Physical Fly & Noclip locomotion, CTAA Antialiasing, Xiexe Toon blend modes
Physical Fly, No-Clip, CTAA AntiAliasing, Xiexe toon feature parity with Flat-lit Toon, MetaMovie Additions, bugfixes
Hello, and welcome back to the Neos Weekly Update! We’ve got quite a lineup of new smaller features to talk about this week. We’ve renamed Fly to Noclip and have added in a new physical fly locomotion as the “proper” Fly.
CTAA Antialiasing has been added and Xiexe toon is now up to par with Flat-lit toon with its feature set! We’ve also got some smaller additions for the upcoming Metamovie project to keep things moving along nicely for it’s feature in the Biennale de Venezia film festival.
[h2]Physical Fly and Noclip[/h2]
We’ve got a new locomotion that will be installed automatically in newly created worlds (older worlds will have to upgrade their locomotion modules). Physical Fly works similar to our old Fly locomotion module, except your avatar will physically interact with objects instead of moving right through them. In this new locomotion mode, you have access to climbing, a feature not available in the old Fly locomotion module.
Fly has been renamed to Noclip (short for No Clipping) and has all of the original features of the original Fly locomotion. The new name better represents what it’s intended purpose is, as it’s primarily used for editing and easily moving through terrain and other structures.
[h2]Cinematic Temporal Anti Aliasing (CTAA)[/h2]
After many community requests, we’ve finally added Cinematic Temporal Anti Aliasing (CTAA) to Neos. Currently it’s an optional mode that needs to be enabled through a launch flag, but once all the bugs have been ironed out we can switch to it by default in place of the simpler FXAA.
Shifty, our Quality Control lead, has prepared some notes on CTAA below:
[h2]Xiexe Toon feature parity with Flat Lit Toon[/h2]
We’ve been working hard over time to bring Xiexe Toon up to par with all of the features that Flat-lit Toon have, so that we will eventually be able to remove Flat Lit and replace it entirely with Xiexe. Xiexe now supports transparency and other blending options, so now it can be fully transitioned to from Flat Lit Toon Toon.
We’re keeping Flat-Lit around just a little longer, so our community can let us know of any bugs they find with converting their Flat lit materials to Xiexe. This is everyone’s LAST CHANCE to let us know of bugs they encounter, so please, if your avatar or world is utilizing Flat Lit Toon, we highly encourage you to convert it to Xiexe toon before the forced conversion, so we can weed out and fix any last-minute bugs. We will fix any remaining bugs after, but you would need to live with the converted bugged materials until they’re ironed out.
[h2]MetaMovie Additions[/h2]
We’ve added some new features for a specific MetaMovie build of Neos, to ensure it’s an easy entry for the viewers of the MetaMovie. These new features won’t be accessible to the general population however, but were important for keeping things moving along nicely during the Venice film festival.
The reason we’re bringing it up here is we’ll be doing a test run of the MetaMovie itself, so keep a look out because we might have a need for testers!
[h2]Physics, UIX and other bugfixes[/h2]
As usual, Neos has also received many bugfixes, tweaks and other small improvements over the week. Notably we have fixed a bug where jumping would send collision end event from triggers, even if the player has remained completely within the trigger volume. This should make behaviors that depend on this (like parenting user to a vehicle) much more stable and reliable.
UIX and text rendering has also received various bugfixes, improving their reliability and ease of use. One of the major changes to text rendering was implementing missing support for tab characters, which would be previously completely ignored and reworked positioning of the text cursor, which previously would ignore the last space at the end of the text.
[h2]Community Highlights[/h2]
[h3]Music Visualizer World, by Orange[/h3]
This world is more like an immersive music video, as all of the objects within pulsate and move to the music! It’s a great place to show someone the potential of how music can affect a world. Great job, Orange!
[h3]Streamer Showcase: Snow SOS[/h3]
Snow has shown Neos off to thousands of viewers! Their sense of humor and comedic timing are amazing! If you watch Snow’s streams, I’m certain you’ll have a few laughs! Thank you, Snow SOS!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h3]Animated Dance Floor, by QueenHidi[/h3]
QueenHidi has made a fantastic dance world where the floor and lighting utilizes the pixels in a video of your choosing! Great for raves and parties! Nice world, QueenHidi!
[h2]What’s Next?[/h2]
We’re continuing to rework and extend the underlying subsystems for world and session management to support the new World UI and design new systems. The individual pieces are slowly coming together, so hopefully there will be much more to show within the upcoming days.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Thank you for checking out our Weekly Update. We’d like to wish our new users a happy time with learning Neos and hope they make some great new friends!
Hello, and welcome back to the Neos Weekly Update! We’ve got quite a lineup of new smaller features to talk about this week. We’ve renamed Fly to Noclip and have added in a new physical fly locomotion as the “proper” Fly.
CTAA Antialiasing has been added and Xiexe toon is now up to par with Flat-lit toon with its feature set! We’ve also got some smaller additions for the upcoming Metamovie project to keep things moving along nicely for it’s feature in the Biennale de Venezia film festival.
[h2]Physical Fly and Noclip[/h2]
We’ve got a new locomotion that will be installed automatically in newly created worlds (older worlds will have to upgrade their locomotion modules). Physical Fly works similar to our old Fly locomotion module, except your avatar will physically interact with objects instead of moving right through them. In this new locomotion mode, you have access to climbing, a feature not available in the old Fly locomotion module.
Fly has been renamed to Noclip (short for No Clipping) and has all of the original features of the original Fly locomotion. The new name better represents what it’s intended purpose is, as it’s primarily used for editing and easily moving through terrain and other structures.
[h2]Cinematic Temporal Anti Aliasing (CTAA)[/h2]
After many community requests, we’ve finally added Cinematic Temporal Anti Aliasing (CTAA) to Neos. Currently it’s an optional mode that needs to be enabled through a launch flag, but once all the bugs have been ironed out we can switch to it by default in place of the simpler FXAA.
Shifty, our Quality Control lead, has prepared some notes on CTAA below:
Originally posted by ShiftCTAA, or 'Cinematic Temporal Anti-Aliasing' is a post-processing effect that greatly reduces the amount of aliasing, or 'jaggies' that a user will see.
Aliasing is usually present at the edges of objects where there is a lot of contrast, but can also be seen on the inside surfaces of objects too. Generally speaking, it is a visually distracting 'shimmering'.
Being a temporal anti-aliasing solution, CTAA makes use of motion vectors (information about the positional change of the object each frame) in order to smooth the resulting image the user sees.
Users that wish to try out CTAA can do so by using the command line argument -CTAA. This command can be added to the launch options in Steam by right clicking on Neos VR in their Steam library, selecting properties, then setting launch options, and entering -CTAA.
There are additional command line arguments that allow you to control a few properties of CTAA.
-CTAATemporalEdgePower which has a range from 1.0 to 4.0, and is defaulted to 4.0.
-CTAASharpnessEnabled which can be set to either False, or True, and is defaulted to False.
-CTAAAdaptiveSharpness which has a range from 0.0 to 0.5, and is defaulted to 0.2.
The defaults were tuned to provide the greatest reduction in aliasing without introducing other distracting visual effects.
[h2]Xiexe Toon feature parity with Flat Lit Toon[/h2]
We’ve been working hard over time to bring Xiexe Toon up to par with all of the features that Flat-lit Toon have, so that we will eventually be able to remove Flat Lit and replace it entirely with Xiexe. Xiexe now supports transparency and other blending options, so now it can be fully transitioned to from Flat Lit Toon Toon.
We’re keeping Flat-Lit around just a little longer, so our community can let us know of any bugs they find with converting their Flat lit materials to Xiexe. This is everyone’s LAST CHANCE to let us know of bugs they encounter, so please, if your avatar or world is utilizing Flat Lit Toon, we highly encourage you to convert it to Xiexe toon before the forced conversion, so we can weed out and fix any last-minute bugs. We will fix any remaining bugs after, but you would need to live with the converted bugged materials until they’re ironed out.
[h2]MetaMovie Additions[/h2]
We’ve added some new features for a specific MetaMovie build of Neos, to ensure it’s an easy entry for the viewers of the MetaMovie. These new features won’t be accessible to the general population however, but were important for keeping things moving along nicely during the Venice film festival.
The reason we’re bringing it up here is we’ll be doing a test run of the MetaMovie itself, so keep a look out because we might have a need for testers!
[h2]Physics, UIX and other bugfixes[/h2]
As usual, Neos has also received many bugfixes, tweaks and other small improvements over the week. Notably we have fixed a bug where jumping would send collision end event from triggers, even if the player has remained completely within the trigger volume. This should make behaviors that depend on this (like parenting user to a vehicle) much more stable and reliable.
UIX and text rendering has also received various bugfixes, improving their reliability and ease of use. One of the major changes to text rendering was implementing missing support for tab characters, which would be previously completely ignored and reworked positioning of the text cursor, which previously would ignore the last space at the end of the text.
[h2]Community Highlights[/h2]
[h3]Music Visualizer World, by Orange[/h3]
This world is more like an immersive music video, as all of the objects within pulsate and move to the music! It’s a great place to show someone the potential of how music can affect a world. Great job, Orange!
[h3]Streamer Showcase: Snow SOS[/h3]
Snow has shown Neos off to thousands of viewers! Their sense of humor and comedic timing are amazing! If you watch Snow’s streams, I’m certain you’ll have a few laughs! Thank you, Snow SOS!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h3]Animated Dance Floor, by QueenHidi[/h3]
QueenHidi has made a fantastic dance world where the floor and lighting utilizes the pixels in a video of your choosing! Great for raves and parties! Nice world, QueenHidi!
[h2]What’s Next?[/h2]
We’re continuing to rework and extend the underlying subsystems for world and session management to support the new World UI and design new systems. The individual pieces are slowly coming together, so hopefully there will be much more to show within the upcoming days.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Thank you for checking out our Weekly Update. We’d like to wish our new users a happy time with learning Neos and hope they make some great new friends!
