Neos VR News

Hello and welcome back to the Weekly Update!

This Friday we’re going to be streaming our 1000 follower stream celebration! We’ll be playing games with you in the chat and giving away Neos merch from our upcoming Merch store. Make sure to join us at 3PM PST on the 26th if you don’t want to miss it!

If you’d like to see what our streams are generally like, we also have a fun compilation from the one held a week ago. In other news, the RadiantUI dash is getting nearly ready for official release, check out the latest work in progress state below.

And last but not least, we have some amazing community creations to showcase as well! We’re always overwhelmed by the amazing things you create and we encourage everyone to join our official Discord or follow the #NeosVR hashtag on Twitter to see more, as there’s too many to cover.



[h2]1000 Follower Celebration Stream with free Neos merch this Friday![/h2]
Thanks to you guys, we’ll be celebrating the milestone of reaching 1000 followers on Twitch! The celebration stream will be held this Friday (June 26th) at our normal streaming time 3PM PST! We’ll be playing games and giving away some merchandise from our newly opened Merch store, items ranging from stickers, pins, bandanas and a T-Shirt!

We would have never gotten to this level of support if it weren’t for you, our community! Having the community with us every Friday allows us to show you all of the things we’re working on, and it’s always fun for us on the team to participate and answer questions. We’re also always asking ourselves what new commands we could give you guys to further add to the fun mayhem the streams always bring.

This week’s stream is going to have no less mayhem, so please come join us and win some stickers and things! We’ll all be looking forward to seeing you, and Nex will say Thank You at least another 30+ times throughout the stream. And Sykes will likely get Zeused another 100+ times!

See you there!

Bandana's are coming and more! Note that this is just a preview, the designs aren't 100 % final yet.

[h2]Funny Stream moment compilations[/h2]
Our video producer and editor, Theofilus, is planning to frequently bring us new compilations of funny stream moments, and has done so with our latest stream.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

In the video, we see our chat frequently Zeusing and Exploding our guests and team members in the stream world. Also we get a compilation of Nexulan saying “Thank you” way too many times. It’s quite funny, but don’t take my word for it, go check it out!

[h2]Last Friday's Q&A livestream at Sakura[/h2]
If you missed our last stream, here you can watch the complete recording of it. We've gotten lots of great questions on Neos and its development and lots of fun with the chat in the beautiful Sakura world by PolylogiX

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h2]RadiantUI dash is getting nearly ready for release[/h2]
The upcoming new dash and its related systems are now in nearly usable state. The old UI dialogs have been wrapped into this new form, instead of popping out as separate windows and we’re currently working on an initial set of facets to provide the replace the remaining functionality and test out the new subsystems that we’ve been building for a while.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

The dash will serve as the core of the new RadiantUI, where all the essential functionality will be located by default. After its official release, we’ll redesign and reimplement all of the old UI pieces one by one, making them look much better, easier to use and giving them more flexibility and functionality.

All the UI is also being redesigned under the Facet system, making each piece fully modular and customizable, as it can be moved to any UI container - e.g. from dash on your avatar’s hand. The container system has received more work and polish as well, as you can see in this video:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

As a nice side bonus, part of UIX, our custom high-performance UI framework has been redesigned as well to fix certain sorting issues, which caused some parts of UI to render on top of others. This should make UIX more robust and easier to use if you’ve encountered this bug before.

[h2]Community Highlights[/h2]
[h3]Animated Chalkboard, by A Monsoon of Babies[/h3]

This user has created an amazing looking chalkboard, with both normal stationary chalk and animated chalk which would make any digital classroom more interesting!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h3]Neos Animation, by @tekerets on Twitter[/h3]
Animation in Neos is something we’ve hoped users would use Neos for even in the far future, so we would never have imagined users creating animations at this point in Neos’s development! Tekerets has made a couple amazing animations so far, so check them out!



[h3]3D Blockchain viewer by Sirkitree[/h3]
Sirkitree has created a really interesting way to visualize block-chain information and transactions using Neos’s built in LogiX system! Looks like a great idea for how people would want to visualize stocks and other forms of information!



[h3]Sakura, by PolyLogiX[/h3]
From every angle, this world looks like a precious painting. Featuring Japanese-inspired scenery and music as well as an intricate attention to detail. It’s another world designed for rest, relaxing and sleep, so bring a pillow!



[h3]Storage Scroll, by N-JELLY (@NJELLY1 on Twitter)[/h3]
This has to be the most amazing storage solution I’ve seen yet in Neos. You can put anything in this scroll, from tooltips, weapons, accessories, and even other scrolls! N-JELLY has released this in their shared folder, so check it out! Thank you N-JELLY!



[h2]What’s Next?[/h2]
This upcoming week we’ll be very likely swapping to the new RadiantUI dash, so enjoy your last moments with the old one and keep an eye out on the #testing channel on our official Discord! Since this is a major change, we’ll release the build in the danger-nightly channel first, so we can ensure there’s no major breakage before it goes live.

Thank you for reading this week’s Community Highlights! As always, we wouldn’t be here without you guys, so thank you for tuning in and supporting us in all the ways you do! And a special thanks to the big streamers Snow SOS, Roflgator and Sodapoppin for giving Neos a try, and for showing us off to your awesome viewers!

Make sure to tune in again next week for the Weekly Update! Have a good week everyone!

Pushing an extra hotfix based on some crash reports due to the optimizations/changes in the last build. Hopefully this fixes the issues, let us know if you're still experiencing problems!

[h2]Optimizations:[/h2]
- Added more memory pooling to the sync message validation, reducing GC churn and related increased memory and CPU usage for the host
- Optimized low level ReferenceID operations

[h2]Bugfixes:[/h2]
- Fixed released drives from the local part of data model being encoded for syncing, causing the session to crash (based on reports by @art0007i, @Zane, @AdmiralSoap through @Shifty | Quality Control Lead)
- Fixed sorting issue for SessionOrbsController

Pushing a high priority update to fix a security exploit that lets users kick/ban without proper permission. I've pulled in a bunch of other things from the WIP Radiant Dash build as well as a bonus (the new dash is not ready for release yet), including some memory/CPU optimizations and possibly fix for the ocassional random particle effect freeze!

[h2]Security:[/h2]
- Fixed incorrect kick/ban request validation logic, which can let users kick/ban others without having the sufficient permission to do so (reported by @I wont shut up about reflections, logs provided by @drecalen and @bbblacketer)
- Added extra diagnostic information for kicking/banning for future issues
- Some more small cloud security additions

[h2]Optimizations:[/h2]
- Heavily reduced memory and CPU usage for managing sync elements by deduplicating their lookup tables
- Added memory pooling to sync message validation, heavily reducing memory allocations (and associated CPU usage) for the host
- Added reference cleanup on Dispose to the reference controller, to aid the GC and help prevent potential memory leaks
- Upgraded to Unity 2019.4.1f1 (from 2019.4.0f1)

[h2]Bugfixes:[/h2]
- Fixed particles in userspace not emitting at the correct position
- Fixed occasional excessive allocations and calculations during particle system emissions

More progress on the new RadiantUI dash, Facets and Containers! I've also discovered a few UIX bugs during this development that caused incorrect sorting (things rendering behind when they should be in front in various cases), which required parts of UIX to be redesigned a bit, but they should be good now! Let me know if there's any new unexpected UIX breakage.

Some new UIX features that came along with the RadiantUI work too, like TiledRawImage (perfect for UI grids and such). Also a bunch of other bugfixes and tweaks that were done on the side.

[h2]New Features:[/h2]
- Added Padding support to Grid Container (and to facet containers in general)
- Added grid placement visuals to the GridContainer for facets
- Added TiledRawImage under UIX/Graphics, which renders a texture tiled based on the size of the UI rect elements with tile size and an offset (can be used to make a grid for example)

[h2]Tweaks:[/h2]
- Tweaked custom sizing mechanism for facet containers to be more intuitive
- Added world name to the "Role not available" message on headless (requested by @aat#1337)
- Dimmed the GridSpace world preset's skybox (based on feedback from ProbablePrime#4895, implemented by @Coffee | Programmer)

[h2]Bugfixes:[/h2]
- Redesigned part of graphic chunk hierarchy mechanism to properly split graphics that follow a nested graphic chunk into a separate rendererer, so they can be sorted properly to render over the visuals of the nested chunks
-- This fixes graphics that should render on top of some nested graphic within a graphic chunk actually rendering below it (e.g. having an overlay overlapping on top of a scroll area or rendering visuals over nested canvases)
- Fixed incorrect graphic sorting on UIX canvas with overlapping graphic elements under the same parent
-- This fixes some graphic elements that are earlier in the hierarchy rendering on top of elements later in the hierarchy when the element later uses submesh that has already been used earlier
-- Certain elements that naturally cause overlaps, like the OutlinedArc are excluded from this precise sorting for better performance
- Fixed invalid calculations of the Maximum Traction/Support slope threshold values, causing certain angles to throw an exception (reported by @H3BO3)
- Tweaked logic for determining which item can be placed on the toolshelf to exclude non-persistent parts (like the hand proxy visual)
-- This should fix tools not being placeable on the item shelves in the edit mode (reported by @ProbablePrime and investigated by @Coffee | Programmer)
- Made VirtualKey, VirtualShift and VirtualModifierKey components clear the "ClearFocusOnPress" field of the Button component on startup if present
-- This fixes custom UIX based keyboards hiding themselves when typing into private UI (reported by @SmolCookie, @Lewi-bean | Audio Designer)

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 final


If 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!