Welcome to new team members! Xiexe's Toon Shader, UI "Facets" and more
Hello everyone!
Welcome back to the weekly update. We have some wonderful news; The Neos Team has grown again! We have three lovely new members who have been working very hard alongside the rest of the team for quite a while now. If you wish to, give them congratulations when you see them online in Neos!
We also have a new, highly configurable addition to our Materials, the popular Xiexe Toon Shader used by many in other platforms. Over time, this will replace our current “Unlit Toon” shader. We’ll be going over why this is a pretty important step forward for our platform below.
COVID-19 has been changing the way a lot of us are communicating. The Neos Team is very thankful that we can at least provide you all with a virtual universe where you can safely communicate face-to-face in these trying times. If you ever feel lonely, come give us an in-world visit! There’s always friendly faces here. We’re all in this together, so let’s keep going strong!
[h2]Welcome to the team, Lewis, Rue, and Shifty![/h2]
We have three lovely new team members who have been working hard the last few months to help our community grow and thrive.
In all the excitement we forgot to take a proper group picture, so these two random ones will have to do!
[h3]Lewis Snow: Neos Team Sound Engineer![/h3]
Lewis has been a part of the community for quite some time now, and has been making some amazing items for everyone to enjoy within Neos. He’s quite multifaceted in his talents, ranging from modeling, world creation, LogiX creation, and sound design. He hardly needs an introduction, though, as he’s quite the social butterfly and is well-known throughout the community.
[h3]Rue Shejn: Neos Team 3D Modeler[/h3]
Ever since Rue has joined, he’s shown a huge interest in helping Neos move forward. Within his first day, he built out a world using only in-world tools. Now he’s progressed on to 3D modeling from within Blender and bringing his creations into Neos. He’s been working alongside our main 3D artist, Aegis_Wolf, for a couple months now on the MetaMovie project, improving his skills and showing his team spirit.
[h3]Shifty: Neos Team Bug Management/Triage[/h3]
From day one, Shifty has shown a huge interest in learning all they could about Neos, and has used their knowledge to assist anyone in need. You’ll frequently see Shifty in our official Discord server’s #questions-help channel, eager to answer any questions they come across, and taking the burden of helping users with troubleshooting bugs off of the shoulders of the rest of the Neos Team.
[h2]Xiexe Toon Shader[/h2]
Based on popular community demand, we have added a new Toon shader, to replace the aged Cubed’s Flat Lit Toon we’ve been using for a while. After evaluating several candidates suggested by our community, we have picked the Xiexe Toon Shader as the best balance of features and clean maintainable code.
Because long term compatibility is crucial for Neos, we have stripped away some functionality that we’re not certain we can ensure will stay supported, especially with some upcoming changes to the rendering pipeline or introduction of our own toon shader at some point.
Nevertheless this shader still offers greatly expanded functionality and customizability and better interactions with the lighting in worlds. So far we’ve heard positive feedback on this new addition!
Once a few more functions are added in and the integration is polished, we’ll deprecate the Flat Lit Toon and auto-convert existing instances of it to a close equivalent of the Xiexe Toon.
[h2]The functional UI elements have their name: Facets[/h2]
During the design phase, we have called the individual functional pieces of UI “widgets”. However this term doesn’t quite describe them well, because they can be anything from just a tiny FPS counter to a complex component or scene inspector.
After a discussion with the community on our Discord (in the #devlog channel), we have settled on adopting a new term: “Facet”. This will describe any individual self-contained modular piece of the new UI.
Each facet is going to be a part of a “container”. This can be the dash, its own individual window or a grid on your palm. The important part is that they can be freely moved between containers, allowing you to rearrange, modify and extend the UI so it suits your needs.
Under this new system, each screen on the dash is going to be a container, usually with multiple facets. By default it’ll be preloaded with the official ones for the common functionality, but allow it to be customized and expanded with community made facets, to introduce completely new functionality to the UI.
We chose this term for a few reasons. One of them being a nice metaphor. Facets can be nice and shiny pieces, like on a gem. And having the UI be highly customizable can be considered to be multifaceted.
But also importantly, it’s not a term that would be used too commonly and confused with other things. We expect that the community will start building lots of custom facets and once we roll out the Neos Workshop, share or sell them, so having a unique term will make it easy to search.
[h2]Community Highlights[/h2]
[h3]Avatar Motion Recorder by Dante[/h3]
Dante has created an amazing piece of LogiX, which can record a user’s body movements, save them into an avatar, and that avatar can play the recorded animation! This will be great for creating NPCs in all types of games!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h3]Planetary Prometheus by BIOHAZRED[/h3]
This dark, beautiful world is inspired by Destiny, and features many interesting areas and mysterious structures. Great for hanging out and exploring! Come bring your friends to this amazing world!
[h3]Celebrating Saint Patrick’s Day in Neos[/h3]
We hope everyone had a happy Saint Patrick’s Day this week and stayed safe! And thanks to everyone who joined us for the celebration party in Neos in Epic’s Cave Club by Epica2m! You can check out this beautiful world in Neos or watch the livestream here:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h3]GDC 2020 event in Neos[/h3]
This year we had the honor to participate in the Playable GDC 2020 event as one of the social VR spaces that people could try out at the event and serve as one of the camera feeds for their livestream. It was a blast, thanks everyone for joining and trying out Neos!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h2]What’s Next?[/h2]
Currently the work is undergoing on implementing the new UI. A few small components have already trickled into the builds, with more to come. First we are replacing smaller parts of the UI that can be released in smaller chunks, to provide improvements early on.
This includes the new circular menus, lasers and laser interactions (like remote grabbing and clicking) and equipping tools and items. You’ll be able to use these still with the old dash and windows.
The next step after that will be the dash itself and the facet system. Since for this it’s harder to replace things piece by piece, it will take longer to rework all of the important bits and swap the dash, but we’ll release the bits and pieces in regular bits for you to play and experiment with as we have done with UIX.
Thank you for reading this week’s Weekly Update!
Welcome back to the weekly update. We have some wonderful news; The Neos Team has grown again! We have three lovely new members who have been working very hard alongside the rest of the team for quite a while now. If you wish to, give them congratulations when you see them online in Neos!
We also have a new, highly configurable addition to our Materials, the popular Xiexe Toon Shader used by many in other platforms. Over time, this will replace our current “Unlit Toon” shader. We’ll be going over why this is a pretty important step forward for our platform below.
COVID-19 has been changing the way a lot of us are communicating. The Neos Team is very thankful that we can at least provide you all with a virtual universe where you can safely communicate face-to-face in these trying times. If you ever feel lonely, come give us an in-world visit! There’s always friendly faces here. We’re all in this together, so let’s keep going strong!
[h2]Welcome to the team, Lewis, Rue, and Shifty![/h2]
We have three lovely new team members who have been working hard the last few months to help our community grow and thrive.
In all the excitement we forgot to take a proper group picture, so these two random ones will have to do!
[h3]Lewis Snow: Neos Team Sound Engineer![/h3]
Lewis has been a part of the community for quite some time now, and has been making some amazing items for everyone to enjoy within Neos. He’s quite multifaceted in his talents, ranging from modeling, world creation, LogiX creation, and sound design. He hardly needs an introduction, though, as he’s quite the social butterfly and is well-known throughout the community.
[h3]Rue Shejn: Neos Team 3D Modeler[/h3]
Ever since Rue has joined, he’s shown a huge interest in helping Neos move forward. Within his first day, he built out a world using only in-world tools. Now he’s progressed on to 3D modeling from within Blender and bringing his creations into Neos. He’s been working alongside our main 3D artist, Aegis_Wolf, for a couple months now on the MetaMovie project, improving his skills and showing his team spirit.
[h3]Shifty: Neos Team Bug Management/Triage[/h3]
From day one, Shifty has shown a huge interest in learning all they could about Neos, and has used their knowledge to assist anyone in need. You’ll frequently see Shifty in our official Discord server’s #questions-help channel, eager to answer any questions they come across, and taking the burden of helping users with troubleshooting bugs off of the shoulders of the rest of the Neos Team.
[h2]Xiexe Toon Shader[/h2]
Based on popular community demand, we have added a new Toon shader, to replace the aged Cubed’s Flat Lit Toon we’ve been using for a while. After evaluating several candidates suggested by our community, we have picked the Xiexe Toon Shader as the best balance of features and clean maintainable code.
Because long term compatibility is crucial for Neos, we have stripped away some functionality that we’re not certain we can ensure will stay supported, especially with some upcoming changes to the rendering pipeline or introduction of our own toon shader at some point.
Nevertheless this shader still offers greatly expanded functionality and customizability and better interactions with the lighting in worlds. So far we’ve heard positive feedback on this new addition!
Once a few more functions are added in and the integration is polished, we’ll deprecate the Flat Lit Toon and auto-convert existing instances of it to a close equivalent of the Xiexe Toon.
[h2]The functional UI elements have their name: Facets[/h2]
During the design phase, we have called the individual functional pieces of UI “widgets”. However this term doesn’t quite describe them well, because they can be anything from just a tiny FPS counter to a complex component or scene inspector.
After a discussion with the community on our Discord (in the #devlog channel), we have settled on adopting a new term: “Facet”. This will describe any individual self-contained modular piece of the new UI.
Each facet is going to be a part of a “container”. This can be the dash, its own individual window or a grid on your palm. The important part is that they can be freely moved between containers, allowing you to rearrange, modify and extend the UI so it suits your needs.
Under this new system, each screen on the dash is going to be a container, usually with multiple facets. By default it’ll be preloaded with the official ones for the common functionality, but allow it to be customized and expanded with community made facets, to introduce completely new functionality to the UI.
We chose this term for a few reasons. One of them being a nice metaphor. Facets can be nice and shiny pieces, like on a gem. And having the UI be highly customizable can be considered to be multifaceted.
But also importantly, it’s not a term that would be used too commonly and confused with other things. We expect that the community will start building lots of custom facets and once we roll out the Neos Workshop, share or sell them, so having a unique term will make it easy to search.
[h2]Community Highlights[/h2]
[h3]Avatar Motion Recorder by Dante[/h3]
Dante has created an amazing piece of LogiX, which can record a user’s body movements, save them into an avatar, and that avatar can play the recorded animation! This will be great for creating NPCs in all types of games!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h3]Planetary Prometheus by BIOHAZRED[/h3]
This dark, beautiful world is inspired by Destiny, and features many interesting areas and mysterious structures. Great for hanging out and exploring! Come bring your friends to this amazing world!
[h3]Celebrating Saint Patrick’s Day in Neos[/h3]
We hope everyone had a happy Saint Patrick’s Day this week and stayed safe! And thanks to everyone who joined us for the celebration party in Neos in Epic’s Cave Club by Epica2m! You can check out this beautiful world in Neos or watch the livestream here:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h3]GDC 2020 event in Neos[/h3]
This year we had the honor to participate in the Playable GDC 2020 event as one of the social VR spaces that people could try out at the event and serve as one of the camera feeds for their livestream. It was a blast, thanks everyone for joining and trying out Neos!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h2]What’s Next?[/h2]
Currently the work is undergoing on implementing the new UI. A few small components have already trickled into the builds, with more to come. First we are replacing smaller parts of the UI that can be released in smaller chunks, to provide improvements early on.
This includes the new circular menus, lasers and laser interactions (like remote grabbing and clicking) and equipping tools and items. You’ll be able to use these still with the old dash and windows.
The next step after that will be the dash itself and the facet system. Since for this it’s harder to replace things piece by piece, it will take longer to rework all of the important bits and swap the dash, but we’ll release the bits and pieces in regular bits for you to play and experiment with as we have done with UIX.
Thank you for reading this week’s Weekly Update!