DelVR released - D&D in Neos; Reflection Probes, Cubemaps, texture compression
Hello everyone and welcome to another weekly update!
This week we have very exciting additions that will help significantly increase the visual fidelity of worlds in Neos and enable some new cool visual effects, thanks to significantly improved texture compression options, full cubemap support and most importantly Reflection Probes, which can be created and baked completely in-game!
A long time community project by the DelVR team has also released an amazing Dungeons and Dragons world to the public, with beautiful environments and lots of interactive tools for D&D gameplay. This is probably the most complex project in Neos to date and it’s definitely worth checking it out.
[h2]DelVR - Dungeons and Dragons in NeosVR[/h2]
This week we have a big community highlight. The DelVR team (ChrisWarner and ToMo) has been working hard for about a year on creating a world and set of tools for playing Dungeons and Dragons inside of NeosVR and as of this Friday have released it to the public.
We’re very impressed with the scope, depth and level of polish of this project. It features a beautiful medieval style tavern. Inside you’ll find plenty of nice areas to hang around and explore and importantly the game room.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
The world is filled with tools to enhance the D&D gameplay, from character sheets and stats to a board with a tile system, which allows you to easily set up the environment for the gameplay. Different environment pieces will automatically snap to the grid, making the building the scenery easy and quick.
The creators of DelVR have given us an in depth showcase on our last Friday stream, if you missed it, you can watch it here:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Whether or not you’re a D&D player, this world is definitely worth checking out. You can find it in the published worlds or visit their official headless session. If you’re interested in learning more, you can visit their official Discord and YouTube channel. You can also support them on their Patreon.
We’re very honored to have this amazing project on our platform and hope it will bring a lot of joy to many players! Big thank you from all of us to the DelVR team for all their hard work on this!
[h2]200 Neos VR tutorials by Probable Prime[/h2]
One more community highlight that we shouldn't omit is more of a compound one. ProbablePrime has been creating amazing Neos VR tutorials for a long while now and recently he has uploaded his 200th tutorial.
This is very impressive amount of tutorials, covering all kinds of topics from making avatars, using different tools, components and axis aligners. If you'd like to check them out, you can watch all 200 on the playlist on his YouTube channel. If you'd like to learn more about Neos definitely give them a watch and big thank you to ProbablePrime for his continued effort to educate the Neos community!
[h2]AMD Compressonator SDK integration[/h2]
The first step towards implementing reflection probes was expanding support for different texture compression options that Neos has. Originally Neos only supported BC1 (DXT1) and BC3 (DXT5) crunch compressed formats. These cover the majority of textures, but since reflection probes typically use HDR textures, those were insufficient.
To solve this, we integrated the AMD Compressonator SDK into Neos’ codebase, giving Neos the ability to block-compress each texture into a much wider variety of formats. This includes BC6H, which supports HDR textures.
However, the benefits of this integration go beyond reflection probes. For BC1 and BC3 formats you can now disable the crunch compression, which will make Neos use LZMA instead. This can produce bigger files/downloads (VRAM usage remains the same), but will help remove some blocking artifacts introduced by the crunch compression.
For visually complex textures you can also now use the more advanced BC7 compression. It takes significantly more time to compress (although for textures already uploaded to Neos’ cloud this happens in the cloud too, not bogging down your own PC), but produces much higher quality results with fewer artifacts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKYkGJN7EYE
If you only need a single color channel you can also use BC4 format. Internally Neos supports a much wider variety of formats as well, including a much more modern and flexible ASTC, but this isn’t currently supported with DirectX 11 and will have to remain a far future update, once we switch to Vulkan or DirectX 12.
All of these new formats automatically plug into Neos’ asset variant system. Neos will request the best matching versions, load textures by mipmap levels and automatically use fallbacks when the requested version isn’t currently available. For example, requesting 100 % quality of BC7 will load a 60 % quality version if it’s the only one available, while scheduling the computation of the higher quality version on the cloud.
The inspector will now show detailed information about which variant is actually loaded as well, giving you better feedback about the system and state of your assets.
[h2]Full cubemap support with time-sliced GPU uploads[/h2]
Another key component towards reflection probe support was a full featured support for cubemaps. Previously Neos had very rudimentary support, with on way to import or create cubemaps in-game.
We have significantly overhauled and generalized Neos’ texture and asset variant system to reuse the same code used for traditional 2D textures for any texture type, including Cubemap textures.
As a result, the asset variant system now fully supports Cubemaps, which includes computing metadata (this is used to select the right block compression format at runtime) and using block compression to reduce their VRAM footprint.
On Neos’ side Cubemaps are now natively uploaded to the GPU over the DirectX 11 (Windows) or OpenGL (Linux, Android) API’s, with time-slicing and progressive mip-map loading. This way you’ll see the low resolution version of cubemap as soon as it’s downloaded, while the higher resolution versions are still downloading and decompressing.
The timeslicing also reduces hitches while loading those textures, as the operation is split over several frames, rather than stalling the rendering until it’s completed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wNldGkSmsA
In-game, we have added a new Cubemap Creator tool, in which you can simply drop 6 individual faces of the cubemap as standard 2D textures and create a cubemap out of them. This way you can easily create cubemap based skyboxes (the Projection360 material now supports both cubemaps and 2D equirectangular inputs), but also cookies for point lights.
Example of point light cookies used to project star maps into the world.
The cubemap textures themselves also now support typical texture options like filtering and selecting the compression formats.
[h2]Reflection Probe support[/h2]
Thanks to all these additions, we could properly implement Reflection Probes into Neos, which are now available as of the latest release. Each probe provides reflections for all materials within its volume, ensuring that the lighting more closely matches the surroundings. This can drastically improve visual quality of the scene.
Neos supports both realtime and baked reflection probes. You can simply create a new reflection probe and bake them in-game at any time. The probe will automatically exclude all players, gizmos and other probe visuals when baking. The result of the bake is simply a cubemap, which the probe then self-assigns.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HV4g2o9ssLc
Since this cubemap is asset like any other, it comes with all the typical Neos flexibility - you can use an asset multiplexer to switch between different reflections for example or even assign custom made ones to produce interesting visual effects.
Typical reflection probe with 128x128 resolution and HDR enabled will use 96 kB of VRAM thanks to the BC6H compression, compared to 1 MB for raw uncompressed data (RGBA Half), allowing you to place dozens or even hundreds of them in the scene. This is why integrating the block compression was so crucial.
To make it easier to work with lots of reflection probes in a world, you can also use the new Reflection Probe Wizard. Using this you can mass bake all probes in the world or only part of the hierarchy. You can filter them out by tag or disabled state as well.
The baking wizard also has the option to teleport you to the probe’s location right before it bakes (with optional delay), which can be useful for worlds with culling systems.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtO21w7aS7I
The realtime reflection probes will render everything, providing very high fidelity realtime reflections, but are also using a significant amount of system resources, so should be used only in specific situations. Consider them like adding 6 extra cameras to your scene, each with the resolution of the probe.
We hope that the reflection probes will help you create more beautiful looking worlds and help increase their graphical fidelity. We’re already seeing some cool uses of them and can’t wait to see more!
---------------------------
Anyway this is everything for this week so far. As usual you can find more details about all the smaller additions, tweaks and bug fixes check out the patch notes on Steam or the #neos-updates on our official Discord. Thanks to everyone for your support as well, without it we wouldn’t be able to bring you all of these new features and keep growing into the future!
This week we have very exciting additions that will help significantly increase the visual fidelity of worlds in Neos and enable some new cool visual effects, thanks to significantly improved texture compression options, full cubemap support and most importantly Reflection Probes, which can be created and baked completely in-game!
A long time community project by the DelVR team has also released an amazing Dungeons and Dragons world to the public, with beautiful environments and lots of interactive tools for D&D gameplay. This is probably the most complex project in Neos to date and it’s definitely worth checking it out.
[h2]DelVR - Dungeons and Dragons in NeosVR[/h2]
This week we have a big community highlight. The DelVR team (ChrisWarner and ToMo) has been working hard for about a year on creating a world and set of tools for playing Dungeons and Dragons inside of NeosVR and as of this Friday have released it to the public.
Originally posted by descriptionEmbody your character, see the world from their eyes as you explore environments created intuitively and seamlessly by your gamemaster. Don't just play tabletop, Live in it.
Currently, DelVR seeks to bring the D&D ( Dungeons & Dragons) tabletop board game experience into virtual reality, but these tools enable a much broader scope of creativity, with gamemasters and players alike being able to import their own custom content with ease through the Neos VR platform.
We’re very impressed with the scope, depth and level of polish of this project. It features a beautiful medieval style tavern. Inside you’ll find plenty of nice areas to hang around and explore and importantly the game room.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
The world is filled with tools to enhance the D&D gameplay, from character sheets and stats to a board with a tile system, which allows you to easily set up the environment for the gameplay. Different environment pieces will automatically snap to the grid, making the building the scenery easy and quick.
The creators of DelVR have given us an in depth showcase on our last Friday stream, if you missed it, you can watch it here:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Whether or not you’re a D&D player, this world is definitely worth checking out. You can find it in the published worlds or visit their official headless session. If you’re interested in learning more, you can visit their official Discord and YouTube channel. You can also support them on their Patreon.
We’re very honored to have this amazing project on our platform and hope it will bring a lot of joy to many players! Big thank you from all of us to the DelVR team for all their hard work on this!
[h2]200 Neos VR tutorials by Probable Prime[/h2]
One more community highlight that we shouldn't omit is more of a compound one. ProbablePrime has been creating amazing Neos VR tutorials for a long while now and recently he has uploaded his 200th tutorial.
This is very impressive amount of tutorials, covering all kinds of topics from making avatars, using different tools, components and axis aligners. If you'd like to check them out, you can watch all 200 on the playlist on his YouTube channel. If you'd like to learn more about Neos definitely give them a watch and big thank you to ProbablePrime for his continued effort to educate the Neos community!
[h2]AMD Compressonator SDK integration[/h2]
The first step towards implementing reflection probes was expanding support for different texture compression options that Neos has. Originally Neos only supported BC1 (DXT1) and BC3 (DXT5) crunch compressed formats. These cover the majority of textures, but since reflection probes typically use HDR textures, those were insufficient.
To solve this, we integrated the AMD Compressonator SDK into Neos’ codebase, giving Neos the ability to block-compress each texture into a much wider variety of formats. This includes BC6H, which supports HDR textures.
However, the benefits of this integration go beyond reflection probes. For BC1 and BC3 formats you can now disable the crunch compression, which will make Neos use LZMA instead. This can produce bigger files/downloads (VRAM usage remains the same), but will help remove some blocking artifacts introduced by the crunch compression.
For visually complex textures you can also now use the more advanced BC7 compression. It takes significantly more time to compress (although for textures already uploaded to Neos’ cloud this happens in the cloud too, not bogging down your own PC), but produces much higher quality results with fewer artifacts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKYkGJN7EYE
If you only need a single color channel you can also use BC4 format. Internally Neos supports a much wider variety of formats as well, including a much more modern and flexible ASTC, but this isn’t currently supported with DirectX 11 and will have to remain a far future update, once we switch to Vulkan or DirectX 12.
All of these new formats automatically plug into Neos’ asset variant system. Neos will request the best matching versions, load textures by mipmap levels and automatically use fallbacks when the requested version isn’t currently available. For example, requesting 100 % quality of BC7 will load a 60 % quality version if it’s the only one available, while scheduling the computation of the higher quality version on the cloud.
The inspector will now show detailed information about which variant is actually loaded as well, giving you better feedback about the system and state of your assets.
[h2]Full cubemap support with time-sliced GPU uploads[/h2]
Another key component towards reflection probe support was a full featured support for cubemaps. Previously Neos had very rudimentary support, with on way to import or create cubemaps in-game.
We have significantly overhauled and generalized Neos’ texture and asset variant system to reuse the same code used for traditional 2D textures for any texture type, including Cubemap textures.
As a result, the asset variant system now fully supports Cubemaps, which includes computing metadata (this is used to select the right block compression format at runtime) and using block compression to reduce their VRAM footprint.
On Neos’ side Cubemaps are now natively uploaded to the GPU over the DirectX 11 (Windows) or OpenGL (Linux, Android) API’s, with time-slicing and progressive mip-map loading. This way you’ll see the low resolution version of cubemap as soon as it’s downloaded, while the higher resolution versions are still downloading and decompressing.
The timeslicing also reduces hitches while loading those textures, as the operation is split over several frames, rather than stalling the rendering until it’s completed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wNldGkSmsA
In-game, we have added a new Cubemap Creator tool, in which you can simply drop 6 individual faces of the cubemap as standard 2D textures and create a cubemap out of them. This way you can easily create cubemap based skyboxes (the Projection360 material now supports both cubemaps and 2D equirectangular inputs), but also cookies for point lights.
Example of point light cookies used to project star maps into the world.The cubemap textures themselves also now support typical texture options like filtering and selecting the compression formats.
[h2]Reflection Probe support[/h2]
Thanks to all these additions, we could properly implement Reflection Probes into Neos, which are now available as of the latest release. Each probe provides reflections for all materials within its volume, ensuring that the lighting more closely matches the surroundings. This can drastically improve visual quality of the scene.
Neos supports both realtime and baked reflection probes. You can simply create a new reflection probe and bake them in-game at any time. The probe will automatically exclude all players, gizmos and other probe visuals when baking. The result of the bake is simply a cubemap, which the probe then self-assigns.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HV4g2o9ssLc
Since this cubemap is asset like any other, it comes with all the typical Neos flexibility - you can use an asset multiplexer to switch between different reflections for example or even assign custom made ones to produce interesting visual effects.
Typical reflection probe with 128x128 resolution and HDR enabled will use 96 kB of VRAM thanks to the BC6H compression, compared to 1 MB for raw uncompressed data (RGBA Half), allowing you to place dozens or even hundreds of them in the scene. This is why integrating the block compression was so crucial.
To make it easier to work with lots of reflection probes in a world, you can also use the new Reflection Probe Wizard. Using this you can mass bake all probes in the world or only part of the hierarchy. You can filter them out by tag or disabled state as well.
The baking wizard also has the option to teleport you to the probe’s location right before it bakes (with optional delay), which can be useful for worlds with culling systems.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtO21w7aS7I
The realtime reflection probes will render everything, providing very high fidelity realtime reflections, but are also using a significant amount of system resources, so should be used only in specific situations. Consider them like adding 6 extra cameras to your scene, each with the resolution of the probe.
We hope that the reflection probes will help you create more beautiful looking worlds and help increase their graphical fidelity. We’re already seeing some cool uses of them and can’t wait to see more!
---------------------------
Anyway this is everything for this week so far. As usual you can find more details about all the smaller additions, tweaks and bug fixes check out the patch notes on Steam or the #neos-updates on our official Discord. Thanks to everyone for your support as well, without it we wouldn’t be able to bring you all of these new features and keep growing into the future!