Thank you all for fueling the flame of the metaverse in 2019; What's coming 2020
Hello everyone!
A year ago I wrote a post about how you, the community and our early supporters lit the spark of the metaverse in 2018. You saw the potential in the pile of code and dreams I called Neos and supported it in its earliest stages with your time, creativity and money.
Now a year later, that spark has grown into a full blown flame. Our community grew tremendously, with many more passionate and creative people joining and spending their time (almost) every day in Neos, building, creating and having fun together.
I’m very thankful that the core of our community keeps this kind of spirit. My work on Neos is just one part of the equation, but your creativity, helpfulness and kindness is what really makes the place and makes it inviting for new members.
[h2]Growing both Neos and the Neos Team[/h2]
Our team has grown as well, pretty much exclusively from community members, helping accelerate overall Neos’ development as a platform and filling in wherever it was needed. We started doing regular Twitch streams, which turned out to be a lot more fun than we expected, releasing weekly update posts to keep you informed and the support on Patreon, ICO and Twitch has exceeded our expectations and allowed us to keep going full steam ahead.
Neos itself has grown and transformed significantly as well. At the beginning of the year we’ve just added physical locomotion. We launched NCR, got rid of constantly present lasers, got rid of garbage collector stutters, switched to more efficient single-pass rendering and GPU instancing, implemented asset variant system which slashed loading times and memory usage to a fraction of what they were, reworked and upgraded our cloud infrastructure and done other major optimizations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqBmQ6Qlx48
[h2]Bringing avatar system to the cutting edge[/h2]
A lot of the work was also focused on bringing Neos up to standard of other social platforms and even beyond. We were one of the first platforms to introduce full finger tracking for Index Controllers with custom avatars, using a hardware agnostic system with full skeletal remapping, which allowed us to easily support Leap Motion and other controller skeletal models as well. Gone were the days of pancake hands!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEG2-Yc-0Wc
We’ve finally gotten blendshape/viseme support, with fully automatic setup on import for most avatars (including eyes and blinking), making avatars significantly more expressive out of the box. This was largely possible because of you as well, as you sprung to support the Assimp project, a library that Neos uses for model import.
The full body support was overhauled as well, making the setup much easier and more automated, fixing tons of IK issues and extending support to up to 8 trackers. And to top it off, we’ve added our custom dynamic bones, which not only support collisions with any players in the world, but even grabbing and stretching as well!
But even more amazingly, I’ve seen the community build some impressive tools and scripts, taking their avatars even further. You’ve made variety of gesture systems, personal HUD’s and custom UI’s completely with the tools provided in-game, that could easily pass on as official in any other platforms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5a_Npq1ttY
[h2]Creative Resonance, Streaming and Sharing[/h2]
With more community members we saw explosion in general creativity as well. The worlds, items, gadgets, weapons, vehicles and avatars have gotten more interactive and complex, some first NPC’s were built, we’ve gotten lots of new community made tools and utilities and we’ve gotten some quite comprehensive game worlds.
One of my favorite effects that I’ve noticed is something I like to call “creative resonance”. Often times when somebody builds something, I’d see other community members join in and start remixing the idea or building things around it. A wasp avatar? Suddenly a wasp nest map is made. A hook shot? A spiderman remix and big city to swing around!
Seeing your creativity resonate with each other is one of the things that makes me most proud and happy on Neos. My goal was to always build a shared space where people can seamlessly play and collaborate with each other, but seeing it happen so naturally and effectively went beyond what I imagined would be possible.
For over half a year now, Medra and the rest of the community have organized a weekly Creator Jam, where both old and new users come together and build based on a theme every Sunday. This has led to some impressive creations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLPdZX-UvEU
Another major addition this year was a new streamer camera with lots of fancy features, control panels and tools and Twitch integration. Our goal was to make it easier for you and streamers to share your Neos experiences and creations with others.
We’ve seen many of you starting to stream regularly, share what you made and make amazing tutorials, all of which has helped the community grow even more and I believe it will even more in the upcoming months and years.
[h2]Headless server, Quest, eye tracking, science and more[/h2]
One of the things I didn’t quite expect to add this year, but ended up being the only thing I could work on in the midst of some unexpected family issues was a headless client/server, a version of Neos without any graphical interface that allows hosting worlds on dedicated machines.
To my relief it proved to be quite a welcome addition, as it helped hosting more stable and reliable worlds. Many of you started playing and experimenting with the headless and hosting your own worlds for the community.
We’ve also added support for lots of new hardware this year, making sure Neos can utilize the latest cutting edge hardware and we want to keep on that path.
Eye tracking is one of the new additions with the Vive Pro Eye headset, originally added for research purposes on request from the Sydney Human Research Factor (who have now built an amazing world to study arachnophobia), but also found great use for social, making the avatar’s facial expressions significantly more realistic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQ887HX8Exc
Neos now also runs on the Oculus Quest with preview builds available to Patrons, but is currently held back by some missing optimizations and more focus on PCVR and general features. Despite that, we’ve seen some interesting work and experiments done with those builds, particularly at the SHFR labs.
We saw more utilization of Neos at schools, universities and other projects as well. Two semesters were now taught at the Czech Technical University in Prague using Neos. The Metamovie project has moved on to Neos as well and is currently working on their upcoming Alien Rescue film on our platform.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHKj29_L8Js
[h2]UI: The last frontier[/h2]
A lot of the work this year has brought Neos up to standards and make it into an experience where both existing and new users like to spend their time every day. With many of these major additions and improvements and countless smaller ones we saw the number of daily concurrent users steadily grow, usually hovering around 30-40 nowadays. Just barely a year ago we were celebrating when we’ve peaked at 30 during one of our big events.
However one of the major obstacles still remains, perhaps the most important one: UI/UX. Because of its importance, dependency on other features and the amount of work involved I’ve left it for last.
Fortunately the biggest technical part of the UI overhaul has been already done at the end of 2019: Text Rendering. Neos now has a completely custom high-performance system for rendering text, with support for custom TrueType/OpenType fonts and many more languages, with more features to come.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0erarwt5No
The remaining part is now design and implementation of new UI framework around this new text rendering, which brings me to...
While the theme of 2019 has been bringing Neos up to standard of social VR, in 2020 we want to make its unique features come to the front and shine. I’m very excited for this year, because I will finally work on a lot of the “unicorn” features I wanted to work on for so long.
Here are some of the things that I plan on working this year. Take the list a bit of a grain of salt though, development and life itself can be quite unpredictable and priorities can change, especially if you, the community, will have new and unexpected needs.
The order of most of these is also arbitrary, I’m not sure yet which ones will get worked on first (except UI, physics and license system), we’ll see what you need the most as we go!
Also this list by no means complete, you’ll likely see new major features and additions that aren’t listed here.
[h2]The UI and UX[/h2]
Continuing from last year, the UI overhaul is the current priority. The work is already underway on the new UI framework, which should appear relatively soon, at which point I can start redesigning how the actual UI looks and how you interact with it.
I have originally hoped to have this part already finished by the last year, but the complexity of the text rendering and other unexpected problems and events have thrown a wrench into that and I am sorry for that.
I believe the time put into the UI will be worth it. The new framework is designed so it can last us years ahead and be built upon and the look and feel of the new UI and UX will dictate how will everyone interact with Neos for long time ahead.
This update has the potential to remove a major entry barrier for new users, both casual and creative and allow them to discover all the unique and rich functionality Neos offers and that makes it stand out from other platforms.
The current janky UI is the result of accumulated hacks, ad hoc tweaks and technical limitations all the way from early alpha versions, so with this, we get to define what the “proper” Neos UI is.
Once I am (mostly) finished with the technical part, I plan on doing a special livestream and discussion on how the new UI and UX should work, because I want you to be part of defining this, because you use Neos every day.
[h2]Rigidbody Physics[/h2]
This is another feature I hoped to finish by the end of 2019, so I’d like to apologize for missing that deadline again, especially since I promised it would be coming before 2020 and I don’t like breaking my promises.
However after the UI update physics will be the major priority and will happen soon after. The goal is to first upgrade to a version 2.0 of the BEPU physics engine (currently using 1.0), which alone offers major performance improvements and then follow by integrating components for rigidbody simulation and various constraints (joints, hinges, force fields).
Having full physics simulation will bring lots of new fun into Neos, allowing to build physics based games, environments, vehicles, gravity guns and just general goofing around!
[h2]Object ID / License system and Neos Store[/h2]
Seeing all the incredible creations you have made over the past year, I feel like this feature is overdue now. Neos is built for creators first and foremost, so we want to help not only protect your content, but also make a living doing what you love.
This system will allow to tie ownership information tightly to objects and corresponding assets and define what other users can do, based on which license they hold. Using this, you’ll have a flexible and powerful system to manage your assets.
You’ll be able to restrict who can visit your worlds, save your items or equip your avatars. Any object or asset could be unique, restricted to just a few users, or only allowed to be used if the user purchases it.
This is where Neos Credits (NCR) will come into play and turn into a full blown in-game currency, enabling an economy to naturally arise from your creativity and help support both you and Neos’ development.
[h2]Terrain System[/h2]
This is one of the features I’m itching to work on. For years I have been thinking about a terrain system for Neos, which would allow for building large and dynamic worlds right within VR. My plan is to have this system split into several modular parts, to provide large flexibility.
First major component would be the data provider - a heightmap, voxel map, procedural generation or combination of those, describing what the terrain should look like. The second one would be “mesher/rendender”, which will determine how is the terrain actually displayed. That way you can have a variety of realistic and stylized terrain (e.g. Minecraft-style maps).
As with everything, all will be accessible with scripting and fully dynamic, allowing to build everything from within VR and letting you build your own tools and interactions.
[h2]Screen Share[/h2]
Being able to see and share your screen is surprisingly commonly requested feature, so it is something I’d like to add this year.
Interacting with your desktop from within Neos should alone improve usability by leaps and bounds, as many of our users often use tools like Blender to prepare content for Neos or just want to check the Discord.
However you’ll be able to bring your screen into the shared world so other users can see what you’re doing as well. You could use this for collaboration, presentations, but also entertainment, being able to watch a video or have your friends watch a game you play.
[h2]Desktop client[/h2]
Neos’ major focus is on VR and it will always stay that way. I’ve intentionally chosen this because designing tools and interactions to work well both on screen requires too many compromises, sacrificing usability of both.
However with a lot o the major features out of the way and lots of users without VR headsets who wish to participate, I will begin work on a proper desktop mode and tools for Neos, making it much easier for non-VR users to participate and build.
This will benefit VR users as well, because my goal is to have Neos dynamically switch between desktop and VR, rather than requiring restart, so if you want to jump out of VR and but stay in the world with the friends you’ll be able to.
[h2]Mesh Editing[/h2]
Currently Neos largely relies on 3rd party software to build and import complex meshes and environments. One of my long term goals for Neos is bringing more and more tools natively into VR, so you can do more from within.
Being able to manipulate vertices and faces and create completely new ones will make Neos significantly more independent on external tools for many common tasks and bring collaboration to building models as well.
The importing is not going away, though, we’ll never quite fully match the rich functionality that other software has built over the years or decades. I think that having both options is incredibly powerful combination. See a small issue with a model from Blender? Now you can fix it right inside of Neos! (not “now” now of course, once this feature is built! ;) )
[h2]Builder Tool Improvements[/h2]
In its current state, many of the builder tools in Neos are only half-way done. I want to add more gizmos for visual editing, improve their behaviors and usability and also introduce a more physical way of working with abstract concepts, like vectors, rotations and various transformations.
One of the major editing additions will also be a proper selection system working across different tools. This would allow you to select multiple objects, either manually or by search and perform an operation on them as a group.
[h2]Custom Shader Support[/h2]
Another very commonly requested feature, but also one of the trickiest. Some of the major work to enable this has already been done in 2019, introducing custom shader package format and pipeline for compiling and handling them, but it’s still only used internally.
On the technical side, there isn’t too much preventing the support from being added, but shaders are highly tied to Unity Engine itself, with little control on our side, which makes it much harder to ensure long term backwards compatibility, something that I take very seriously for Neos.
Regardless, I want to investigate the options more and find the best solution for the time being. And who knows, maybe by the time other features are finished some new options will open up!
[h2]More Optimizations[/h2]
And as always, there are many more optimizations to come to Neos to make it run smoother and faster! I plan on significantly improving multi-threading and bringing it to more parts of the pipeline, adding tools for LOD groups and occlusion culling, adding more tools for baking and atlasing in-game and more.
I also want to make a switch to a more modern rendering pipeline, likely the new Universal Rendering Pipeline in Unity and if possible to Vulkan in place of DirectX 11. This should offer not only performance benefits, but also better growth and feature set in the future.
Generally optimizations are always an ongoing process, as new bottlenecks are being identified or more efficient implementations are found.
[h2]Procedural Generation?[/h2]
Now this one I’ve wanted to work on for a long while, but I’m not sure if it will get prioritized this year or not, but I’m adding it here regardless! When I was prototyping ideas for Neos, one of my favorite demos that I built was Neos: The Origin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLXQXFMaMyU
A creative app, which allows you to build a simple environment with your hands, particularly shoot various plants and watch them grow in front of your eyes. This is a very fun and effective way of creating, as you can very quickly get natural and unique looking environments.
My goal is to expand this into a full framework called GeneX, which will allow for building a virtual “genome” using a set of operators, that describes how a plant (or any object) grows and then make instances of it in the environment.
Like I said, this one is definitely up in the air. If possible I’d love to get it this year, but we’ll have to wait and see!
[h2]And other things…[/h2]
As always, those are the major features that I plan on working on, but there will be many more minor ones sprinkled all around, depending on what’s needed at the time. I believe 2020 will be a very fun year for Neos, that will build upon all the hard work done in 2019 and allow us to focus on lots of cool and novel features as the platform matures.
Once again, thank you everyone for all your support, hard work and even friendship. I never quite imagined community growing like this and coming up with so many great ideas.
You are really what gives Neos its life and spirit and what makes me happy to spend the majority of my every day working on it to make it better. It wouldn’t be possible to build all those things without you.
Sometimes I would worry that big companies, with budgets magnitudes of order bigger than ours and teams of dozens of people would stomp us into the ground. It can be a daunting task at times knowing that we’re up against some giants in the industry.
But while many of those companies rise and fall, let go more employees than we ever had on our team and dissolve their communities, our community and numbers keep slowly, but steadily growing.
Our combined passion drives this project forward, it turns that little spark from last year into a full flame and I feel like it might be burning on the wick of a dynamite.
Knowing that passion and hard work is worth way more than a big venture capital gives me a lot of strength and hope for this project and I can’t wait to see where it takes us in 2020.
Thank you all!
Your Froox
A year ago I wrote a post about how you, the community and our early supporters lit the spark of the metaverse in 2018. You saw the potential in the pile of code and dreams I called Neos and supported it in its earliest stages with your time, creativity and money.
Now a year later, that spark has grown into a full blown flame. Our community grew tremendously, with many more passionate and creative people joining and spending their time (almost) every day in Neos, building, creating and having fun together.
I’m very thankful that the core of our community keeps this kind of spirit. My work on Neos is just one part of the equation, but your creativity, helpfulness and kindness is what really makes the place and makes it inviting for new members.
[h2]Growing both Neos and the Neos Team[/h2]
Our team has grown as well, pretty much exclusively from community members, helping accelerate overall Neos’ development as a platform and filling in wherever it was needed. We started doing regular Twitch streams, which turned out to be a lot more fun than we expected, releasing weekly update posts to keep you informed and the support on Patreon, ICO and Twitch has exceeded our expectations and allowed us to keep going full steam ahead.
Neos itself has grown and transformed significantly as well. At the beginning of the year we’ve just added physical locomotion. We launched NCR, got rid of constantly present lasers, got rid of garbage collector stutters, switched to more efficient single-pass rendering and GPU instancing, implemented asset variant system which slashed loading times and memory usage to a fraction of what they were, reworked and upgraded our cloud infrastructure and done other major optimizations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqBmQ6Qlx48
[h2]Bringing avatar system to the cutting edge[/h2]
A lot of the work was also focused on bringing Neos up to standard of other social platforms and even beyond. We were one of the first platforms to introduce full finger tracking for Index Controllers with custom avatars, using a hardware agnostic system with full skeletal remapping, which allowed us to easily support Leap Motion and other controller skeletal models as well. Gone were the days of pancake hands!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEG2-Yc-0Wc
We’ve finally gotten blendshape/viseme support, with fully automatic setup on import for most avatars (including eyes and blinking), making avatars significantly more expressive out of the box. This was largely possible because of you as well, as you sprung to support the Assimp project, a library that Neos uses for model import.
The full body support was overhauled as well, making the setup much easier and more automated, fixing tons of IK issues and extending support to up to 8 trackers. And to top it off, we’ve added our custom dynamic bones, which not only support collisions with any players in the world, but even grabbing and stretching as well!
But even more amazingly, I’ve seen the community build some impressive tools and scripts, taking their avatars even further. You’ve made variety of gesture systems, personal HUD’s and custom UI’s completely with the tools provided in-game, that could easily pass on as official in any other platforms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5a_Npq1ttY
[h2]Creative Resonance, Streaming and Sharing[/h2]
With more community members we saw explosion in general creativity as well. The worlds, items, gadgets, weapons, vehicles and avatars have gotten more interactive and complex, some first NPC’s were built, we’ve gotten lots of new community made tools and utilities and we’ve gotten some quite comprehensive game worlds.
One of my favorite effects that I’ve noticed is something I like to call “creative resonance”. Often times when somebody builds something, I’d see other community members join in and start remixing the idea or building things around it. A wasp avatar? Suddenly a wasp nest map is made. A hook shot? A spiderman remix and big city to swing around!
Seeing your creativity resonate with each other is one of the things that makes me most proud and happy on Neos. My goal was to always build a shared space where people can seamlessly play and collaborate with each other, but seeing it happen so naturally and effectively went beyond what I imagined would be possible.
For over half a year now, Medra and the rest of the community have organized a weekly Creator Jam, where both old and new users come together and build based on a theme every Sunday. This has led to some impressive creations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLPdZX-UvEU
Another major addition this year was a new streamer camera with lots of fancy features, control panels and tools and Twitch integration. Our goal was to make it easier for you and streamers to share your Neos experiences and creations with others.
We’ve seen many of you starting to stream regularly, share what you made and make amazing tutorials, all of which has helped the community grow even more and I believe it will even more in the upcoming months and years.
[h2]Headless server, Quest, eye tracking, science and more[/h2]
One of the things I didn’t quite expect to add this year, but ended up being the only thing I could work on in the midst of some unexpected family issues was a headless client/server, a version of Neos without any graphical interface that allows hosting worlds on dedicated machines.
To my relief it proved to be quite a welcome addition, as it helped hosting more stable and reliable worlds. Many of you started playing and experimenting with the headless and hosting your own worlds for the community.
We’ve also added support for lots of new hardware this year, making sure Neos can utilize the latest cutting edge hardware and we want to keep on that path.
Eye tracking is one of the new additions with the Vive Pro Eye headset, originally added for research purposes on request from the Sydney Human Research Factor (who have now built an amazing world to study arachnophobia), but also found great use for social, making the avatar’s facial expressions significantly more realistic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQ887HX8Exc
Neos now also runs on the Oculus Quest with preview builds available to Patrons, but is currently held back by some missing optimizations and more focus on PCVR and general features. Despite that, we’ve seen some interesting work and experiments done with those builds, particularly at the SHFR labs.
We saw more utilization of Neos at schools, universities and other projects as well. Two semesters were now taught at the Czech Technical University in Prague using Neos. The Metamovie project has moved on to Neos as well and is currently working on their upcoming Alien Rescue film on our platform.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHKj29_L8Js
[h2]UI: The last frontier[/h2]
A lot of the work this year has brought Neos up to standards and make it into an experience where both existing and new users like to spend their time every day. With many of these major additions and improvements and countless smaller ones we saw the number of daily concurrent users steadily grow, usually hovering around 30-40 nowadays. Just barely a year ago we were celebrating when we’ve peaked at 30 during one of our big events.
However one of the major obstacles still remains, perhaps the most important one: UI/UX. Because of its importance, dependency on other features and the amount of work involved I’ve left it for last.
Fortunately the biggest technical part of the UI overhaul has been already done at the end of 2019: Text Rendering. Neos now has a completely custom high-performance system for rendering text, with support for custom TrueType/OpenType fonts and many more languages, with more features to come.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0erarwt5No
The remaining part is now design and implementation of new UI framework around this new text rendering, which brings me to...
What’s coming in 2020?
While the theme of 2019 has been bringing Neos up to standard of social VR, in 2020 we want to make its unique features come to the front and shine. I’m very excited for this year, because I will finally work on a lot of the “unicorn” features I wanted to work on for so long.
Here are some of the things that I plan on working this year. Take the list a bit of a grain of salt though, development and life itself can be quite unpredictable and priorities can change, especially if you, the community, will have new and unexpected needs.
The order of most of these is also arbitrary, I’m not sure yet which ones will get worked on first (except UI, physics and license system), we’ll see what you need the most as we go!
Also this list by no means complete, you’ll likely see new major features and additions that aren’t listed here.
[h2]The UI and UX[/h2]
Continuing from last year, the UI overhaul is the current priority. The work is already underway on the new UI framework, which should appear relatively soon, at which point I can start redesigning how the actual UI looks and how you interact with it.
I have originally hoped to have this part already finished by the last year, but the complexity of the text rendering and other unexpected problems and events have thrown a wrench into that and I am sorry for that.
I believe the time put into the UI will be worth it. The new framework is designed so it can last us years ahead and be built upon and the look and feel of the new UI and UX will dictate how will everyone interact with Neos for long time ahead.
This update has the potential to remove a major entry barrier for new users, both casual and creative and allow them to discover all the unique and rich functionality Neos offers and that makes it stand out from other platforms.
The current janky UI is the result of accumulated hacks, ad hoc tweaks and technical limitations all the way from early alpha versions, so with this, we get to define what the “proper” Neos UI is.
Once I am (mostly) finished with the technical part, I plan on doing a special livestream and discussion on how the new UI and UX should work, because I want you to be part of defining this, because you use Neos every day.
[h2]Rigidbody Physics[/h2]
This is another feature I hoped to finish by the end of 2019, so I’d like to apologize for missing that deadline again, especially since I promised it would be coming before 2020 and I don’t like breaking my promises.
However after the UI update physics will be the major priority and will happen soon after. The goal is to first upgrade to a version 2.0 of the BEPU physics engine (currently using 1.0), which alone offers major performance improvements and then follow by integrating components for rigidbody simulation and various constraints (joints, hinges, force fields).
Having full physics simulation will bring lots of new fun into Neos, allowing to build physics based games, environments, vehicles, gravity guns and just general goofing around!
[h2]Object ID / License system and Neos Store[/h2]
Seeing all the incredible creations you have made over the past year, I feel like this feature is overdue now. Neos is built for creators first and foremost, so we want to help not only protect your content, but also make a living doing what you love.
This system will allow to tie ownership information tightly to objects and corresponding assets and define what other users can do, based on which license they hold. Using this, you’ll have a flexible and powerful system to manage your assets.
You’ll be able to restrict who can visit your worlds, save your items or equip your avatars. Any object or asset could be unique, restricted to just a few users, or only allowed to be used if the user purchases it.
This is where Neos Credits (NCR) will come into play and turn into a full blown in-game currency, enabling an economy to naturally arise from your creativity and help support both you and Neos’ development.
[h2]Terrain System[/h2]
This is one of the features I’m itching to work on. For years I have been thinking about a terrain system for Neos, which would allow for building large and dynamic worlds right within VR. My plan is to have this system split into several modular parts, to provide large flexibility.
First major component would be the data provider - a heightmap, voxel map, procedural generation or combination of those, describing what the terrain should look like. The second one would be “mesher/rendender”, which will determine how is the terrain actually displayed. That way you can have a variety of realistic and stylized terrain (e.g. Minecraft-style maps).
As with everything, all will be accessible with scripting and fully dynamic, allowing to build everything from within VR and letting you build your own tools and interactions.
[h2]Screen Share[/h2]
Being able to see and share your screen is surprisingly commonly requested feature, so it is something I’d like to add this year.
Interacting with your desktop from within Neos should alone improve usability by leaps and bounds, as many of our users often use tools like Blender to prepare content for Neos or just want to check the Discord.
However you’ll be able to bring your screen into the shared world so other users can see what you’re doing as well. You could use this for collaboration, presentations, but also entertainment, being able to watch a video or have your friends watch a game you play.
[h2]Desktop client[/h2]
Neos’ major focus is on VR and it will always stay that way. I’ve intentionally chosen this because designing tools and interactions to work well both on screen requires too many compromises, sacrificing usability of both.
However with a lot o the major features out of the way and lots of users without VR headsets who wish to participate, I will begin work on a proper desktop mode and tools for Neos, making it much easier for non-VR users to participate and build.
This will benefit VR users as well, because my goal is to have Neos dynamically switch between desktop and VR, rather than requiring restart, so if you want to jump out of VR and but stay in the world with the friends you’ll be able to.
[h2]Mesh Editing[/h2]
Currently Neos largely relies on 3rd party software to build and import complex meshes and environments. One of my long term goals for Neos is bringing more and more tools natively into VR, so you can do more from within.
Being able to manipulate vertices and faces and create completely new ones will make Neos significantly more independent on external tools for many common tasks and bring collaboration to building models as well.
The importing is not going away, though, we’ll never quite fully match the rich functionality that other software has built over the years or decades. I think that having both options is incredibly powerful combination. See a small issue with a model from Blender? Now you can fix it right inside of Neos! (not “now” now of course, once this feature is built! ;) )
[h2]Builder Tool Improvements[/h2]
In its current state, many of the builder tools in Neos are only half-way done. I want to add more gizmos for visual editing, improve their behaviors and usability and also introduce a more physical way of working with abstract concepts, like vectors, rotations and various transformations.
One of the major editing additions will also be a proper selection system working across different tools. This would allow you to select multiple objects, either manually or by search and perform an operation on them as a group.
[h2]Custom Shader Support[/h2]
Another very commonly requested feature, but also one of the trickiest. Some of the major work to enable this has already been done in 2019, introducing custom shader package format and pipeline for compiling and handling them, but it’s still only used internally.
On the technical side, there isn’t too much preventing the support from being added, but shaders are highly tied to Unity Engine itself, with little control on our side, which makes it much harder to ensure long term backwards compatibility, something that I take very seriously for Neos.
Regardless, I want to investigate the options more and find the best solution for the time being. And who knows, maybe by the time other features are finished some new options will open up!
[h2]More Optimizations[/h2]
And as always, there are many more optimizations to come to Neos to make it run smoother and faster! I plan on significantly improving multi-threading and bringing it to more parts of the pipeline, adding tools for LOD groups and occlusion culling, adding more tools for baking and atlasing in-game and more.
I also want to make a switch to a more modern rendering pipeline, likely the new Universal Rendering Pipeline in Unity and if possible to Vulkan in place of DirectX 11. This should offer not only performance benefits, but also better growth and feature set in the future.
Generally optimizations are always an ongoing process, as new bottlenecks are being identified or more efficient implementations are found.
[h2]Procedural Generation?[/h2]
Now this one I’ve wanted to work on for a long while, but I’m not sure if it will get prioritized this year or not, but I’m adding it here regardless! When I was prototyping ideas for Neos, one of my favorite demos that I built was Neos: The Origin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLXQXFMaMyU
A creative app, which allows you to build a simple environment with your hands, particularly shoot various plants and watch them grow in front of your eyes. This is a very fun and effective way of creating, as you can very quickly get natural and unique looking environments.
My goal is to expand this into a full framework called GeneX, which will allow for building a virtual “genome” using a set of operators, that describes how a plant (or any object) grows and then make instances of it in the environment.
Like I said, this one is definitely up in the air. If possible I’d love to get it this year, but we’ll have to wait and see!
[h2]And other things…[/h2]
As always, those are the major features that I plan on working on, but there will be many more minor ones sprinkled all around, depending on what’s needed at the time. I believe 2020 will be a very fun year for Neos, that will build upon all the hard work done in 2019 and allow us to focus on lots of cool and novel features as the platform matures.
Thank you all again for making this possible
Once again, thank you everyone for all your support, hard work and even friendship. I never quite imagined community growing like this and coming up with so many great ideas.
You are really what gives Neos its life and spirit and what makes me happy to spend the majority of my every day working on it to make it better. It wouldn’t be possible to build all those things without you.
Sometimes I would worry that big companies, with budgets magnitudes of order bigger than ours and teams of dozens of people would stomp us into the ground. It can be a daunting task at times knowing that we’re up against some giants in the industry.
But while many of those companies rise and fall, let go more employees than we ever had on our team and dissolve their communities, our community and numbers keep slowly, but steadily growing.
Our combined passion drives this project forward, it turns that little spark from last year into a full flame and I feel like it might be burning on the wick of a dynamite.
Knowing that passion and hard work is worth way more than a big venture capital gives me a lot of strength and hope for this project and I can’t wait to see where it takes us in 2020.
Thank you all!
Your Froox
