Welcome to this week’s update on the latest in the NeosVR realm!
We’ve got lots of exciting news this week! We have broken the record of 100 concurrent users for the first time! Not only that, but we also reached our 1000 follower goal on Twitch! It has been a fun ride so far and we’re grateful to everyone watching, asking questions on our stream or just having fun!
The first Neos textbook, originally written in Czech, has also been translated into English! It still needs lots of proofreading and tweaks, if you’re interested in helping out, read more below and let us know.
RadiantUI is also progressing quite well, with the work now being very visual. The core of the new dash is nearly complete and will be swapped out soon, details below!
As part of the work we’ve also added some new shaders, including a brand new PBS Distance Lerp, which lets you create a variety of visual effects that are reactive to distances to points in the world.
[h2]Over 100 concurrent users for the first time![/h2]
We had a visit by Roflgator, a well known Twitch streamer, and he helped us reach over 100 concurrent users online for the first time! Thank you Roflgator! Thanks to your viewers, we were able to meet that milestone, and we’ve gained a lot of new Patrons to boot. We're overwhelmed with your support for this project and we look forward to your streams in the future!
[h2]We reached 1000 followers on Twitch, thank you everyone![/h2]
Our official Twitch channel has been slowly growing over time, but recently we managed to jump quite quickly and reach over 1000 followers! We’re grateful for everyone’s support on Twitch, it’s been a really fun ride so far and a great way to show everyone what Neos can do, talk about what’s been added or what’s being worked on and answer everyone’s questions.
In celebration, we’ll be holding a special celebration livestream within the next few weeks! We’ll have some fun things to announce, so keep an eye out, more information coming soon. In the meanwhile, you can watch this Friday’s thank you stream here:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h2]The first Neos textbook in English - looking for proofreaders![/h2]
Several months ago, the very first NeosVR textbook was published in the Czech Republic, written by doc. Ing. Mgr. Petr Klán, CSc, one of the university teachers using Neos VR as part of their educational courses.
Recently he has finished the initial translation of the book to English, which will make it available to a much wider audience. However before it’s released to the public it needs a final layer of polish.
Note: These previews are initial translations, the text is not finalIf you’d like to contribute, this is your chance! The book is about 100 pages long and covers the basics of virtual reality and Neos, covering everything from avatars, basic tools, gizmos to LogiX. It is written in LateX, so you will need a basic familiarity with it, as well as some familiarity with GitHub and pull requests.
We’d like to include the names of the contributors in the book itself (with the biggest contributor(s) appearing on the cover) and make the prints available to our users as a gift. The PDF version will be released for free for everyone.
If you’re interested in helping out, reach out to a team member (ideally Frooxius) and you will be given access to a private GitHub repository.
The print of the original Czech version[h2]New PBS Distance Lerp shader for fancy reactive effects[/h2]
This week we’ve added a few new shaders and features to existing shaders to support the new Radiant UI. As a bonus, we’ve also thrown in a brand new shader that was planned for a while: PBS Distance Lerp.
This is a special version of the physically based shader which is reactive to proximity to points in space. It will displace the mesh and control emission based on the distance to each point, with support for up to 16 independent points, each with its own emission color.
All the distances and ranges are individually controllable and the displacement direction can be overridden too. This allows for creation of a wide variety of reactive visual effects that are very efficient to render thanks to the whole operation being GPU accelerated.
We can’t wait to see what you’ll make with this new shader! You can watch some quick showcase of its capabilities from our last livestream here:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h2]Progress on RadiantUI - new dash is shaping up![/h2]
All the pieces of the last major parts of RadiantUI are finally coming together, in the form of the brand new dash. It’s not only designed to be significantly more functional and flexible than the old one, but also to have a more modern and polished look, featuring curved screen and sleek animations.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
The new dash is based on UIX and as such inherits all of its flexibility. It can house arbitrary UI’s, containerized into “screens” that can be switched between. Typically most screens will be Facet containers, allowing you to add, modify or remove any UI pieces as you prefer.
You can see the new dash in action in the devlog videos below. Please note that it’s still work in progress and things will change before the release, but it’s getting close. For what’s about to come, see the What’s Next section.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h2]Community Highlights[/h2]
This week's highlights are focused on two new worlds released by Bobotron!
[h3]Metamovie Update[/h3]
Jason Moore, the leader of the awesome MetaMovie project has released another video update, showing off the latest areas built for the project in Neos. Check it out below:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h3]Friday Night Vibes[/h3]
With movie watching in mind, this world resembles a small but fancy movie theatre world, with a popcorn maker and soda to boot! The theatre itself offers a range of seating, from lounge chairs, various kinds of couches and hot tubs as well for the ultimate movie watching experience!
[h3]Rubix Cube[/h3]
This environment is great for streaming, as shown in our most recent Friday Night stream where we celebrated our 1000 followers for watching us! It features a couple different seating areas, a dance floor and a ton of music to listen to, so come give this place a visit or see it first in our archived stream on Twitch!
[h2]What’s Next?[/h2]
There’s still lots of work to be done on the RadiantUI, but the core functionality of the new dash is nearly ready. We’ll be wrapping the existing UI into it next week and making some modifications so we can swap to this new dash in the official builds.
After this swap, we’ll start reworking and redesigning the old pieces of UI into Facets, gradually replacing them one by one. This way the change to a new UI will continue to be a more gradual process, allowing us to gather feedback as we go and correct the course before we stray too far.
There are exciting times ahead, with the overall development of RadiantUI reaching its final stretch, particularly one with the most visual changes!
And as usual, thanks everyone for your continuing support. We couldn't be doing this without you and we're excited to bring you more updates as we go!
