Hello everyone and welcome to another of our weekly updates!
This one is a bit lighter on features as I was on my break for the last week or so, but we still have lots of cool goodies for you! One of the fun projects I did was a functional importer for Minecraft worlds, which can import even pretty large maps with ease and set them up with a culling system.
It also serves as a good stress test (there's already few optimizations planned based on it!), inspiration for our own planned features (like the terrain system) and I've even made source of the importer public as a reference, so it should still provide some benefit to Neos!
The context menu injection has receives some polish as well and overall we've released numerous small additions, tweaks and fixes in the past few days, closing over 50 GitHub issues submitted by you, our community!
In other news, we tried out a brand new Recap Stream format during our last Friday livestream, to make it easier to digest all the additions and changes. There's still lots of things to tweak with the format, but we hope you liked it regardless!
Speaking of the livestreaming, we finally hit 3K followers on Twitch! We'll be doing a special 24 hour livestream this Friday, with some fun prizes, so make sure you don't miss it!
Also the weekly Creator Jam has celebrated 2 years recently! This is an incredible achievement by Medra and other organizers as it's the constantly longest running event on Neos by far and source of some of the best content on the platform.
We've also decided to change our major focus on the BEPUv2 upgrade, as it's the highest voted major feature. Switching over and reworking the integration will provide some performance boost on itself, as well as pave the way to many other significant optimizations and full rigidbody physics down the line, so stay tuned!
[h2]Recap Stream[/h2]
Last week on Friday, we added some more additions to our new stream format, the Monthly Recap Livestream. This monthly stream allows us to act as a one stop shop for all the updates that can happen in one month development, but also give NEOS a public face as well. It will give folks a place to check in when they don't have all the time in the world to keep up with how fast Neos changes each week, and a TownHall Q&A for folks who want some questions answered with development. This week we were Neos Bots to really sell the professional vibe. Hope you enjoy it!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Going forward we'll be refining the format, but if you have any feedback let us know in #bugs-n-feedback on the main discord or send your thoughts to Turk or mentors, as this was made from their feedback! We want these streams to be a good source of information and reliable updates, so we are gonna try to improve as much as we can.
[h2]3000 Follower 24h Live-Stream[/h2]
Congrats! We finally did it, we now have reached our goal of 3000 followers for our main Twitch channel. To celebrate we are gonna be doing a 24 hour live stream hosted by our Producer Nexulan. I hear there's gonna be another Twitch Chat pizza order! So come on by and partake in some celebrations! I know there will definitely be a surprise here or there.
[h2]Minecraft Importer[/h2]
As a fun side project during my break, I have implemented a way to directly import Minecraft Worlds into Neos, since it’s one of my favorite games and part of inspiration for Neos itself. The importer is based on the
Substrate C# library for reading the Minecraft world data (which
I’ve extended to support the newer versions of Anvil format), as well as the excellent
Mineways tool which exports the actual geometry.
The Substrate library is used to read the world data and figure out how many chunks there are in the world and what’s their positioning. This is used to generate an export script for Mineways, which exports the entire map in 64x64 chunks by default.
Once those chunks are exported, they’re imported using the same importer as for any other 3D models and those chunks are then setup with proper materials, collisions and culling system. The meshes are also further baked to reduce the overall amount of assets. The culling system in particular makes sure that the chunk meshes aren’t loaded until they become visible to the user.
This way really big maps can be handled relatively well. Still, this fun side project also helps as a good stress test for parts of Neos, which can be a good source of optimizations (in fact, we’re already looking into some of them!) and messing around with Minecraft’s underlying format provided some good inspiration for our own future systems as well (like the planned terrain system!).
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
I’ve also
published the source code for the importer here, both for contributions and as a reference to showcase how some of the Neos’ internals works for writing your own plugins and importers in the future. This way, even though it was a fun side project, it should still provide some overall benefit to Neos.
And of course, if you’re not interested in any of the technical stuff, you can just import your Minecraft Worlds into Neos easily now! Simply download the Mineways tool and place it in the “Tools/Mineways” folder in your Neos installation, drag and drop the folder containing your Minecraft world and pick “Minecraft World” from the importer!
[h2]Community Maps[/h2]
[h3]Neos Museum by Gearbell[/h3]
For quite some time folks were wondering when we’d ever get a Museum of Neos. It’s only been 2 years since some folks have been here, but a lot has changed over the time. Props to Gearbell getting all the old assets together and showcasing how different everything used to be! Does anyone remember the wrist menus? Or the old old context menu. Much to explore here!
[h3]Black Mesa Train Ride by Elektrospy[/h3]
A map almost 1-2 years in the making is finally here! Have you ever wanted to do Half life in VR? Well I mean the train ride at least to Black Mesa. With all kinds of small touches, little aesthetics, and plenty and plenty of vending machines, this map will show you the effort, time and energy that went into making this map as comparable to the recent Black Mesa release. There’s a huge credits board in the map, so feel free to read up, as there’s a lot of different tools and showcases to share how the map was made! Thanks Elektrospy! Thank you everyone who assisted or helped in the madness
[h3]Hangout n Chill by Major Remp[/h3]
An amazing map and heavenly atmosphere is in this map as you spawn near a well maintained pond on top of this shrine somewhere in the sky. You can even see little spirit foxes and butterflies frolicking in the map as you explore. Seriously Good Job Major Remp! It’s a really well put together map!
[h3]Pack.png by Nicole+[/h3]
With the recent additions folks have been fast at work to import all their Minecraft maps that they’ve had from years past. Even iconic maps such as Pack.png have been involved in the import shenanigans. Thanks Nicole for setting this up for everyone! PS. Pack.png is the picture you see for the default texture pack in Minecraft.
[h3]Treehouse at Dusk by Cataena[/h3]
A Map by Cataena and Crew, a lovely treehouse in a forest in the middle of somewhere. You can hear the cricket and evening critters come alive as you scrummage around the treehouse to see what is around. There’s even an outhouse with a heart on it! Just in case you need to feel a little comfort in nature. Thanks Cataena!
[h3]Unwind by June[/h3]
A lovely light in the dark, this map shows off the creativity of users' abilities and what you can do in Neos. While a simple map, you can see the waves of grass ebb and flow into the dark ether. A map that just has a really nice aesthetic and shows off some really cool techniques with grass! Thanks for the map June!
[h2]Community Current Events[/h2]
[h3]Beat Syndicate NeosVR Soft Launch[/h3]
With the recent closing of WaveXR VR division, the community over there has been slowly migrating to other platforms, bringing good times, vibes and music to party to! With an initial launch lineup of Trash Tanuki, Glitch Euphoria, G-DUB, DJ Dett, TOTC, SynthaKat, Diamonddoge, and QueenHidi, it was quite the thriller this weekend!
[h3]Metaverse Showcase[/h3]
Recently, The Metaverse had a Metaverse Showcase hosted by DAWKY for users to all come together and show off what they had been making for the month of May. It was the first of it’s kind and folks really enjoyed the atmosphere! It’s the kind of place where folks can show off things they make, and grow as folks give feedback, or positive reinforcement to encourage people to grow and learn and make even more cool things! Try to make the next one if you can! It’s a good feeling to be here!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h3]Creator Jammaversary[/h3]
It’s the 2-year anniversary of Creator Jam! And this past week was an entire party of celebration of all the past creations and jams that folks have been making! Make sure to check out all the maps that Creator Jam has posted and the recent MeMe Off they did as well!
[h3]Community Updates: Mentors Wave 2 Closing,Mentor Workshops, & Office Hours[/h3]
Hi Everyone Turk here! Just a heads up Mentors Wave 2 will be closing soon, so if you haven't applied yet please do! I'll be taking all the applications into account and then updating everyone on the results personally. Thanks to everyone for making this community great!
After Wave 2 is closed we will be beginning Mentor Workshops! A day each week or other week hosted by Mentors, for new users to have hands on help, or learn techniques and tricks for folks to get into Neos. This will act as a stomping ground for many mentors, but also for many new users to come and learn. So stay tuned!
Alternatively Neos Team Members will be hosting 30min AMA type meetings where folks can join in, ask questions, and also give folks a little time each week to speak to Team Members about issues, or upcoming changes, or development questions. For more information look in the #office-hours channel in the NEOS discord.
[h2]What's Next: BEPUv2 upgrade[/h2]
With the first phase of desktop implementation done, we were facing a decision on which of the major features to put our main focus on next. Reworking more of the UI and UX has been one of the candidates, as well as the marketplace and licensing system, but since out of the major features BEPUv2 upgrade has the most votes both on GitHub and Patreon, we decided for this one instead!
The work has already started on replacing the physics engine with this higher performance version. Not only is the engine itself going to provide a speed boost, but we're redesigning how is it integrated with rest of Neos as well to get additional performance gains and fix variety of issues that have been plaguing Neos for a long while.
The upgrade is also a prerequisite for numerous other optimizations as well, notably with various efficient culling systems, utilizing some of the BEPUv2's acceleration structures.
You can watch the progress on our
official Discord in #devlog as well as on
this roadmap on GitHub. It will probably take some time to get a working version, but we'll be doing some public testing to catch any major breakages before it goes live, so keep an eye on the Discord if you'd like to help out!
And as always, huge thanks to everyone for supporting this project, notably our Patreon supporters and our creative community. Without you the place wouldn't be the same and we couldn't keep improving it every day!