Announcing Community Developer Fund and Naming the new UI (poll)
Hello everyone and welcome to our weekly update!
We have an exciting announcement this week. After recently reaching our goal of 300 Patreon supporters (thank you!), we have begun working on the promised community developer fund. Neos is a platform that’s alive thanks to you, our community and creators.
Your creativity and passion is what makes this project a success and allows us to grow and we want to share that with you. We have introduced the Community Developer Fund Token (CDFT) as a way to reward the passionate contributors in our community.
In another news, the first piece of new UI is nearly there, the new context menu! There’s also some progress on getting Neos to run with IL2CPP runtime to provide a performance boost. Details below!
[h2]Neos Community Developer Fund (CDF)[/h2]
As you may already know, Neos has its own currency called Neos Credits, or NCR. It’s a cryptocurrency minted as a reward for our Patreon and Ethereum supporters. A way to share the current and future value created by Neos back to the community that is making it happen.
We are allocating a 2 million portion (4%) of all the NCR that will ever exist (50 million) to the first phase of the Neos Community Developer Fund, which has been designed to provide support to the extraordinary community efforts we see. The Neos Community Developer Fund will ensure good liquidity for awarded members, and open a path for even more CDF funding of their projects in the future.
[h3]How it works[/h3]
During CDF Phase 1, community members contributing extraordinary value will be rewarded each portion of the 2,000,000 CDF Tokens that automatically convert into 2,000,000 NCR. Every 25th NCR minting batch is reserved to convert 1/20th of all CDFT to NCR.
[h3]How much is Phase 1 of the CDF worth?[/h3]
It depends. If all holders hypothetically sold their CDFT right after each NCR mint, it would bring them $11,032,178. If they wait for the initial coin offering (ICO) to finish, that would make it $59,061,185, and if/when Neos becomes a really successful project with the same market cap at some point as Ethereum has right now, that would make it worth approximately $634 million.
[h3]Not bad, how do I apply?[/h3]
Neos Teams will try to review every exceptional, deserving community member we know of. You may also apply through the review application form to provide us with context of your contributions, and future plans for Neos. You may also recommend or vouch for someone else. Recommendations of deserving users are especially appreciated.
[h3]Review process[/h3]
Teams will try to reach a consensus based on this approximate guiding criteria:
1) How much value is the community member bringing, and for how many people?
2) How long term are their efforts?
3) How many new users do their contributions attract?
So efforts that bring a lot of value to a small amount of Neos users, for example accessibility tools, as well as efforts that bring value to a lot of users, such as highly popular worlds and games will qualify. The third criterion carries less weight.
[h3]Timeline[/h3]
We would like to have a good estimate of the number of CDFT awards granted by the time batch 50 of the ICO is reached, and to have all CDFT awarded prior to reaching batch 100.
[h3]Phase 2 and beyond[/h3]
After batch 100 of the ICO, we will have enough Ethereum, and other monetary assets to officially start the NCR Buyback Programme to increase liquidity for existing CDFT holders, and to provide NCR for Community Developer Phase 2 and beyond.
[h3]The future and reality of Neos[/h3]
In conclusion, I’d like to say that it’s hard to predict the future of Neos, how our forward looking technical design decisions, engine and data models, VR hardware and other interfaces in general will work out.
It's hard to say how popular Neos will become, but we're pushing towards the goal of being one of the most popular metaverse and spatial computing platforms. It has the potential to get big fast or get big slowly and we will be working tirelessly towards that goal. We’re in this for the long run.
At the end of the day the only thing that really matters is that we and everyone involved have all found many new friends thanks to Neos and we treasure you beyond belief.
To find more about Neos, and its vision, check out the Neos White Paper. For questions, and discussions, join the Neos Discord, and check out the #💲neos-credits-ncr channel.
Thank you all for your current, and future support of Neos. 💛
[h2]Progress on new UI (help us name it!)[/h2]
One of the pieces of the new UI has nearly finished , the new context menu! This will very likely go out tomorrow, replacing the existing radial menus. It is designed to be much simpler to operate, requiring to just point and click and to avoid blocking other controls, which often confuses new users.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
While other parts of UI are still being worked on, the context menu will still contain options that will later on be part of the new dash, like the locomotion settings or scaling options. We’ll also do tweaking as we go to make sure it’s quick and comfortable to use, let us know what you think once you play with it!
One of the nice benefits of the new menu is that it will improve the performance as well. During our profiling sessions, we have found that the existing radial menus eat massive amounts of CPU time. With the new one being designed in a much more efficient way and built on top of UIX, this should free up some resources.
Another part of the new UI that’s being worked on in parallel is a styling system for UIX. This will allow defining styles somewhat similar to CSS, that will define how the UI looks in a unified way. This will serve as the basis for easily customizing the look of the new UI and making custom themes.
The technical design of this system is still being worked on, but here are some technical design notes if you’re curious!
[h3]Help us name the new UI![/h3]
While the technical parts of the new UI are progressing well, we have gotten stuck on the most feared programming problem… naming!
Rather than just referring to the new UI as… well “the new UI”, we’d like to give it a proper moniker, to signify its status as the serious Neos UI that we put real effort in and make it easy to refer to the whole system of new dash, facets, styling, contextual menus and other pieces under a nice catchy name (also I need to name it properly in the code, it’s been bugging me for a week now).
To go along with the whole “Facet” gem metaphor for the modular pieces of UI, we have thought up a few potential candidates:
Radiant UI - based on the radiant gemstone cut. This is a nice metaphor as this cut is typically rectangular (like UI!) and the name could also be interpreted as glowing or radiating, like a hologram.
Quartz UI - another gemstone metaphor. Quartz is a very “versatile” mineral, that comes in many forms and colors, an aspect it will share with the new UI!
OnyX UI - one of the many forms of quartz. It has a cool sounding name that fits along with the likes of LogiX, BaseX, CodeX and other Neos systems. The actual mineral is very dark and matte though, so doesn’t quite fit conceptually.
Jade UI - after the green mineral. Metaphor doesn’t quite work though as it’s not usually cut (no facets) and is green.
Ruby UI - similar to above, but red. This one is pretty shiny! Could be confused with the Ruby programming language.
Gemstone UI - very direct, not much of a metaphor here.
Glint UI - shiny! Simple and cute, who doesn’t like a pretty gem?
Baguette UI - based on the baguette gem cut. It’s a real thing! But no... just no xD In fact I don’t trust you to even put this one into the poll!
What sounds best to you? If you’re a Patreon supporter, you can head over to the Patreon poll and vote for your favorite! If you have any other suggestions, post them in the comments and if we like them we’ll add them to the poll.
[h2]Getting Neos to work with IL2CPP for performance boost (WIP)[/h2]
Another of the long running background projects has recently made some important strides. Neos is currently running inside of Unity, using the Mono runtime. For a long time this has put some limitations on certain optimizations, due to suboptimal JIT compiler and lack of access to certain modern features of the CLR.
One alternative that we were pursuing for a while is getting Neos to run with IL2CPP runtime, which converts the code to C++ and compiles with standard C++ compilers with aggressive optimizations.
Until recently this was blocked due to bugs in the IL2CPP pipeline, but after those were fixed in the latest Unity release and working more on Neos’ codebase to make it compile and run well with this runtime, it’s now nearly fully functional!
Apart from audio and some cloud functionality not working well yet, the build pretty much works with a nice performance boost. There’s still more to do before this is ready and more tweaking afterwards, but the results so far are promising. We’ll keep you updated as we progress more!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Note that the example above wasn’t compiled with maximum optimizations. With heavier optimizations the performance gains were even higher, with still more room to grow.
[h2]Community Highlights[/h2]
[h3]Viva La Villa, by Bobotron[/h3]
Yet another world designed by Bobotron for relaxing with friends. The lighting in this world is superb, providing a relaxed yet dynamic atmosphere.
[h3]Rocky Greenhaven, by Enverex[/h3]
A serene landscape, seemingly fully designed by nature, rests along a shore in the evening sun. This wide-open land full of valleys and hills is great for shooting off fireworks and having virtual barbeques!
[h2]What’s Next?[/h2]
We’ll be releasing a new build with the new context menu very soon, very likely tomorrow! Enjoy the last moments with the current radial menus, because they’ll be gone soon! ;) After this there will be tweaks and modifications based on your feedback and more pieces of the new UI.
The things coming up next is a new laser system, having it and the context menu render through objects to avoid objects obscuring it and reworking some other basic interactions, like grabbing and equipping.
As we’re picking up the pace on the new UI you should see more updates come soon! Thank you for reading our weekly update, let us know if you have any questions and we’ll see you at the next one!
We have an exciting announcement this week. After recently reaching our goal of 300 Patreon supporters (thank you!), we have begun working on the promised community developer fund. Neos is a platform that’s alive thanks to you, our community and creators.
Your creativity and passion is what makes this project a success and allows us to grow and we want to share that with you. We have introduced the Community Developer Fund Token (CDFT) as a way to reward the passionate contributors in our community.
In another news, the first piece of new UI is nearly there, the new context menu! There’s also some progress on getting Neos to run with IL2CPP runtime to provide a performance boost. Details below!
[h2]Neos Community Developer Fund (CDF)[/h2]
As you may already know, Neos has its own currency called Neos Credits, or NCR. It’s a cryptocurrency minted as a reward for our Patreon and Ethereum supporters. A way to share the current and future value created by Neos back to the community that is making it happen.
We are allocating a 2 million portion (4%) of all the NCR that will ever exist (50 million) to the first phase of the Neos Community Developer Fund, which has been designed to provide support to the extraordinary community efforts we see. The Neos Community Developer Fund will ensure good liquidity for awarded members, and open a path for even more CDF funding of their projects in the future.
[h3]How it works[/h3]
During CDF Phase 1, community members contributing extraordinary value will be rewarded each portion of the 2,000,000 CDF Tokens that automatically convert into 2,000,000 NCR. Every 25th NCR minting batch is reserved to convert 1/20th of all CDFT to NCR.
[h3]How much is Phase 1 of the CDF worth?[/h3]
It depends. If all holders hypothetically sold their CDFT right after each NCR mint, it would bring them $11,032,178. If they wait for the initial coin offering (ICO) to finish, that would make it $59,061,185, and if/when Neos becomes a really successful project with the same market cap at some point as Ethereum has right now, that would make it worth approximately $634 million.
[h3]Not bad, how do I apply?[/h3]
Neos Teams will try to review every exceptional, deserving community member we know of. You may also apply through the review application form to provide us with context of your contributions, and future plans for Neos. You may also recommend or vouch for someone else. Recommendations of deserving users are especially appreciated.
[h3]Review process[/h3]
Teams will try to reach a consensus based on this approximate guiding criteria:
1) How much value is the community member bringing, and for how many people?
2) How long term are their efforts?
3) How many new users do their contributions attract?
So efforts that bring a lot of value to a small amount of Neos users, for example accessibility tools, as well as efforts that bring value to a lot of users, such as highly popular worlds and games will qualify. The third criterion carries less weight.
[h3]Timeline[/h3]
We would like to have a good estimate of the number of CDFT awards granted by the time batch 50 of the ICO is reached, and to have all CDFT awarded prior to reaching batch 100.
[h3]Phase 2 and beyond[/h3]
After batch 100 of the ICO, we will have enough Ethereum, and other monetary assets to officially start the NCR Buyback Programme to increase liquidity for existing CDFT holders, and to provide NCR for Community Developer Phase 2 and beyond.
[h3]The future and reality of Neos[/h3]
In conclusion, I’d like to say that it’s hard to predict the future of Neos, how our forward looking technical design decisions, engine and data models, VR hardware and other interfaces in general will work out.
It's hard to say how popular Neos will become, but we're pushing towards the goal of being one of the most popular metaverse and spatial computing platforms. It has the potential to get big fast or get big slowly and we will be working tirelessly towards that goal. We’re in this for the long run.
At the end of the day the only thing that really matters is that we and everyone involved have all found many new friends thanks to Neos and we treasure you beyond belief.
To find more about Neos, and its vision, check out the Neos White Paper. For questions, and discussions, join the Neos Discord, and check out the #💲neos-credits-ncr channel.
Thank you all for your current, and future support of Neos. 💛
[h2]Progress on new UI (help us name it!)[/h2]
One of the pieces of the new UI has nearly finished , the new context menu! This will very likely go out tomorrow, replacing the existing radial menus. It is designed to be much simpler to operate, requiring to just point and click and to avoid blocking other controls, which often confuses new users.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
While other parts of UI are still being worked on, the context menu will still contain options that will later on be part of the new dash, like the locomotion settings or scaling options. We’ll also do tweaking as we go to make sure it’s quick and comfortable to use, let us know what you think once you play with it!
One of the nice benefits of the new menu is that it will improve the performance as well. During our profiling sessions, we have found that the existing radial menus eat massive amounts of CPU time. With the new one being designed in a much more efficient way and built on top of UIX, this should free up some resources.
Another part of the new UI that’s being worked on in parallel is a styling system for UIX. This will allow defining styles somewhat similar to CSS, that will define how the UI looks in a unified way. This will serve as the basis for easily customizing the look of the new UI and making custom themes.
The technical design of this system is still being worked on, but here are some technical design notes if you’re curious!
[h3]Help us name the new UI![/h3]
While the technical parts of the new UI are progressing well, we have gotten stuck on the most feared programming problem… naming!
Rather than just referring to the new UI as… well “the new UI”, we’d like to give it a proper moniker, to signify its status as the serious Neos UI that we put real effort in and make it easy to refer to the whole system of new dash, facets, styling, contextual menus and other pieces under a nice catchy name (also I need to name it properly in the code, it’s been bugging me for a week now).
To go along with the whole “Facet” gem metaphor for the modular pieces of UI, we have thought up a few potential candidates:
Radiant UI - based on the radiant gemstone cut. This is a nice metaphor as this cut is typically rectangular (like UI!) and the name could also be interpreted as glowing or radiating, like a hologram.
Quartz UI - another gemstone metaphor. Quartz is a very “versatile” mineral, that comes in many forms and colors, an aspect it will share with the new UI!
OnyX UI - one of the many forms of quartz. It has a cool sounding name that fits along with the likes of LogiX, BaseX, CodeX and other Neos systems. The actual mineral is very dark and matte though, so doesn’t quite fit conceptually.
Jade UI - after the green mineral. Metaphor doesn’t quite work though as it’s not usually cut (no facets) and is green.
Ruby UI - similar to above, but red. This one is pretty shiny! Could be confused with the Ruby programming language.
Gemstone UI - very direct, not much of a metaphor here.
Glint UI - shiny! Simple and cute, who doesn’t like a pretty gem?
Baguette UI - based on the baguette gem cut. It’s a real thing! But no... just no xD In fact I don’t trust you to even put this one into the poll!
What sounds best to you? If you’re a Patreon supporter, you can head over to the Patreon poll and vote for your favorite! If you have any other suggestions, post them in the comments and if we like them we’ll add them to the poll.
[h2]Getting Neos to work with IL2CPP for performance boost (WIP)[/h2]
Another of the long running background projects has recently made some important strides. Neos is currently running inside of Unity, using the Mono runtime. For a long time this has put some limitations on certain optimizations, due to suboptimal JIT compiler and lack of access to certain modern features of the CLR.
One alternative that we were pursuing for a while is getting Neos to run with IL2CPP runtime, which converts the code to C++ and compiles with standard C++ compilers with aggressive optimizations.
Until recently this was blocked due to bugs in the IL2CPP pipeline, but after those were fixed in the latest Unity release and working more on Neos’ codebase to make it compile and run well with this runtime, it’s now nearly fully functional!
Apart from audio and some cloud functionality not working well yet, the build pretty much works with a nice performance boost. There’s still more to do before this is ready and more tweaking afterwards, but the results so far are promising. We’ll keep you updated as we progress more!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Note that the example above wasn’t compiled with maximum optimizations. With heavier optimizations the performance gains were even higher, with still more room to grow.
[h2]Community Highlights[/h2]
[h3]Viva La Villa, by Bobotron[/h3]
Yet another world designed by Bobotron for relaxing with friends. The lighting in this world is superb, providing a relaxed yet dynamic atmosphere.
[h3]Rocky Greenhaven, by Enverex[/h3]
A serene landscape, seemingly fully designed by nature, rests along a shore in the evening sun. This wide-open land full of valleys and hills is great for shooting off fireworks and having virtual barbeques!
[h2]What’s Next?[/h2]
We’ll be releasing a new build with the new context menu very soon, very likely tomorrow! Enjoy the last moments with the current radial menus, because they’ll be gone soon! ;) After this there will be tweaks and modifications based on your feedback and more pieces of the new UI.
The things coming up next is a new laser system, having it and the context menu render through objects to avoid objects obscuring it and reworking some other basic interactions, like grabbing and equipping.
As we’re picking up the pace on the new UI you should see more updates come soon! Thank you for reading our weekly update, let us know if you have any questions and we’ll see you at the next one!