Building the metaverse bonfire with the community - Neos in 2020 in review (1/2)
Hello everyone and welcome to our third yearly update! We hope everyone had a great new year and enjoyed the festivities, whether in Neos or elsewhere.
Watching the New Year fireworks as the number of concurrent users kept climbing towards our all-time record.
With 2020 over, it’s a good time to take a look back at the last year and see where we’ll be going for this one. With the global pandemic, it was a challenging year for everyone, but also one where many people came together to work through the new challenges and we’re happy that our platform could be part of this.
The 2018 year, when we officially released Steam in May, was signified by a spark, a metaphor for everyone who joined and supported the platform in its infancy, when it was just a pile of code with no active community. The first few people have sparked what’s now the core of our community and helped us shape some crucial parts of the platform to make it more interesting to more users.
The following year 2019 that spark grew into a flame, with the community growing and bringing more users as well as Neos getting more crucial features, improving avatar expressivity, supporting a wide variety of hardware, building crucial frameworks to build other features on top of and improving general usability of Neos. It was a year that really set the ball rolling.
Over 2020 we saw the fruits of that development, as the community grew in size over the course of the year. Our main focus on making Neos more accessible to new users by redesigning the UI and UX, fixing and tweaking many interactions to remove common frustrations and overall improving accessibility and power of Neos.
With every improvement we saw the community grow more and more users become regulars. The worlds, gadgets, tools and other content kept getting more elaborate and clever as the time went, bringing out more of the creative freedom that Neos offers and showing it to wider audiences on many platforms.
Our community has also come together to support development of Neos, by helping out with onboarding new users, resolving issues, reporting issues, bugs and feature requests, translating the interface, documenting everything on the Wiki and more.
The financial support of Patreon and our ICO also grew significantly, reaching a very important milestone. During 2019 we were still losing money every month and using up our original seed investment. It was a particularly challenging period, as we weren’t sure how much longer our runway would last and we were trying to conserve as many resources as possible.
Thanks for the overwhelming support in 2020, we have finally become self sufficient. Thanks to everyone’s support, we no longer have to worry whether we are going to survive, but we can focus more on how we’re going to grow, both the platform, the community and our team.
Because of this, we have decided to use bonfire as the symbol to represent 2020, with every user who registered during this year getting it as their badge. The bonfire symbolizes the community coming together, with everyone putting a log into the fire, helping it grow and sustain itself.
There’s a bit of a silly interpretation of the symbolism as well. If you’ve ever submitted a bug report, you might know we often ask for log files, or “logs” for short to help diagnose the issue. And there are also “logs” in the bonfire… You get the point! ;)
The year wasn’t without its challenges for us either. We didn’t get to implement a lot of things that we wanted to this year, while we implemented some others that we didn’t even think of last year. Many of the issues became more challenging than expected and managing the growth of the community and rising number of bug reports and feature requests put a wrench in a few things a few times as well.
But regardless we keep on moving forward, learning from the challenges and our mistakes and doing what we can to improve the platform every day. We have a lot planned for the next year and the following years, but we’re also prepared to adapt based on the changing needs of the community and our team to keep the project going forward. Let’s have a look at some of the highlights of this year.
[h2]Making Neos more accessible and powerful[/h2]
One of the major goals we set at the beginning of 2020 was improving Neos’ accessibility, making it easier to use and get started with as well as make the time spent more comfortable. At the same time we wanted to do this without sacrificing its creative power, so we have opted for an approach that gives the users a lot of power to customize their experience not only for themselves, but also for other users.
[h3]Optimizations[/h3]
Lag is one of the major factors that limits the size of the sessions and makes the stay less comfortable. Near the beginning of the year we have replaced the Unity UI framework with our own, written completely from scratch, dubbed UIX, a portmanteau of “UI” and “UX” and reference to our subsystems ending with “X” (e.g. LogiX, BaseX, CodeX…).
UIX is now responsible for rendering all of the classical 2D UI in Neos with unprecedented performance. It is highly asynchronous, multithreaded, efficient and extensible. Where even a simple single inspector window would drastically drop the framerate for everyone, you can now have dozens of complex inspector windows open without a major performance impact.
This has drastically helped out for collaborative sessions, with multiple users working on projects in the same world or some users hanging out with a few others editing. Realtime collaboration is key to creative resonance and building a lot of the amazing content that we have seen over the past year.
Pushing the limit of user count after some optimizations
UI’s for creators aren’t the only ones that benefited from our own framework. The inventory, contacts list, world browser and all other user facing interfaces benefit not only from the performance speedup, but also from the flexibility and full control when reworking the interfaces to be easier to use.
We have optimized other parts of the engine as well, improving performance in sessions with many users. There is still much to do in that area and a lot of headroom to optimize as well, but we’re happy that the typical sessions could now reach 15-20 users without optimized avatars and in come cases over 30 with optimized ones.
[h3]Overhauling the UI and UX[/h3]
A big part of last year was reworking core interfaces and interactions of Neos to make Neos less frustrating to new users, while at the same time making it more powerful and extensible to the experienced users. We reworked much of the UI, replacing the belt menu with dash, introducing a new unified world browser and redesigned interactions with tools, gadgets, contextual menus and other actions in Neos.
The new UI system, dubbed Radiant UI, also laid the foundations to make the UI more modular and extensible. The behavior of the UI was split into modular pieces, rather than using monolithic components. This allows anyone to use those as building blocks for their own versions and extensions.
We introduced a Facet system, a method for swapping and extending pieces of UI as modular pieces that can be arranged into grids on the dash. Even though the system still needs more work to reach its full potential, we’ve already seen a lot of cool customized dashes and creative facets that extend Neos’ functionality far beyond the basics, from custom avatar cameras, Discord viewers to utilities or webcomic viewers.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Giving the power to creators and the community to shape the metaverse is one of our core philosophies and something we believe will be even more important once we introduce a workshop/marketplace, allowing anyone to share their own pieces of UI with everyone. Metaverse is a place for everyone and we want everyone to have the same power on shaping the virtual world to their needs and preferences.
However making sure that the base UI that everyone starts with is easy to use is important as well and we have made considerable progress on this front. Usability was one of major problems for Neos in 2019 and with the community feedback we’ve been able to reduce the initial friction significantly, resulting in higher user retention and fewer frustrations. There are still many other parts that we want to improve in the coming year, pushing the barrier of entry even lower.
[h3]New Metaverse Training Center and setup guide[/h3]
An important part of reducing the initial friction was also a redesigned version of the Metaverse Training Center as well as a new official setup guide. Those combined help ensure new users have the basics setup properly (their microphone, language, basic settings, user account) and learn the basic controls in a controlled manner.
This should make the job easier for community members who have been hard at work helping out new users and building community tutorials before the official one rolled out.
We have redesigned the MTC environment to be more pleasant and inviting and run better as well, utilizing a lot of the new features we have added over the year, like dynamic variables or collider user trackers for easy culling to improve performance.
We will continue building more parts with the new style to help cover other common issues, like finding and setting up avatars or using the streamer camera.
[h3]Eye and lip tracking, haptic vests and other hardware[/h3]
Thanks to the flexibility of Neos’ engine, we can easily add support for a wide variety of hardware in a short timeframe, bringing Neos to the cutting edge of VR hardware support. Over the course of 2020 Neos has gotten native support for a wide variety of different accessories to enhance the VR experience.
Following the eye tracking support, we have integrated the lip tracker module prototype by HTC, allowing for much wider avatar expressivity, by tracking fine motions of your lips, jaw and cheeks. Neos can map those directly to the avatar if it has appropriate blend shapes or trigger specific expressions for any other avatars.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Another notable addition was a new haptic framework system, with full native support for bHaptics vest and the upcoming OWO Game suit. Any full body avatar is automatically injected with haptic sampling points and haptic volumes, so for avatar-to-avatar interaction all you have to do is to put the suit on, pair it and start Neos and you’ll be able to feel touches from other people out of the box.
Content creators can use the HapticVolume component to create a range of sensations and enhance their content. The system allows for a very fine-grained control over the haptic feedback, creating a range of sensations and intensities. For example adding a haptic volume with noise to a hot tub in a map will make any users wearing haptic devices feel the bubbles on the submerged parts of their virtual body.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMPnDbpG_K8
The system also creates a layer of abstraction, future proofing the content and making sure it works with any new hardware that comes to market as well without having to update the content itself.
We added support for some other hardware as well, such as the Etee controllers, Pico Neo 2 and the new HP Reverb G2, exposing the raw controller data through LogiX, giving everyone full control to build their own interactivity in-game.
[h3]Websockets, Dynamic Variables, Reflection Probes, revamped audio system, file share and more[/h3]
Related to the hardware support, some other features added to the engine have opened ways for the community to add their own support. LogiX now has WebSocket support, allowing for easy data communication with external tools and code.
One of the common ways we’ve seen this used is to create custom integrations with different types of hardware. Since its addition, there have been more and more users running around with things like heart rate monitors, not only just showing the pulse on their name badges, but letting other users feel it too via haptics by putting their hand near the chest.
Many other creations have used websockets as well, for anything from feeding in statistics and other information (like weather) from the web, doing automatic voice translation to training AI and doing research.
Another of the notable additions were dynamic variable spaces. Those greatly simplified dynamically sharing and linking data in worlds and creating highly modular systems with LogiX. This made creating games, tools, interactive items much easier, allowing to increase the complexity and scope of projects in Neos.
To give creators the ability to make their worlds look visually nicer, we have also implemented reflection probes, with underlying support in the asset variant system and native GPU uploads. Reflection probes can be easily created, edited and baked completely in-game, making it easy to set them up and immediately see their effect on the environment, without dependency on external software.
We have also reworked Neos' audio system, removing another of the few remaining old ugly parts of the codebase. Not only has this made the code cleaner and easier to build on, but it has significantly improved audio playback performance, getting rid of stutters when playing audio effects and overall CPU load and brought many new features, such as voice message support for the in-game chat, microphone tool or ability to adjust pitch/speed of audio playback dynamically with our in-game scripting or do basic audio editing (trimming, normalizing, looping...) without ever leaving VR.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWsIvj7GzsA
Many of the additions and tweaks were done to improve the generally quality of life and workflow in Neos as well. For example adding the Contacts+ session mode based on community demand, adding silence option that lets you deal with disruptive users in your sessions, banning users from only specific worlds and in general hardening security and improving the behaviors.
Notably we have added virtual desktop access, allowing you to interact with your desktop right from the Neos dash and even build your own tools with it. Despite many powerful tools, interoperability with external software like Blender, Photoshop, Audacity and many more is still an important part of the creation process and being able to use them from within Neos has helped boost the workflow.
Another useful feature is file share, built on top of Neos' flexible asset synchronization system. This lets you bring any file into the world and simply hand it to another user to share it with them or save it as part of the world. This improved workflow in many cases, allowing to very easily exchange work-in-progress .blend files when collaborating in a world or publishing Python scripts for the websocket applications with the world. We've even seen some users use it to backup some of their data.
These are just a few of the additions that happened over the year, from hundreds of builds, with thousands of additions, tweaks and bugfixes. It is difficult to sum up everything in one neat article, but we hope that the overall improvement thanks to both the small and big changes has helped everyone in some way and pushed the platform closer to maturity.
[h2]Growth of the community and content[/h2]
Neos itself wasn’t the only thing that grew over the past year, perhaps more importantly the community itself and the content you have produced has as well, breathing an actual life into the technological improvements.
At the beginning of the year the community was still quite small and Neos relatively empty, with only a few people online at certain times of the day. The peak number of users was just around 30-40 each day.
By the end of the year the peak number of concurrent users is over 100 (averaging around 120-130 in December) on pretty much every day, with active public sessions open consistently at any time of the day, with around 600 unique users on throughout the course of every day.
Just as the year was ending, we broke our record, reaching 360 concurrent users on Steam (and over 420 according to our own internal metrics, although those are less conservative and include about two dozen headless accounts), ending the year with a bang.
Peak concurrent users and daily active users over the last year
Same statistics since May 4th 2018 (Neos VR beta release on Steam) showing overall growth
We don’t expect this spike to be the daily norm for some time, but looking at the overall trend of the growth over the whole history it’s only a question of time before we reach those numbers on a regular basis.
Despite our cloud services handling the sudden triple/quadruple increase in load without much of a problem, this sort of natural gradual growth is much healthier for the platform and allows us to adapt to the challenges as they come.
[h3]Becoming sustainable[/h3]
Our user base wasn’t the only thing to grow in numbers, our Patreon and ICO support did noticeably as well, currently sitting at $11.5K per month, with ICO seeing some big investments as well.
Thanks to this overwhelming support we have become financially self-sufficient, transitioning away from a period of time where we were constantly worrying whether or not we’ll survive and how much longer our runway (original seed investment) will last.
Patreon growth over the course of Neos' existence. Graph from graphtreon.com
This has been a key point in the development of this platform, as it has proven that it’s sustainable and something we can keep devoting our full attention to, without looking to other projects to keep the lights (and the cloud services) on.
Not only that, but we could also grow our team to handle different aspects of development and community support. While we’re not at the stage where we can support the entire team full-time yet, the help and taking on responsibilities in different areas has freed a lot of my (Frooxius) time to focus on the development itself, while at the same time advancing Neos on different fronts, with the new MTC, official content, support and more.
[h3]Moderation team and self-moderation tools[/h3]
With the growth of the community and more people coming to Neos every day also come some conflicts, drama and even occasionally some bad actors looking to disrupt everyone’s experience.
To handle such cases, we have started putting together a moderation team, whose responsibility is to mediate some of these conflicts, explain how to use self-moderation tools in Neos and in worst cases ban users to prevent further disruption.
We have opted for a more granular approach. We understand that platforms like Neos are socialization outlets for many and work environments for some as well and getting blocked from such platforms can have devastating effects on someone, even if such action is warranted.
As such we have added a few types of bans that can be applied to users. Oftentimes a “spectator ban” which sets any user to Spectator in any session they visit helps prevent any disruptive behavior, while still allowing the user to communicate with others and gives the host of the session the choice to trust them with permissions.
In more extreme cases (e.g. repeatedly posting inappropriate materials in public) a “public ban” would be applied, preventing the user from joining any sessions and any of their sessions showing in public, but still allows them to invite their friends to their own sessions.
Fortunately there were only a handful of cases where those measures had to be applied and most cases can be resolved by talking to the users and mediation. One of our philosophies is to also give as much control to individual users over their experience as possible as well in form of self moderation tools, with the moderation team serving as a buffer before those are implemented and for cases that aren’t generalized well.
Earlier this year we started a big discussion on some of these topics on GitHub, particularly user blocking functionality, which sparked a lot of passionate discussion on how this should be implemented and approached, but in the end with the input from a Patreon poll we have not prioritized the actual implementation yet, as it’s not in a crucial yet to be put above other features and improvements.
It is something that we definitely anticipate to become more urgent as the community grows and we hope that the community will let us know when it’s needed, either directly on GitHub or Discord or through our moderation team.
[h3]Creator Jam[/h3]
Perhaps one of the most prominent and long going community projects is the Creator Jam, hosted by Medra. It is a weekly event, where every Sunday creators both old and new come together and create based on a set theme.
It is a great way for new users to learn about the creative powers of Neos and meet some of the community. It’s also a great excuse for seasoned members to get creative with others and work on things they normally wouldn’t have.
The Creator Jam has given rise to some of the most creative tools, gadges, worlds and even some games over this year and continues to do so, as it has reached its 84th consecutive week, running consistently for year and half at this point, a very impressive feat by Medra and other community members any means.
If you’d like to know more about Creator Jam and participate in one of the jams, whether just as an observer or creator, check out the official Discord server. You can also check out the trailer released earlier this year.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h3]Metamovie at 77th Venice International Film Festival[/h3]
Another of the notable projects that have been in development for a while on our platform is the Metamovie project by Jason Moore. It is an interactive film with live actors, using environments and interactions built collaboratively inside of Neos VR.
The movie stars you, the audience, as the protagonists, with one VIP character driving the story and interacting with the actors and a group of eyebots that float around and can help notify the VIP of some key parts of the environment and clues.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
A working version of the experience was featured at the 77th Venice International Film Festival earlier this year and showcased to a wide audience across the world. Many of the Neos community have come together to help with the test runs and make sure the experience is as polished as possible for the festival.
We’re excited to see where this project goes as it moves towards its completion, offering a novel way for audiences to experience storytelling and utilize the power of the metaverse to do it. We are proud that Neos can serve projects like this, not only for their final form, but also for their production, slashing down the iteration time and offering more flexibility and interactivity.
[h3]DelVR - Dungeons and Dragons in VR[/h3]
One of the most prominent and elaborate projects that appeared on Neos this year is DelVR, a project with goal to bring D&D experience into virtual reality. It features a beautiful medieval world with highgly interactive tables for quickly building environments and other tools to enhance the gameplay sessions.
Screenshot from the DelVR world. Also shows a reflection probe in a world, as well as lightsource with starmap cookie using the cubemap support that was added for the reflection probes.
This project is headed by ChrisWarner and ToMo, who have been working on it for about a year. Whether you played D&D before or not, it's definitely worth to checking out. Building out fully fledged games and interactive worlds like this has been one of the things we dreamed of when designing Neos and seeing it come to fruition with this level of interactivity and clever use of Neos' features and mechanics has been very satisfying to watch.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
One of the official DelVR tutorials. Check out their YouTube channel for more!
We hope that we'll see more projects like this to grow on our platform and bring lots of fun to people from all kinds of backgrounds and interests.
[h3]Cross Universe[/h3]
Another notable project is the Cross Universe, a Japanese trading card game that has become quite popular in Neos. The mechanics of the game were implemented into an interactive table and large set of cards, some of them enhanced with 3D models that pop up whenever the card is placed on the board.
Earlier this year the Japanese community held an international tournament, with many of the community members participating. We even had the honor of the creator of the game visit and try it out as well!
If you'd like to learn more about the game, check out this community made tutorial by Enkiko:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h3]Metaverse Maker Contest[/h3]
One of the most prominent events of this year was the Metaverse Maker Contest, organized by the Creator Jam and several community members and sponsors. During this month long competition community members have worked hard to create content in 3 different categories - worlds, avatars and tools/other.
Announcement post: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/740250/view/2885077187674903468
The amount of content created and its quality and creativity has absolutely blown us away, with about 201 participants and 81 submissions. This made the judging process particularly hard, it took myself (as one of the judges) 17 hours of raw time to go through everything.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAfCwLqLI_E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-WXkgf3pus
Raw footage of going through all MMC entries
Your efforts in this competition have pushed the level of creativity in Neos to a whole new level, creating fully fledged games, narrative experiences, some of the most beautiful and interactive worlds we’ve seen, avatar creation tools, interactive gadgets and even more unusual stuff like procedural plant growing algorithms (using L-systems), interactive Brainfuck language interpreter or even a Neos-themed rap song.
There is too much to sum up in this article, so I’d definitely recommend checking out the original announcement post. We’re really proud of our community and the level of dedication and creativity you have showcased in this competition.
We’re thankful for all the sponsors as well, who have contributed to the prize pool, resulting in over $2000 worth of prizes and of course Medra and other contributors for organizing this awesome event.
Compared to our official competition NNC in 2019, the MMC was bigger and better in every way and as the community continues to grow, we can’t even imagine what kind of stuff we’ll see in 2021. There are exciting times ahead!
Watching the New Year fireworks as the number of concurrent users kept climbing towards our all-time record.With 2020 over, it’s a good time to take a look back at the last year and see where we’ll be going for this one. With the global pandemic, it was a challenging year for everyone, but also one where many people came together to work through the new challenges and we’re happy that our platform could be part of this.
The 2018 year, when we officially released Steam in May, was signified by a spark, a metaphor for everyone who joined and supported the platform in its infancy, when it was just a pile of code with no active community. The first few people have sparked what’s now the core of our community and helped us shape some crucial parts of the platform to make it more interesting to more users.
The following year 2019 that spark grew into a flame, with the community growing and bringing more users as well as Neos getting more crucial features, improving avatar expressivity, supporting a wide variety of hardware, building crucial frameworks to build other features on top of and improving general usability of Neos. It was a year that really set the ball rolling.
Over 2020 we saw the fruits of that development, as the community grew in size over the course of the year. Our main focus on making Neos more accessible to new users by redesigning the UI and UX, fixing and tweaking many interactions to remove common frustrations and overall improving accessibility and power of Neos.
With every improvement we saw the community grow more and more users become regulars. The worlds, gadgets, tools and other content kept getting more elaborate and clever as the time went, bringing out more of the creative freedom that Neos offers and showing it to wider audiences on many platforms.
Our community has also come together to support development of Neos, by helping out with onboarding new users, resolving issues, reporting issues, bugs and feature requests, translating the interface, documenting everything on the Wiki and more.
The financial support of Patreon and our ICO also grew significantly, reaching a very important milestone. During 2019 we were still losing money every month and using up our original seed investment. It was a particularly challenging period, as we weren’t sure how much longer our runway would last and we were trying to conserve as many resources as possible.
Thanks for the overwhelming support in 2020, we have finally become self sufficient. Thanks to everyone’s support, we no longer have to worry whether we are going to survive, but we can focus more on how we’re going to grow, both the platform, the community and our team.
Because of this, we have decided to use bonfire as the symbol to represent 2020, with every user who registered during this year getting it as their badge. The bonfire symbolizes the community coming together, with everyone putting a log into the fire, helping it grow and sustain itself.
There’s a bit of a silly interpretation of the symbolism as well. If you’ve ever submitted a bug report, you might know we often ask for log files, or “logs” for short to help diagnose the issue. And there are also “logs” in the bonfire… You get the point! ;)
The year wasn’t without its challenges for us either. We didn’t get to implement a lot of things that we wanted to this year, while we implemented some others that we didn’t even think of last year. Many of the issues became more challenging than expected and managing the growth of the community and rising number of bug reports and feature requests put a wrench in a few things a few times as well.
But regardless we keep on moving forward, learning from the challenges and our mistakes and doing what we can to improve the platform every day. We have a lot planned for the next year and the following years, but we’re also prepared to adapt based on the changing needs of the community and our team to keep the project going forward. Let’s have a look at some of the highlights of this year.
[h2]Making Neos more accessible and powerful[/h2]
One of the major goals we set at the beginning of 2020 was improving Neos’ accessibility, making it easier to use and get started with as well as make the time spent more comfortable. At the same time we wanted to do this without sacrificing its creative power, so we have opted for an approach that gives the users a lot of power to customize their experience not only for themselves, but also for other users.
[h3]Optimizations[/h3]
Lag is one of the major factors that limits the size of the sessions and makes the stay less comfortable. Near the beginning of the year we have replaced the Unity UI framework with our own, written completely from scratch, dubbed UIX, a portmanteau of “UI” and “UX” and reference to our subsystems ending with “X” (e.g. LogiX, BaseX, CodeX…).
UIX is now responsible for rendering all of the classical 2D UI in Neos with unprecedented performance. It is highly asynchronous, multithreaded, efficient and extensible. Where even a simple single inspector window would drastically drop the framerate for everyone, you can now have dozens of complex inspector windows open without a major performance impact.
This has drastically helped out for collaborative sessions, with multiple users working on projects in the same world or some users hanging out with a few others editing. Realtime collaboration is key to creative resonance and building a lot of the amazing content that we have seen over the past year.
Pushing the limit of user count after some optimizationsUI’s for creators aren’t the only ones that benefited from our own framework. The inventory, contacts list, world browser and all other user facing interfaces benefit not only from the performance speedup, but also from the flexibility and full control when reworking the interfaces to be easier to use.
We have optimized other parts of the engine as well, improving performance in sessions with many users. There is still much to do in that area and a lot of headroom to optimize as well, but we’re happy that the typical sessions could now reach 15-20 users without optimized avatars and in come cases over 30 with optimized ones.
[h3]Overhauling the UI and UX[/h3]
A big part of last year was reworking core interfaces and interactions of Neos to make Neos less frustrating to new users, while at the same time making it more powerful and extensible to the experienced users. We reworked much of the UI, replacing the belt menu with dash, introducing a new unified world browser and redesigned interactions with tools, gadgets, contextual menus and other actions in Neos.
The new UI system, dubbed Radiant UI, also laid the foundations to make the UI more modular and extensible. The behavior of the UI was split into modular pieces, rather than using monolithic components. This allows anyone to use those as building blocks for their own versions and extensions.
We introduced a Facet system, a method for swapping and extending pieces of UI as modular pieces that can be arranged into grids on the dash. Even though the system still needs more work to reach its full potential, we’ve already seen a lot of cool customized dashes and creative facets that extend Neos’ functionality far beyond the basics, from custom avatar cameras, Discord viewers to utilities or webcomic viewers.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Giving the power to creators and the community to shape the metaverse is one of our core philosophies and something we believe will be even more important once we introduce a workshop/marketplace, allowing anyone to share their own pieces of UI with everyone. Metaverse is a place for everyone and we want everyone to have the same power on shaping the virtual world to their needs and preferences.
However making sure that the base UI that everyone starts with is easy to use is important as well and we have made considerable progress on this front. Usability was one of major problems for Neos in 2019 and with the community feedback we’ve been able to reduce the initial friction significantly, resulting in higher user retention and fewer frustrations. There are still many other parts that we want to improve in the coming year, pushing the barrier of entry even lower.
[h3]New Metaverse Training Center and setup guide[/h3]
An important part of reducing the initial friction was also a redesigned version of the Metaverse Training Center as well as a new official setup guide. Those combined help ensure new users have the basics setup properly (their microphone, language, basic settings, user account) and learn the basic controls in a controlled manner.
This should make the job easier for community members who have been hard at work helping out new users and building community tutorials before the official one rolled out.
We have redesigned the MTC environment to be more pleasant and inviting and run better as well, utilizing a lot of the new features we have added over the year, like dynamic variables or collider user trackers for easy culling to improve performance.
We will continue building more parts with the new style to help cover other common issues, like finding and setting up avatars or using the streamer camera.
[h3]Eye and lip tracking, haptic vests and other hardware[/h3]
Thanks to the flexibility of Neos’ engine, we can easily add support for a wide variety of hardware in a short timeframe, bringing Neos to the cutting edge of VR hardware support. Over the course of 2020 Neos has gotten native support for a wide variety of different accessories to enhance the VR experience.
Following the eye tracking support, we have integrated the lip tracker module prototype by HTC, allowing for much wider avatar expressivity, by tracking fine motions of your lips, jaw and cheeks. Neos can map those directly to the avatar if it has appropriate blend shapes or trigger specific expressions for any other avatars.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Another notable addition was a new haptic framework system, with full native support for bHaptics vest and the upcoming OWO Game suit. Any full body avatar is automatically injected with haptic sampling points and haptic volumes, so for avatar-to-avatar interaction all you have to do is to put the suit on, pair it and start Neos and you’ll be able to feel touches from other people out of the box.
Content creators can use the HapticVolume component to create a range of sensations and enhance their content. The system allows for a very fine-grained control over the haptic feedback, creating a range of sensations and intensities. For example adding a haptic volume with noise to a hot tub in a map will make any users wearing haptic devices feel the bubbles on the submerged parts of their virtual body.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMPnDbpG_K8
The system also creates a layer of abstraction, future proofing the content and making sure it works with any new hardware that comes to market as well without having to update the content itself.
We added support for some other hardware as well, such as the Etee controllers, Pico Neo 2 and the new HP Reverb G2, exposing the raw controller data through LogiX, giving everyone full control to build their own interactivity in-game.
[h3]Websockets, Dynamic Variables, Reflection Probes, revamped audio system, file share and more[/h3]
Related to the hardware support, some other features added to the engine have opened ways for the community to add their own support. LogiX now has WebSocket support, allowing for easy data communication with external tools and code.
One of the common ways we’ve seen this used is to create custom integrations with different types of hardware. Since its addition, there have been more and more users running around with things like heart rate monitors, not only just showing the pulse on their name badges, but letting other users feel it too via haptics by putting their hand near the chest.
Many other creations have used websockets as well, for anything from feeding in statistics and other information (like weather) from the web, doing automatic voice translation to training AI and doing research.
Another of the notable additions were dynamic variable spaces. Those greatly simplified dynamically sharing and linking data in worlds and creating highly modular systems with LogiX. This made creating games, tools, interactive items much easier, allowing to increase the complexity and scope of projects in Neos.
To give creators the ability to make their worlds look visually nicer, we have also implemented reflection probes, with underlying support in the asset variant system and native GPU uploads. Reflection probes can be easily created, edited and baked completely in-game, making it easy to set them up and immediately see their effect on the environment, without dependency on external software.
We have also reworked Neos' audio system, removing another of the few remaining old ugly parts of the codebase. Not only has this made the code cleaner and easier to build on, but it has significantly improved audio playback performance, getting rid of stutters when playing audio effects and overall CPU load and brought many new features, such as voice message support for the in-game chat, microphone tool or ability to adjust pitch/speed of audio playback dynamically with our in-game scripting or do basic audio editing (trimming, normalizing, looping...) without ever leaving VR.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWsIvj7GzsA
Many of the additions and tweaks were done to improve the generally quality of life and workflow in Neos as well. For example adding the Contacts+ session mode based on community demand, adding silence option that lets you deal with disruptive users in your sessions, banning users from only specific worlds and in general hardening security and improving the behaviors.
Notably we have added virtual desktop access, allowing you to interact with your desktop right from the Neos dash and even build your own tools with it. Despite many powerful tools, interoperability with external software like Blender, Photoshop, Audacity and many more is still an important part of the creation process and being able to use them from within Neos has helped boost the workflow.
Another useful feature is file share, built on top of Neos' flexible asset synchronization system. This lets you bring any file into the world and simply hand it to another user to share it with them or save it as part of the world. This improved workflow in many cases, allowing to very easily exchange work-in-progress .blend files when collaborating in a world or publishing Python scripts for the websocket applications with the world. We've even seen some users use it to backup some of their data.
These are just a few of the additions that happened over the year, from hundreds of builds, with thousands of additions, tweaks and bugfixes. It is difficult to sum up everything in one neat article, but we hope that the overall improvement thanks to both the small and big changes has helped everyone in some way and pushed the platform closer to maturity.
[h2]Growth of the community and content[/h2]
Neos itself wasn’t the only thing that grew over the past year, perhaps more importantly the community itself and the content you have produced has as well, breathing an actual life into the technological improvements.
At the beginning of the year the community was still quite small and Neos relatively empty, with only a few people online at certain times of the day. The peak number of users was just around 30-40 each day.
By the end of the year the peak number of concurrent users is over 100 (averaging around 120-130 in December) on pretty much every day, with active public sessions open consistently at any time of the day, with around 600 unique users on throughout the course of every day.
Just as the year was ending, we broke our record, reaching 360 concurrent users on Steam (and over 420 according to our own internal metrics, although those are less conservative and include about two dozen headless accounts), ending the year with a bang.
Peak concurrent users and daily active users over the last year
Same statistics since May 4th 2018 (Neos VR beta release on Steam) showing overall growthWe don’t expect this spike to be the daily norm for some time, but looking at the overall trend of the growth over the whole history it’s only a question of time before we reach those numbers on a regular basis.
Despite our cloud services handling the sudden triple/quadruple increase in load without much of a problem, this sort of natural gradual growth is much healthier for the platform and allows us to adapt to the challenges as they come.
[h3]Becoming sustainable[/h3]
Our user base wasn’t the only thing to grow in numbers, our Patreon and ICO support did noticeably as well, currently sitting at $11.5K per month, with ICO seeing some big investments as well.
Thanks to this overwhelming support we have become financially self-sufficient, transitioning away from a period of time where we were constantly worrying whether or not we’ll survive and how much longer our runway (original seed investment) will last.
Patreon growth over the course of Neos' existence. Graph from graphtreon.comThis has been a key point in the development of this platform, as it has proven that it’s sustainable and something we can keep devoting our full attention to, without looking to other projects to keep the lights (and the cloud services) on.
Not only that, but we could also grow our team to handle different aspects of development and community support. While we’re not at the stage where we can support the entire team full-time yet, the help and taking on responsibilities in different areas has freed a lot of my (Frooxius) time to focus on the development itself, while at the same time advancing Neos on different fronts, with the new MTC, official content, support and more.
[h3]Moderation team and self-moderation tools[/h3]
With the growth of the community and more people coming to Neos every day also come some conflicts, drama and even occasionally some bad actors looking to disrupt everyone’s experience.
To handle such cases, we have started putting together a moderation team, whose responsibility is to mediate some of these conflicts, explain how to use self-moderation tools in Neos and in worst cases ban users to prevent further disruption.
We have opted for a more granular approach. We understand that platforms like Neos are socialization outlets for many and work environments for some as well and getting blocked from such platforms can have devastating effects on someone, even if such action is warranted.
As such we have added a few types of bans that can be applied to users. Oftentimes a “spectator ban” which sets any user to Spectator in any session they visit helps prevent any disruptive behavior, while still allowing the user to communicate with others and gives the host of the session the choice to trust them with permissions.
In more extreme cases (e.g. repeatedly posting inappropriate materials in public) a “public ban” would be applied, preventing the user from joining any sessions and any of their sessions showing in public, but still allows them to invite their friends to their own sessions.
Fortunately there were only a handful of cases where those measures had to be applied and most cases can be resolved by talking to the users and mediation. One of our philosophies is to also give as much control to individual users over their experience as possible as well in form of self moderation tools, with the moderation team serving as a buffer before those are implemented and for cases that aren’t generalized well.
Earlier this year we started a big discussion on some of these topics on GitHub, particularly user blocking functionality, which sparked a lot of passionate discussion on how this should be implemented and approached, but in the end with the input from a Patreon poll we have not prioritized the actual implementation yet, as it’s not in a crucial yet to be put above other features and improvements.
It is something that we definitely anticipate to become more urgent as the community grows and we hope that the community will let us know when it’s needed, either directly on GitHub or Discord or through our moderation team.
[h3]Creator Jam[/h3]
Perhaps one of the most prominent and long going community projects is the Creator Jam, hosted by Medra. It is a weekly event, where every Sunday creators both old and new come together and create based on a set theme.
It is a great way for new users to learn about the creative powers of Neos and meet some of the community. It’s also a great excuse for seasoned members to get creative with others and work on things they normally wouldn’t have.
The Creator Jam has given rise to some of the most creative tools, gadges, worlds and even some games over this year and continues to do so, as it has reached its 84th consecutive week, running consistently for year and half at this point, a very impressive feat by Medra and other community members any means.
If you’d like to know more about Creator Jam and participate in one of the jams, whether just as an observer or creator, check out the official Discord server. You can also check out the trailer released earlier this year.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h3]Metamovie at 77th Venice International Film Festival[/h3]
Another of the notable projects that have been in development for a while on our platform is the Metamovie project by Jason Moore. It is an interactive film with live actors, using environments and interactions built collaboratively inside of Neos VR.
The movie stars you, the audience, as the protagonists, with one VIP character driving the story and interacting with the actors and a group of eyebots that float around and can help notify the VIP of some key parts of the environment and clues.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
A working version of the experience was featured at the 77th Venice International Film Festival earlier this year and showcased to a wide audience across the world. Many of the Neos community have come together to help with the test runs and make sure the experience is as polished as possible for the festival.
We’re excited to see where this project goes as it moves towards its completion, offering a novel way for audiences to experience storytelling and utilize the power of the metaverse to do it. We are proud that Neos can serve projects like this, not only for their final form, but also for their production, slashing down the iteration time and offering more flexibility and interactivity.
[h3]DelVR - Dungeons and Dragons in VR[/h3]
One of the most prominent and elaborate projects that appeared on Neos this year is DelVR, a project with goal to bring D&D experience into virtual reality. It features a beautiful medieval world with highgly interactive tables for quickly building environments and other tools to enhance the gameplay sessions.
Screenshot from the DelVR world. Also shows a reflection probe in a world, as well as lightsource with starmap cookie using the cubemap support that was added for the reflection probes.Embody 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.
This project is headed by ChrisWarner and ToMo, who have been working on it for about a year. Whether you played D&D before or not, it's definitely worth to checking out. Building out fully fledged games and interactive worlds like this has been one of the things we dreamed of when designing Neos and seeing it come to fruition with this level of interactivity and clever use of Neos' features and mechanics has been very satisfying to watch.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
One of the official DelVR tutorials. Check out their YouTube channel for more!
We hope that we'll see more projects like this to grow on our platform and bring lots of fun to people from all kinds of backgrounds and interests.
[h3]Cross Universe[/h3]
Another notable project is the Cross Universe, a Japanese trading card game that has become quite popular in Neos. The mechanics of the game were implemented into an interactive table and large set of cards, some of them enhanced with 3D models that pop up whenever the card is placed on the board.
Earlier this year the Japanese community held an international tournament, with many of the community members participating. We even had the honor of the creator of the game visit and try it out as well!
If you'd like to learn more about the game, check out this community made tutorial by Enkiko:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h3]Metaverse Maker Contest[/h3]
One of the most prominent events of this year was the Metaverse Maker Contest, organized by the Creator Jam and several community members and sponsors. During this month long competition community members have worked hard to create content in 3 different categories - worlds, avatars and tools/other.
Announcement post: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/740250/view/2885077187674903468The amount of content created and its quality and creativity has absolutely blown us away, with about 201 participants and 81 submissions. This made the judging process particularly hard, it took myself (as one of the judges) 17 hours of raw time to go through everything.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAfCwLqLI_E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-WXkgf3pus
Raw footage of going through all MMC entries
Your efforts in this competition have pushed the level of creativity in Neos to a whole new level, creating fully fledged games, narrative experiences, some of the most beautiful and interactive worlds we’ve seen, avatar creation tools, interactive gadgets and even more unusual stuff like procedural plant growing algorithms (using L-systems), interactive Brainfuck language interpreter or even a Neos-themed rap song.
There is too much to sum up in this article, so I’d definitely recommend checking out the original announcement post. We’re really proud of our community and the level of dedication and creativity you have showcased in this competition.
We’re thankful for all the sponsors as well, who have contributed to the prize pool, resulting in over $2000 worth of prizes and of course Medra and other contributors for organizing this awesome event.
Compared to our official competition NNC in 2019, the MMC was bigger and better in every way and as the community continues to grow, we can’t even imagine what kind of stuff we’ll see in 2021. There are exciting times ahead!
Continue reading part 2 here