Building the metaverse bonfire with the community - Neos in 2020 in review (2/2)
This is continuation from part 1, read it here first if you haven't
[h3]Neos Festa[/h3]
The Japanese team and community have been very busy as well creating a wide variety of content and have organized a festival to showcase some of the creativity only only from the Japanese community, but international one as well.
The second Neos Festa brought a few dozen creators, with each creator submitting their creation in a form of a both, that would be loaded from a user interface, containing basic information on the author and links to their profiles.
Many of the submissions took the concept of a booth in very creative ways, with some simply having showcases of their art and gadgets, while others have packed entire environments, worlds and even interactive games within the entire booth.
It’s definitely a good place to visit to check out more of the amazing content and we hope to see many more festivals like this to celebrate the creativity across different cultures and communities.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h3]Localization[/h3]
Another benefit of our custom UI framework UIX is a full support for Unicode and support for TTF/OTF font files. Building on this, we have implemented the first part of the localization framework, allowing Neos’ UI text to be translated into different languages.
As English is a secondary language for me and my cofounder, we know that English interface can present a barrier for many people, like our Japanese community and localization can significantly improve accessibility.
Despite that, the effort that our community has put into translating Neos into different languages has still surprised us. At the time of writing, Neos is now available in 18 different languages (and 2 variants), with maintainers of most of them regularly ensuring that all newly added text is translated.
We’re really grateful that you’ve been so passionate about localizing Neos and it has been amazing to see it in so many different languages, even if we cannot understand them ourselves.
The localization process for core UI also helped test out the underlying systems for it, which we’ll be generalizing and making usable for any user created content as well in the future. With community members from across the world, this will make your own content more easily accessible to others, no matter what their native language is.
If you’d like to help with the localization process, check out the official GitHub repository here. We’re giving any large contributors a bonus 25 GB of storage space on Neos as a little show of thanks for their effort.
[h3]Wiki and tutorials[/h3]
Yet another front where the community has been helping out is documenting Neos on the official Wiki, covering everything from the basic controls, to documenting components and LogiX and their behaviors. Having a good Wiki helps out both existing and new users and we’re really happy that many of you have dedicated your time to help on this front.
We have seen many new tutorials as well, notably by ProbablePrime, who has now published over 200 tutorials on various topics on his YouTube channel, serving as a great resource for new users and even experienced content builders.
https://www.youtube.com/c/ProbablePrime/videos
Tutorials were built directly in Neos as well, whether small items to help teach various concepts and interactions, to whole tutorial worlds, such as the community made tutorial by Earthmark. Those have shown us some good ways to teach new users basic concepts and get them comfortable in Neos.
Our long term goal is to integrate this documentation and tutorials directly into a knowledge base in Neos itself, but those channels will still remain great resources to learn more about the platform and its capabilities.
[h3]Streamers, Opera performance, first scientific studies, use in schools and more[/h3]
There were many more exciting things happening within the community over the course of the year, too many to mention all. We’ve had a few prominent streamers (big thanks to Rolfgator, SnowSoS, KimplE and many others) come check out the platform and bring in a lot of new users to the platform and showcase some of its possibilities (another big thanks to International Dance Association and JJfxMultimedia for showcasing our 11-point tracking system) to a wider audience.
https://twitter.com/bbotics/status/1342896211251011584
IDA showing off breakdance moves with elbow tracking
Plenty of smaller streamers and community members also keep streaming Neos regularly, some devoted ones (shoutout to Rukio and everyone featured on his streams) nearly every day, giving people a glimpse into everyday life, creativity and shenanigans on the platform!
Near the end of the year, the Amadeus Artists in Vienna performed in a virtual opera performance in Neos VR, with users from all over the world watching. The performance combined real world capture with virtual environments, creating a beautiful way to experience the art.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Neos is also used in schools and in research. One of our most notable users, the Sydney Human Factors Research (SHFR) have used Neos to conduct several different studies, with the first one of them recently being published in a peer reviewed journal Plos One, with more coming.
We’re really proud that Neos could serve science as well and even more that members of the community have helped make those studies happen as well, showing the incredible power of real time collaboration across different groups, creating synergies and connecting people that would probably never have met otherwise.
Neos was also used to remotely teach two full semesters at the Czech technical university in Prague by doc. Ing. Mgr. Petr Klán, CSc. The students could watch the lectures from the comfort of their home and hand off their assignments virtually, as the school buildings were closed due to COVID.
NeosVR textbooks, written by doc. Ing. Mgr. Petr Klán, CSc. for his university coursehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGwB6y_JRcg
One of the university lectures, in Czech
Neos Classroom, a variant of Neos with the UI optimized for education running natively on the Oculus Quest, has also been utilized throughout the year at multiple secondary schools in the Czech Republic for remote education.
Overall 2020 has become the year where the events and community creations have crossed the point to where we can keep track of them all, let alone mention every single one deserving of a highlight, so we can only say thank you to everyone for this year. Thank you for your support, thank you for spreading the words about Neos and showing what is it capable of and thank you for your dedication to making Neos into a place full of life, creativity, joy, but also place for many to learn and grow or improve their professional work, particularly during this challenging year.
[h2]Overcoming challenges and plans for the future[/h2]
The growth of community this year hasn’t been without its challenges either. At the beginning of the year, we planned out many major features that we wanted to work on, but only some of them got prioritized, particularly the UI and UX. While all of them still remain on the roadmap, we needed to make some adjustments on how we prioritize and communicate features.
The UI update was a particularly difficult one, including on a personal level. Changing the fundamental ways of how everyone interacts with Neos brought a lot of emotion and conflicting opinions into the process, which was repeated several times as we replaced one part of the UI after another.
While the feedback and ideas were welcome and helped shape and improve the new UI significantly, the emotion and continuous pressure have taken their emotional toll. It also clashed with an effort to replace much of the UI quickly and focus on other tasks.
With no breaks in between or distractions for months this has paradoxically caused the process to take longer than it could’ve. The UI itself wasn’t the only challenge however, but rather an indication of a larger issue.
Back in 2019 the community was still small enough that any change was generally positive and most issues could be resolved quickly, but with growing numbers of users this became impossible.
With more users the variety of opinions and preferences on many of the changes increased. This led to a number of feature/change requests that couldn't all be resolved, or that would even be mutually exclusive. I'd also get more and more messages, spending a few hours almost every day just replying to people and resolving their issues.
Navigating this has become challenging, as any decision would still leave a group of people unhappy. I’ve had to start saying no to certain requests too, as they weren’t feasible, would cause too many problems or would clash with other features.
For me personally this was particularly difficult, as I always strive to ensure everyone’s happy and not being able to prevent or resolve all the resulting negativity even by spending all my time working had a compounding effect over the course of the year.
Adding to that, certain major and long awaited features, like the physics engine upgrade and many optimizations depending on it (either directly or indirectly through a planned workflow) have hit unexpected roadblocks (in case of physics, a bug in the JIT compiler), making the emotional drain worse.
As the support and community grew, I’ve pushed myself out of the equation when deciding on what to prioritize, trying to focus on what the community wants and needs and what we need for the project to grow, thinking that it would let us achieve the important milestones faster.
As an end result, I’ve found it harder and harder to work throughout the year. Making it more difficult to focus, particularly on more complex features and issues that I’ve wanted to address for a while (e.g. the full body hips fix) and making it more difficult to generally stay positive and creative.
As the pressure got worse, I constantly felt that I’m doing everything wrong and negativity dominated my every day. I had become afraid to talk about things publicly, worried they would be nitpicked, and turned into long arguments, responded to with passive aggression or used against later, even when I just shared some progress update, some behind the scenes details on what I was working on or the status of some feature.
I love Neos and the community too much for something like that to ever make me stop, so I kept going despite that, but I’ve learned that this approach doesn’t make the work go faster. Instead the opposite occurred. As this mental state ended up paralyzing my ability to make decisions or take actions. It would leave me staring blankly at my notes, or the code when pushing myself to work.
I would still try to move as fast as I could, but would end up working on issues and features that were not as complex had as few complications as possible, and the lowest potential of a negative reception. This was an important lesson for me and something I'm having to learn to deal with, as I focus on ramping up my efficiency again to make it easier to focus on the harder problems.
For the year ahead, we will instead switch back to the approach we took before to maintain better efficiency and keep the project moving faster. Instead of working on a single big thing for months uninterrupted, trying to get them to perfection based on the feedback and reports, you’ll see us switch between different priorities more.
That way we’ll advance different aspects of the platform bit by bit, rather than focusing on a single one. While it might take longer for any individual feature to get to its polished state, overall it will help maintain development momentum and keep things fresh and fun, allowing us to polish the features with a new perspective, rather than exhaustion.
You will also see more features implemented and bugs fixes that weren’t particularly high priority, but were easy enough to handle or particularly fun to work on. This was previously part of my process and I’ve slowly started including it again over the past few months, because it helps me things mentally and builds momentum to tackle the more difficult ones needed by the community.
Over the course of the year we have also expanded our team and delegated more responsibilities, particularly with moderation, quality control (handling bug reports, feature requests and so on) and shifted towards GitHub and more formal/efficient methods of communication.
Our team has helped me tremendously over the course of the year, taking care of different tasks and responsibilities and redirecting a lot of the negativity away from me, so I can focus more on the core development. They also helped advance the project on different fronts and helped collect feedback and bug reports from the growing community.
This transition caused some troubles with public communication though, as I was still being overwhelmed and the team searched for ways to shield me from a lot of the stress. As time goes and we give these things more structure, the process will become smoother.
[h3]Making sure your feedback is heard[/h3]
As the growth continues, we will be leaning more on those formal methods to keep the process manageable and make sure that as many people as possible get their concerns addressed. We hope that you’ll help us out with this process, whether by simply voting on the issues relevant to you on GitHub, providing proper structured feedback or teaching other users how to best share their own concerns and suggestions.
We won’t be able to address every single feedback of concern, so making sure to properly prioritize the ones that are affecting many users, this will continue to become more important. Using search functionalities and keeping up with the channels we put in place will also be more necessary as same questions get repeated more and more.
By upvoting issues on GitHub that you feel are important and encouraging users dealing with the same issue or wanting the same feature you can help us with this process and help ensure we focus on things that matter to the community.
If you’re creating a new issue yourself, following the instructions and filling out all the information in a clean and concise way will help improve its chances of being addressed sooner, compared to issues that are missing information, are too vague or difficult to read and process. The extra few minutes you put into your issue can save hours, even days of work on our end.
While we also understand the passion or how frustrating some things can be, we appreciate when those emotions are kept outside of the discussion. This helps keep the focus purely on the issue and prevent unnecessary stress. We’re humans too and when things are kept polite and positive, we work faster and better when we’re in it together!
Eventually we’d like to integrate the issue tracker fully into Neos itself, making it easier for users to report bugs or request features, without having to register another account and use external websites, but for the time being GitHub is going to be the primary point for those resources.
But above all, please realize that we’re not machines. We might be pushing lots of builds out, but we’re still humans and there's a limit to how much we can do and we’ll make some mistakes too. Work with us to make our job easier. Being passive aggressive, rude or angry doesn’t help anyone and only makes dealing with the issues harder and slower. Even worse, over time it results in burnout, which can push the features you care about by several months.
We’d like to keep sharing more things on development with you publicly, but that means sharing the bumps and warts that are a natural part of the process. If those cause problems and draw away the attention from the development, we’ll have to keep them internal until we’re sure that there’s no risk of shuffling priorities or pushing something for later.
We would also love to hang out with the community as regular users more and just have fun as users of the platform, rather than talk about issues and answer questions most of the time. Using the proper channels for those goes a long way (big thanks for everyone who does, we really appreciate it!) and makes it easier for us to pop up in public more without getting overwhelmed.
Most importantly our goal is to keep the development fun and engaging, to keep the ball rolling and deliver new features to you faster. Sometimes you’ll see certain things prioritized that might not be the most urgent for the community, but that help us shake up things and keep the overall pace.The Universe was born from Chaos, so it should only make sense that the Metaverse comes from a little bit too.
I appreciate everyone’s support and kindness throughout this year, they have helped tremendously when dealing with the negative parts and I hope that even the less urgent additions will keep making your Neos experience better every day and bring more fun things to play with.
[h3]Prioritizing Desktop Mode[/h3]
After a lot of debates with the team, and considering the weight the decision has on the community and ourselves, we have decided to prioritize proper desktop support as the next major feature. There are several compelling reasons to prioritize it right now, at least for the first phase of it, despite our general focus on VR first.
When designing Neos, we’re always thinking on how to make the interactions natural for VR and take full advantage of it and we’re taking the same approach with the desktop mode as well. It will be built to utilize the same subsystems that were built for VR, but make them easy to use with keyboard and mouse (or a gamepad) and unify the development for both modes going forward.
Proper desktop support has been one of the most requested major features for a while, with many people without VR headsets wanting to play, numerous users even leaving bad reviews due to the lacking support.
For a while we have ignored these requests and focused solely on VR, but with the growth of the VR community and many new users coming over and making their home in Neos, more and more users ended up moving back to other platforms, or not making the switch in the first place, because they would have to leave their non-VR friends behind.
Making the desktop experience a lot more comfortable and featured will prevent this splitting of mixed friend groups and help the growth of the VR side as well. Lack of desktop support in Neos has been a problem for event organizers as well, as event-goers are often mixed desktop/VR groups as well.
Having the desktop mode in place before other major features will help as well, particularly the Neos Store (marketplace). Once unveiled, this can bring a lot of attention from investors and buyers coming from other platforms. Requiring VR to fully interact could be a factor that puts a lot of them off, which could end up hurting the creators selling their items as well as the Neos Credits ICO and anyone holding NCR as a result.
With desktop mode already in place, all other major additions and improvements will potentially impact a much broader audience, bringing even more users to the platform.
We have already started designing the architectural changes and additions to support desktop play, unifying Neos’ underlying systems. Our current screen mode is only a quickly implemented hack, that (poorly) re-implements a few of the core systems.
By building the desktop support properly on the same subsystems that VR uses, we’ll not only make it more functional, but also eliminate a lot of recurring problems and issues (how many times have you heard the response “Desktop mode isn’t currently supported”?) and allow us to develop both desktop and VR as one going forward.
As a nice bonus, it will help with debugging as well, as some of the subsystems aren’t currently emulated or difficult to use (e.g. locomotion) and require me to jump into VR headset to test every change. The workflow will improve for mobile builds as well, allowing to quickly test mobile builds on a regular phone, without having to jump into the Quest and wait for it to boot up.
One more crucial reason why desktop is being prioritized is also a bit of a personal one. With the momentum on optimizations lost due to the unexpected roadblock and waiting on 3rd party fixes, desktop mode presents a very safe choice, as it has virtually no risk of dependencies and unexpected roadblocks, affecting only Neos’ own codebase on which we have full control. Working on this will allow to rebuild some of the momentum, which will then transfer to other major features as well.
[h3]What’s planned for desktop mode?[/h3]
As mentioned above, building the proper desktop mode on the same subsystems will help to unify parts of the codebase and make it consistent with how playing in VR behaves as well. In practice this means that things that currently don’t work or are very buggy will be now functional like locomotion modules (e.g. being able to walk and jump around), avatar behaviors, tool/gadget interactions or properly respecting the permission system.
The crucial part is making those interactions easy to use. We have a few subsystems planned for this, which will use a combination of the IK with the new capabilities of the interaction system from the UI overhaul to achieve this. For example when equipping a gun, the system will make your character automatically point at the same point that your mouse cursor is.
Some very early notes on the Desktop supportWe plan on supporting both first person and third person mode as well, to allow for a variety of play and interaction, with third person supporting free-cam for easy editing as well. If you have a VR headset, the system will also support instantly switching between the two as well, rather than having to restart Neos, which will not only benefit the creative workflow, but let you stay in a world and talk with people if you need to take your headset off for a while.
Building out the basic interaction methods and the first and third person modes is our immediate goal, as this will allow desktop users to have the (nearly) same capabilities as VR users do, unify the system for content creators, removing the needs for any hacks for screen users and make the usage a lot more comfortable.
However our plans go beyond that, allowing for things like splitting up the viewport or pinning in-world UI’s to the screen (e.g. inspectors) for easy and quick access. We’d like to integrate face tracking solutions as well, to give the avatars a lot more expressivity.
Some other features will become more relevant/viable as well, such as input binding system and support for gamepads. Whether those extra features will be implemented now or later in the future is currently up in the air, we might prioritize different features, like the physics engine or more UI to mix things up, but hopefully it gives you a better idea of what our long term goals are.
Regardless the initial implementation is the most crucial, as it will make Neos significantly more accessible to users and simplify the development going forward, not just for us, but also for anyone building content in Neos.
[h3]Mentor Team[/h3]
In line with the moderation team, we’re also planning to unveil a team of mentors - community members who are interested in helping out others in official capacity. Mentors will be part of the moderation team. Turk has been appointed to lead the mentor section by Veer and will be responsible for organizing other mentors.
Helping out new users and each other is at the core of our community and something that many members already participate in (and we hope continue to participate even outside of the Mentor program) and we feel that it is a good way to help add some level of organization to the process for those who are interested.
There will be more information on the mentor team, so keep an eye out on our weekly updates if you’re interested to learn more.
[h3]More UI work, more optimizations, physics, Neos store[/h3]
Following the desktop mode, we’ll be interweaving work on several major and minor features, depending on what’s most efficient at the time. There are a few main priorities that we’ll be choosing from.
We plan on reworking more of the UI, most importantly the inventory, file browser and contacts and adding the workshop, allowing for easy sharing and searching for items, tools, avatars and any other creations in Neos, providing a proper solution instead of public shared folders. This will help new users get started too, as it’ll make it much easier to find an avatar.
With the JIT compiler bug in Unity fix recently on the way, the upgrade to BEPUv2 will be unblocked and swapping the physics engine and implementing heavy optimizations built with some of its functionality is going to be back on the menu. This will get the ball rolling for other related optimizations as well, making Neos run smoother as we go.
Not only that, but adding full support for rigid body physics will be on the top of the list as well and will happen when possible, bringing a whole new level of creativity.
Recently another blocking bug was fixed (good timing with the beginning of the new year!) as well in the libVLC library, which will allow us to continue with its integration and replace the aging UMP, improving reliability and some functionality.
Another crucial feature will be the Neos store (marketplace), giving everyone a way to sell their creations and make a living by building content in (or for) Neos. The Neos store isn’t technically a feature on itself, but rather a combination of two different features - the workshop mentioned above and the license / object ID system.
The latter will allow for marking any objects and assets with authorship and ownership information, controlling their distribution and use and allowing users to purchase a license to use the object in their own sessions.
Submitting these items to the workshop will allow them to be browsed or searched for resulting in a functional store. The benefit of this approach is that content can be bought by organically discovering it in a world or session - for example another user playing with a gadget in a session.
While those are our next main goals, they will be likely interweaved with other changes as well and adjustments based on the current needs of the project, community and the team. Our goal is to strike a good balance and keep the momentum going, so we can get to other major additions on our roadmap as soon as possible as well.
[h2]To the year ahead[/h2]
Neos is a long term project for us and we believe that the metaverse needs to be built properly, without taking shortcuts that would compromise and stall the development at some point in the future. We’re grateful that you, our community also understand and support that goal and that we can share this journey together.
The years of work on this project had many ups and downs. We’ve seen projects with teams and funding magnitudes of order larger than ours unveiling their own stabs at the metaverse while we were still laying out the underlying foundations for the engine powering ours. Now while many of those projects are gone or defunct, we’re continuing to grow, exceeding the daily user bases they ever had, still with only a fraction of the resources.
All of that is in big parts thanks to you and your support, passion and hard effort in building the metaverse with us, contributing your thoughts, creations, tools, tutorials and time organizing events, helping new users and building incredible projects to show what the platform is already capable of and what it can be.
The joy and level of creativity keeps amazing us more with each passing day and we can’t even imagine how much more will come as the community and our feature-set keeps growing. We want to make Neos as awesome as you make Neos special. Thank you for being with us and thank you for supporting this project!
Watching the New Year fireworks as the number of concurrent users kept climbing towards our all-time record.
Pushing the limit of user count after some optimizations
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
Patreon growth over the course of Neos' existence. Graph from graphtreon.com
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.