Neos VR News

Hello everyone!

Welcome back to the weekly update. We have some wonderful news this time around: The new context menu has been released, our patrons have chosen the name Radiant UI for our new UI system, we’re highlighting some excellent tools by our amazing Japanese users and we’ll be talking about our new Wednesday stream.



[h2]Radiant UI[/h2]
We held a vote for our lovely Patreon supporters to choose the new UI name and they’ve chosen Radiant UI! The future is looking bright for our new user interface, and this name shines just as bright!

The name was initially suggested by one of our newest Team members, Shifty. As most of you agree, they’ve come up with a great one. Thank you for shaping the future of Neos and participating in the vote, everyone!

[h2]New Context Menu[/h2]
The new context menu has been released, the very first piece of Radiant UI!



This new menu is replacing our old wrist menu system, creating a much more pleasant experience where one no longer has to torque and twist their wrist around to make selections. It doesn’t block the user's input and automatically closes when the hand is moved away, fixing common frustrations for new users.

Now it’s all within a simple radial menu that appears in front of your hand. Some options that are there now will be moved to a more appropriate area when we release the new dash, but for now most of the options you are used to seeing will be in the new menu.

It has also received a lot of improvements and additions based on your feedback and there’s more to come still, so let us know your thoughts and experiences while things are still in flux!

[h2]Wednesday Livestream for Beginners / New Users[/h2]
We now have an official Wednesday stream, hosted by Nexulan, where we answer your questions about Neos. No question is too big or too small, we’ll walk you through our UI and get you acquainted with all of the basics. If you’ve got a question, whether you’re old or new, please join us and we’ll help you out!

You can also watch the recording of the first stream here in case you missed it live and get a proper Neos crash course on how to get started with Neos, setup your avatar and meet some awesome people to hang out with! Make sure to follow us on Twitch to catch the next stream.

We have also showcased the new context menu, so if you'd like to see it in action watch the beginning of the video.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h2]Inventory public folder unpublishing[/h2]

Recently there were concerns raised about the public inventory folder functionality in Neos, where those items were listable in the public API. To address this issue, we’ve made two changes.

First, the public API will now no longer list inventory items unless a path is explicitly provided. This preserves functionality of inventory links, but prevents anybody from getting a list of all public items without knowing the exact path.

Second, we have added a new button to the inventory. If you select a shared folder (with blue tab on the upper left corner), you will see a purple hand. By clicking on this button twice, you will unpublish the folder and all of its contents. If you have folders that you have accidentally published before or that you don’t want anyone accessing, you can use this button.



However despite those mitigations, we recommend using the public folder function (orange Envelope button) only for folders you want to actually share with the public. It is not suitable for sharing items privately with just a few users.

As an alternative, you can send items to other users via the messaging system or if you're a Patreon supporter, request creation of a group. We plan on having fine grained inventory sharing in the future, which will allow sharing of folders with specific users in a secure way.

[h2]Danger Nightly Tester Group[/h2]

To help test builds before they go out to the public branch, we have created a new role called “Danger Tester” on our official Discord. If you’re interested in helping to test out any builds that we’re not certain are free of breaking errors, contact Shifty on the Discord.

Whenever there’s a build that needs testing and early feedback, we’ll ping you in the #testing channel. This is completely voluntary, but any help is appreciated!

[h2]Scale aligner, performance improvements and more[/h2]

Apart from the big updates, Neos has received some new smaller additions, like Scale Aligner component, new LogiX nodes, lots of UIX bugfixes for canvases breaking and stopping to update and some significant performance improvements as well. Check out the #neos-updates channel on our official Discord for details!

[h2]Community Highlights[/h2]

[h3]Custom Menu Installer by Rhenium & Aetoriz[/h3]

Click the image, it links to a video showing the system in action

This is amazing! Rhenium and Aetoriz have been creating so many great tools to improve productivity and quality-of-life within Neos since they’ve joined and this is one of their newest additions.

You can store items, emotes, and just about anything you can save into your inventory (everything, essentially), and have them at a few clicks of the new Context menu. The setup process is a breeze, so give it a shot! Many thanks to you two!

[h3]Cherry Blossom Festival, by Neos East Japan[/h3]

Neos East Japan, a team of extremely dedicated and creative japanese community members, have put together a beautiful cherry blossom festival inside Neos. It was a fun day, with lots of users from the whole community!



[h2]What’s Next?[/h2]
Following the polishing of the new context menu, we’re now working on a new gripping, equipping and laser system, to streamline the whole experience and open up more options for control.

Thank you again for joining us during our weekly update! We can’t wait to tell you all about our progress next week, as Frooxius is working hard to bring us the next steps in the UI update.

Please make sure to join us for our streams, especially our Wednesday stream if you have questions! You can even join us in-world to get a walk-through. See you then!

Fixing up some extra issues with context menu and UI. Also two semi-major optimizations that should make things run a bit smoother! (I've done some profiling and found more things that cost CPU/GPU time, but those will be optimized in the future).

[h2]Optimizations:[/h2]
- Reworked global (skybox) reflections to only update on skybox changes, saving up a lot of CPU overhead for rendering them every frame
- Heavily optimized SkinnedMeshRenderer connector updates, avoiding constant rebuilding of materials, bones and other properties when they haven't changed
- Optimized blendshape updates on SkinnedMeshRenderer
- Added more reference breaking/cleanup to (Skin)MeshRenderer connector to avoid more potential memory leaks

[h2]Bugfixes:[/h2]
- Fixed stray clicks to UIX canvases when the trigger is held, particularly when using the flick selection with the context menu
-- This fixes options being immediatelly clicked in the Create New dialog (reported by @Shifty)
-- Also fixes randomly clicking options when opening inspector, causing objects/avatars get messed up (reported by @Rukio)
- Fixed broken libVLC library after recent Unity update due to Unity build process changes, causing various multimedia files not to play
-- This fixes MP3 files not play (reported by @ProbablePrime) and anything other than MP4 not playing (reported by @Zane)
- Fixed Undo/Redo buttons in the context menu not being properly updated (having proper labels and gray out) when a tooltip is equipped (reported by @Shifty)

Hello everyone and welcome to our weekly update!

We have an exciting announcement this week. After recently reaching our goal of 300 Patreon supporters (thank you!), we have begun working on the promised community developer fund. Neos is a platform that’s alive thanks to you, our community and creators.

Your creativity and passion is what makes this project a success and allows us to grow and we want to share that with you. We have introduced the Community Developer Fund Token (CDFT) as a way to reward the passionate contributors in our community.

In another news, the first piece of new UI is nearly there, the new context menu! There’s also some progress on getting Neos to run with IL2CPP runtime to provide a performance boost. Details below!



[h2]Neos Community Developer Fund (CDF)[/h2]
As you may already know, Neos has its own currency called Neos Credits, or NCR. It’s a cryptocurrency minted as a reward for our Patreon and Ethereum supporters. A way to share the current and future value created by Neos back to the community that is making it happen.



We are allocating a 2 million portion (4%) of all the NCR that will ever exist (50 million) to the first phase of the Neos Community Developer Fund, which has been designed to provide support to the extraordinary community efforts we see. The Neos Community Developer Fund will ensure good liquidity for awarded members, and open a path for even more CDF funding of their projects in the future.

[h3]How it works[/h3]
During CDF Phase 1, community members contributing extraordinary value will be rewarded each portion of the 2,000,000 CDF Tokens that automatically convert into 2,000,000 NCR. Every 25th NCR minting batch is reserved to convert 1/20th of all CDFT to NCR.

[h3]How much is Phase 1 of the CDF worth?[/h3]
It depends. If all holders hypothetically sold their CDFT right after each NCR mint, it would bring them $11,032,178. If they wait for the initial coin offering (ICO) to finish, that would make it $59,061,185, and if/when Neos becomes a really successful project with the same market cap at some point as Ethereum has right now, that would make it worth approximately $634 million.

[h3]Not bad, how do I apply?[/h3]
Neos Teams will try to review every exceptional, deserving community member we know of. You may also apply through the review application form to provide us with context of your contributions, and future plans for Neos. You may also recommend or vouch for someone else. Recommendations of deserving users are especially appreciated.

[h3]Review process[/h3]
Teams will try to reach a consensus based on this approximate guiding criteria:

1) How much value is the community member bringing, and for how many people?
2) How long term are their efforts?
3) How many new users do their contributions attract?

So efforts that bring a lot of value to a small amount of Neos users, for example accessibility tools, as well as efforts that bring value to a lot of users, such as highly popular worlds and games will qualify. The third criterion carries less weight.

[h3]Timeline[/h3]
We would like to have a good estimate of the number of CDFT awards granted by the time batch 50 of the ICO is reached, and to have all CDFT awarded prior to reaching batch 100.

[h3]Phase 2 and beyond[/h3]
After batch 100 of the ICO, we will have enough Ethereum, and other monetary assets to officially start the NCR Buyback Programme to increase liquidity for existing CDFT holders, and to provide NCR for Community Developer Phase 2 and beyond.

[h3]The future and reality of Neos[/h3]
In conclusion, I’d like to say that it’s hard to predict the future of Neos, how our forward looking technical design decisions, engine and data models, VR hardware and other interfaces in general will work out.

It's hard to say how popular Neos will become, but we're pushing towards the goal of being one of the most popular metaverse and spatial computing platforms. It has the potential to get big fast or get big slowly and we will be working tirelessly towards that goal. We’re in this for the long run.

At the end of the day the only thing that really matters is that we and everyone involved have all found many new friends thanks to Neos and we treasure you beyond belief.

To find more about Neos, and its vision, check out the Neos White Paper. For questions, and discussions, join the Neos Discord, and check out the #💲neos-credits-ncr channel.

Thank you all for your current, and future support of Neos. 💛

[h2]Progress on new UI (help us name it!)[/h2]
One of the pieces of the new UI has nearly finished , the new context menu! This will very likely go out tomorrow, replacing the existing radial menus. It is designed to be much simpler to operate, requiring to just point and click and to avoid blocking other controls, which often confuses new users.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

While other parts of UI are still being worked on, the context menu will still contain options that will later on be part of the new dash, like the locomotion settings or scaling options. We’ll also do tweaking as we go to make sure it’s quick and comfortable to use, let us know what you think once you play with it!

One of the nice benefits of the new menu is that it will improve the performance as well. During our profiling sessions, we have found that the existing radial menus eat massive amounts of CPU time. With the new one being designed in a much more efficient way and built on top of UIX, this should free up some resources.

Another part of the new UI that’s being worked on in parallel is a styling system for UIX. This will allow defining styles somewhat similar to CSS, that will define how the UI looks in a unified way. This will serve as the basis for easily customizing the look of the new UI and making custom themes.

The technical design of this system is still being worked on, but here are some technical design notes if you’re curious!



[h3]Help us name the new UI![/h3]
While the technical parts of the new UI are progressing well, we have gotten stuck on the most feared programming problem… naming!

Rather than just referring to the new UI as… well “the new UI”, we’d like to give it a proper moniker, to signify its status as the serious Neos UI that we put real effort in and make it easy to refer to the whole system of new dash, facets, styling, contextual menus and other pieces under a nice catchy name (also I need to name it properly in the code, it’s been bugging me for a week now).

To go along with the whole “Facet” gem metaphor for the modular pieces of UI, we have thought up a few potential candidates:

Radiant UI - based on the radiant gemstone cut. This is a nice metaphor as this cut is typically rectangular (like UI!) and the name could also be interpreted as glowing or radiating, like a hologram.

Quartz UI - another gemstone metaphor. Quartz is a very “versatile” mineral, that comes in many forms and colors, an aspect it will share with the new UI!

OnyX UI - one of the many forms of quartz. It has a cool sounding name that fits along with the likes of LogiX, BaseX, CodeX and other Neos systems. The actual mineral is very dark and matte though, so doesn’t quite fit conceptually.

Jade UI - after the green mineral. Metaphor doesn’t quite work though as it’s not usually cut (no facets) and is green.

Ruby UI - similar to above, but red. This one is pretty shiny! Could be confused with the Ruby programming language.

Gemstone UI - very direct, not much of a metaphor here.

Glint UI - shiny! Simple and cute, who doesn’t like a pretty gem?

Baguette UI - based on the baguette gem cut. It’s a real thing! But no... just no xD In fact I don’t trust you to even put this one into the poll!

What sounds best to you? If you’re a Patreon supporter, you can head over to the Patreon poll and vote for your favorite! If you have any other suggestions, post them in the comments and if we like them we’ll add them to the poll.

[h2]Getting Neos to work with IL2CPP for performance boost (WIP)[/h2]
Another of the long running background projects has recently made some important strides. Neos is currently running inside of Unity, using the Mono runtime. For a long time this has put some limitations on certain optimizations, due to suboptimal JIT compiler and lack of access to certain modern features of the CLR.

One alternative that we were pursuing for a while is getting Neos to run with IL2CPP runtime, which converts the code to C++ and compiles with standard C++ compilers with aggressive optimizations.

Until recently this was blocked due to bugs in the IL2CPP pipeline, but after those were fixed in the latest Unity release and working more on Neos’ codebase to make it compile and run well with this runtime, it’s now nearly fully functional!

Apart from audio and some cloud functionality not working well yet, the build pretty much works with a nice performance boost. There’s still more to do before this is ready and more tweaking afterwards, but the results so far are promising. We’ll keep you updated as we progress more!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Note that the example above wasn’t compiled with maximum optimizations. With heavier optimizations the performance gains were even higher, with still more room to grow.

[h2]Community Highlights[/h2]
[h3]Viva La Villa, by Bobotron[/h3]
Yet another world designed by Bobotron for relaxing with friends. The lighting in this world is superb, providing a relaxed yet dynamic atmosphere.



[h3]Rocky Greenhaven, by Enverex[/h3]
A serene landscape, seemingly fully designed by nature, rests along a shore in the evening sun. This wide-open land full of valleys and hills is great for shooting off fireworks and having virtual barbeques!



[h2]What’s Next?[/h2]
We’ll be releasing a new build with the new context menu very soon, very likely tomorrow! Enjoy the last moments with the current radial menus, because they’ll be gone soon! ;) After this there will be tweaks and modifications based on your feedback and more pieces of the new UI.

The things coming up next is a new laser system, having it and the context menu render through objects to avoid objects obscuring it and reworking some other basic interactions, like grabbing and equipping.

As we’re picking up the pace on the new UI you should see more updates come soon! Thank you for reading our weekly update, let us know if you have any questions and we’ll see you at the next one!

Welcome to our weekly update! This week has been a bit quieter, as the development was scattered over some smaller additions and fixes. Nevertheless we’re picking up speed on the new UI, the new context menus should come next week.

We’ve also done another livestream dedicated to the community creations of the month, so if you missed it, give it a watch!



[h2]March Community Showcase[/h2]

At the end of every month, we showcase all the amazing community creations during our regular Friday livestream. In case you missed the stream live, you can watch the recording below!

Curiously we saw an uptick in worlds largely built from primitives inside of Neos, rather than being imported from an external 3D modelling program. Regardless of how the content was made, we’re always amazed by everyone’s creativity and passion!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h2]Updated Roadmap on GitHub[/h2]

Based on feedback, we have reworked and updated Neos’ roadmap on GitHub, to make it easier to read and include better information about our plans for the future and things currently underway.

You can find the long term planned features, the major upcoming features and things that are currently being worked on, as well as related GitHub issues where applicable. We hope this will give you a better idea of what’s planned for Neos and roughly when it’s coming.

Keep in mind though that our approach to development is quite flexible, so priorities can change based on the needs of community and Neos and new features in the list can be added (the list itself isn’t fully comprehensive). It’s why your feedback on these things matters, so let us know what you think!

[h2]Additions to Xiexe Toon, more new UI components, some optimizations and other improvements[/h2]

As usual, we have released a bunch of builds this week, but the work was mostly scattered over smaller features and additions. The newly added Xiexe Toon shader has received more options (including cutout rendering) and optimizations.

We have added some new LogiX nodes as well for working with boolean vectors, Rects (used in UI), math and more. The CircleAligner component has also been expanded with new options for better control and flexibility.

Some time was spent also profiling Neos’ codebase and making smaller optimizations where possible, as well as looking into ways to update the runtime (e.g. compiling with IL2CPP) to get a big performance boosts, but currently this work is more in the background with uncertain results.

Lastly, there are some new UIX additions with bits and pieces of the new UI, particular circle segment UI elements and layouts for the new menus. These will serve as the basis for the new context menus, but you can use them with your own UI already!

This devlog video show them in action (WARNING: Has loud music on)

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h2]Community Highlights[/h2]

[h3]Legoshi’s Dorm Room by Ballistic[/h3]

This room, from the BEASTARS series, was lovingly fully recreated by Ballistic. The textures were created in Gimp and are utilizing the Xiexe shader we recently implemented, but every object was created using only Neos’s built-in tools. If you’re a fan of the series, you should absolutely give this room a visit!



[h3]Space Out by Coffee[/h3]

Low gravity, low lights, relaxing music! Coffee’s Space Out world is great for doing just what the name entails, as well as a great environment for conversation with friends!



[h2]What’s Next?[/h2]

We’ll be replacing the radial menus for new ones next week, replacing the lasers/remote interactions and adding the snapping mechanism to tools and items, so get ready for the change!

It will probably get a bit of getting used to, but we think that the replacements will allow for easier and faster use for everyone, so it’ll be worth it.

Thank you again for reading our weekly update and for supporting this project! Whether it’s by simply hanging out in the community, building awesome content or supporting us on Patreon, Twitch and other sources, it lets us keep focused on making this metaverse better every day!

Hello everyone!

Welcome back to the weekly update. We have some wonderful news; The Neos Team has grown again! We have three lovely new members who have been working very hard alongside the rest of the team for quite a while now. If you wish to, give them congratulations when you see them online in Neos!

We also have a new, highly configurable addition to our Materials, the popular Xiexe Toon Shader used by many in other platforms. Over time, this will replace our current “Unlit Toon” shader. We’ll be going over why this is a pretty important step forward for our platform below.

COVID-19 has been changing the way a lot of us are communicating. The Neos Team is very thankful that we can at least provide you all with a virtual universe where you can safely communicate face-to-face in these trying times. If you ever feel lonely, come give us an in-world visit! There’s always friendly faces here. We’re all in this together, so let’s keep going strong!



[h2]Welcome to the team, Lewis, Rue, and Shifty![/h2]

We have three lovely new team members who have been working hard the last few months to help our community grow and thrive.



In all the excitement we forgot to take a proper group picture, so these two random ones will have to do!

[h3]Lewis Snow: Neos Team Sound Engineer![/h3]
Lewis has been a part of the community for quite some time now, and has been making some amazing items for everyone to enjoy within Neos. He’s quite multifaceted in his talents, ranging from modeling, world creation, LogiX creation, and sound design. He hardly needs an introduction, though, as he’s quite the social butterfly and is well-known throughout the community.

[h3]Rue Shejn: Neos Team 3D Modeler[/h3]
Ever since Rue has joined, he’s shown a huge interest in helping Neos move forward. Within his first day, he built out a world using only in-world tools. Now he’s progressed on to 3D modeling from within Blender and bringing his creations into Neos. He’s been working alongside our main 3D artist, Aegis_Wolf, for a couple months now on the MetaMovie project, improving his skills and showing his team spirit.

[h3]Shifty: Neos Team Bug Management/Triage[/h3]
From day one, Shifty has shown a huge interest in learning all they could about Neos, and has used their knowledge to assist anyone in need. You’ll frequently see Shifty in our official Discord server’s #questions-help channel, eager to answer any questions they come across, and taking the burden of helping users with troubleshooting bugs off of the shoulders of the rest of the Neos Team.

[h2]Xiexe Toon Shader[/h2]

Based on popular community demand, we have added a new Toon shader, to replace the aged Cubed’s Flat Lit Toon we’ve been using for a while. After evaluating several candidates suggested by our community, we have picked the Xiexe Toon Shader as the best balance of features and clean maintainable code.

Because long term compatibility is crucial for Neos, we have stripped away some functionality that we’re not certain we can ensure will stay supported, especially with some upcoming changes to the rendering pipeline or introduction of our own toon shader at some point.

Nevertheless this shader still offers greatly expanded functionality and customizability and better interactions with the lighting in worlds. So far we’ve heard positive feedback on this new addition!

Once a few more functions are added in and the integration is polished, we’ll deprecate the Flat Lit Toon and auto-convert existing instances of it to a close equivalent of the Xiexe Toon.

[h2]The functional UI elements have their name: Facets[/h2]

During the design phase, we have called the individual functional pieces of UI “widgets”. However this term doesn’t quite describe them well, because they can be anything from just a tiny FPS counter to a complex component or scene inspector.

After a discussion with the community on our Discord (in the #devlog channel), we have settled on adopting a new term: “Facet”. This will describe any individual self-contained modular piece of the new UI.

Each facet is going to be a part of a “container”. This can be the dash, its own individual window or a grid on your palm. The important part is that they can be freely moved between containers, allowing you to rearrange, modify and extend the UI so it suits your needs.

Under this new system, each screen on the dash is going to be a container, usually with multiple facets. By default it’ll be preloaded with the official ones for the common functionality, but allow it to be customized and expanded with community made facets, to introduce completely new functionality to the UI.

We chose this term for a few reasons. One of them being a nice metaphor. Facets can be nice and shiny pieces, like on a gem. And having the UI be highly customizable can be considered to be multifaceted.

But also importantly, it’s not a term that would be used too commonly and confused with other things. We expect that the community will start building lots of custom facets and once we roll out the Neos Workshop, share or sell them, so having a unique term will make it easy to search.

[h2]Community Highlights[/h2]
[h3]Avatar Motion Recorder by Dante[/h3]

Dante has created an amazing piece of LogiX, which can record a user’s body movements, save them into an avatar, and that avatar can play the recorded animation! This will be great for creating NPCs in all types of games!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h3]Planetary Prometheus by BIOHAZRED[/h3]
This dark, beautiful world is inspired by Destiny, and features many interesting areas and mysterious structures. Great for hanging out and exploring! Come bring your friends to this amazing world!

[h3]Celebrating Saint Patrick’s Day in Neos[/h3]
We hope everyone had a happy Saint Patrick’s Day this week and stayed safe! And thanks to everyone who joined us for the celebration party in Neos in Epic’s Cave Club by Epica2m! You can check out this beautiful world in Neos or watch the livestream here:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h3]GDC 2020 event in Neos[/h3]

This year we had the honor to participate in the Playable GDC 2020 event as one of the social VR spaces that people could try out at the event and serve as one of the camera feeds for their livestream. It was a blast, thanks everyone for joining and trying out Neos!



[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h2]What’s Next?[/h2]

Currently the work is undergoing on implementing the new UI. A few small components have already trickled into the builds, with more to come. First we are replacing smaller parts of the UI that can be released in smaller chunks, to provide improvements early on.

This includes the new circular menus, lasers and laser interactions (like remote grabbing and clicking) and equipping tools and items. You’ll be able to use these still with the old dash and windows.

The next step after that will be the dash itself and the facet system. Since for this it’s harder to replace things piece by piece, it will take longer to rework all of the important bits and swap the dash, but we’ll release the bits and pieces in regular bits for you to play and experiment with as we have done with UIX.

Thank you for reading this week’s Weekly Update!