you’d like to play with it, you can find it in Neos Essentials or the MTC Art Room.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h2]New LogiX nodes and audit log[/h2]
We have gotten some new LogiX node contributions from Coffee! There are two new operator nodes x2 and x3 for quickly squaring and cubing numbers. There’s also HitUVCoordinate node under the Physics category, which allows extracting a UV coordinate from a raycast that hit a mesh collider, allowing for some potentially interesting applications.
Neos backend now also has an audit log for any changes being done to worlds and items. This will help us investigate worlds or items disappearing and provide a safety net to restore accidentally overwritten or deleted items and worlds.
However this is meant only for emergency use-cases. If you have important creations you don’t want to lose, it’s a good idea to keep backed up copies and versions of those. In case you lose something you can’t recover, contact Neos staff and they’ll be able to help you.
[h2]What’s Next?[/h2]
There is still quite some work to do on UIX, the new UI framework, namely layout components, interactions and implementing a proper set of components and behaviors so it can fully replace the current hybrid Unity UI system, but after the long design phase it’s finally in the last stretch.
We expect that the swap will happen sometime next week and usher a new era of lag-less inspectors and allow us to finally begin on overhauling the UI visuals and interactions to make Neos significantly easier to use for both new and existing users.
Thank you again for joining us on this week’s edition of the Weekly Update! We hope to see you all at our livestream tonight. And thank you again to all of our Patreon supporters and creative users, without you this project wouldn’t be the same!