LIV News

Since LIV’s v1 update, we have been testing “StreamerKit”, a utility to make running a stream in VR possible. With LIV v2, that’s now stable and available for everyone!

You can bring your chat, sub/follow alerts, donations, channel points & even hype train events all into VR. A dedicated message log window follows your head around so your chat’s always close by - and while you’re in the action we’ve got heads-up notifications to keep you up-to-date with what your audience is up to!

It’s highly customisable and takes up minimal extra resources from your already overburdened system 😉

Right now we have Twitch fully supported, with YouTube coming in an update and other streaming platforms as we go! Here’s a quick rundown of everything StreamerKit offers:

• Twitch support! (Chat, Raids & Hosts, Subscriptions, Cheers, Channel Rewards, Hype Trains)
  
• Donation events from Streamlabs and StreamElements!
  
• Full emote support, including BetterTTV & FrankerFaceZ.
  
• Fully customisable heads-up alerts with prioritisation, mute, position, and duration adjustments!
  
• In-VR historical event log with filters - wanna see only donations?
  
• Fully-customizable chat window - adjustable colours, viewer count, a clock, message timestamps, ignore users and more!
  

To get connected with your audience, grab LIV from Steam and hit “Launch StreamerKit”. Login with Twitch and you’re off!


[h2]Avatars, from a new perspective[/h2]

When using LIV’s avatars, you can now have another camera angle.
It renders with a transparent background, so it’s easy to overlay a front view of your stylish moves directly on your gameplay!

To get started, go into LIV’s camera or in-VR avatar settings and enable it - you can customise the resolution and a new window will appear for capturing with something like OBS. Don’t forget to enable transparency in OBS’s Game Capture.

That’s not all though - did you know LIV has a gamepad-controllable camera? We’ve also got a programmatic camera API that allows you to script and customise LIV’s avatar cameras.

If you know a bit of Unity and C#, our template project is available over in our Discord community’s #how-to-camera-plugins channel!


[h2]We run on borrowed cycles...[/h2]

When you’re playing a VR game normally, your entire PC is dedicated to running that VR game. When you bring LIV into that mix, your PC now has to do 3 things all at once - run your game, handle your camera, and render LIV!

To that end, we have been doggedly optimising our compositor and SDK to be thrifty with your PC’s vespene gas. We have completely rebuilt our compositing backend to handle this delicate situation while causing minimal interference with your gameplay.

We now have greatly reduced VRAM hogging by min-maxing our buffer sizes, and we’re recycling every resource possible to remove hiccups and stutters!
The result of all this levelling is that LIV’s output is silky smooth - and synchronised tightly with your camera. As long as your PC can render the content, LIV can composite it 💪


[h2]ハロー ワールド！[/h2]

Along with everything else in the v2 update we’ve added support for different languages! You can pick one from LIV’s “About” menu. The list of languages we support isn’t final, so let us know if you’d like to see your language added!

Starting with App v2, we’ve got:

• Japanese
  
• Korean
  
• Spanish
  
• French
  
• Russian
  
• Chinese (Simplified & Traditional)
  

[h3]And that's a wrap![/h3]

Wanna chat? Join our Discord, we'll see you there 😊

Full blog post here!

As always, these posts always end up being too long for here - so please head on over to our latest blog post for patch notes & upcoming new features ːsteamhappyː

Cheers!

It's time again for a big update! It's about time, right? Well, finally, we have an update that marks one heck of a milestone for us - we finally have a full end-to-end experience for setting up and getting your lovely bodies into VR!

We reckon this update's big enough to take us out of the v0.0.x trenches and into the v0.1.x mountains. That's one whole point-oh more than before!

Though, updates aside - what we do is always a work-in-progress, so keep the crash reports & suggestions coming. Don't ease up on us.




VIVR, our mad-easy calibration tool, is now fully integrated with LIV! And that's not the half of it.

One of our biggest points of user friction was calibration. What's the deal? Calibration is what you need to do to your camera before we can bring it into VR - there's lots of cameras out there, and it's impossible to automatically detect the specific setup that you have.

We take you through a three-step improvement program process that has you marking out the limits of what your camera can see. Done properly, you can get that crispy calibration in no time at all. These steps work out where your camera is, how wide it can see, and where it's pointing.

On top of that, we needed to support people with both static cameras, and cameras that can move. This point here was the one that threw a wrench in the works. To calibrate, you need a reference point that we can offset from. This reference point normally doesn't move, but we support using extra controllers or trackers as that reference point. There used to be two places to set that up, one in LIV, and one in VIVR.

Well, no more! The long-foretold marriage of VIVR and LIV has taken place, and now there's only one place to set your camera up. Create a camera profile, choose your camera, calibrate. You can do it all in your HMD, and even tweak your latency compensation whilst you're at it.

Neat.




Good question! We will soon remove it from the Steam store, as just having it up there and public is enough to cause confusion. We're invested in giving you all the best user experience possible for this madness that is mixed reality, and this is a change that will simplify things for everyone.

That said - don't worry. We're not taking away the ability to export your calibrations outside of LIV at all, so getting your calibration is as easy as exporting it.



VIVR's integration is pretty neat, but what about the other stuff we've been up to?

• Performance! We know we have a long way to go here, and the first of many changes is already in place - users compositing Beat Saber & Tilt Brush will be happy to know that there's a ~10% GPU utilisation drop when compositing at 1080p now!
• Viewfinder flip! It makes sense to show you mirrored, so that's what we've done. Defaults to enabled!
• 
  The LIV Wiki! The guide in the client now links directly to it - check it out for some really helpful tips for streaming and recording! Big-ups to ragesaq from our community for getting us set up.
  
• Camera latency is now stored in milliseconds, not frames. Doesn't sound like much, but it's a move for the fuuuuutuuuureeee.
• Speed improvements! We now batch up commands sent to the compositor so things feel shnappy.
• The "SDK Enabled" switch has moved directly into manual mode! You can toggle it without needing to re-capture the current application.
• Calibration magic: We tell you exactly what you need to do if you've missed a step in setup!
• Calibration: There's now a prompt on the screen if you're trying to do things too close. Remember that the first step needs to be right on the lens!
• Calibration: Added a "lock UI" switch!
• Calibration: Latency adjustment now happens in milliseconds, and it's way easier to adjust!

• Latency compensation. This is one of the big ones, taking half a week to solve!
• We sometimes checked if the compositor was running on your PC after it'd already disconnected, which was causing a crash. We make sure we're not just asking nobody now.
• When Steam was updating your libraries whilst LIV was loading, it'd cause a crash.
• If you closed Beat Saber, your camera would stay dimmed. We shone the light on this one!
• Refreshing your camera list several times could lead to odd behaviour. Now it doesn't matter how fresh you are, it'll behave.
• If your camera had loads of different resolutions, it could expand the window off your screen. Growth inhibitors in place!
• If you tried to open the camera settings more than once, the compositor would get real hung up about it. With careful coaching we've been able to get it back on the straight and narrow.
• Anywhere we had clickable URLs or opened stuff in your browser had the potential to cause a crash if you didn't set your default browser. We now fall back to Internet Explorer, and yes, we're sorry.
• Cropping, for good this time. We completely rewrote the way cropping works, and now it's much more... consistent. As a bonus, we let you make small X/Y adjustments again!
• If you had the zoom feature enabled, it would be ignored when you first selected the camera profile!
• Some Unreal engine games would always fail to configure. We now take a much longer look at those games to work out exactly how they gotta be configured.
• Launching Unity games before running them first would cause Steam to ask you for permission to launch it - turns out that's not necessary, so it's fixed!
• In some really odd DNS setups (leave localhost alone pls), the compositor couldn't connect to the GUI.
• When Steam told us you had a library somewhere, we trusted it. We got hurt, the library doesn't always exist. Now our guard's up.
• Sometimes in code we needed to check if two folders were the same - but if one of those folders... wasn't a folder, it'd cause a crash. Fixed.
• Closing the compositor is now much more reliable, and faster too!
• When the compositor first loaded, your viewfinder settings were not correctly restored.

We're seriously excited to push this version out to y'all. LIV is now in a position where we can start to work on the more interesting future features that we've been teasing on our streams since like... December. And it goes without saying, we'll be testing these things with people in our Discord, so if you're interested in keeping up to date, stick around in the community!

Our gratitude goes out to everyone for being truly amazing. Seeing everyone chip in with support, advice and feedback on content is exactly why we opened our doors wide open. Keep being rad.

Finally though - got a suggestion? Like... a curveball of a mind baby? Throw it at us. We want that mind baby; we're all ears.

That's all for this update!

Connect with us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram & in our Discord community!

LIV Client update!

It's v0.0.17, baby!

Please - jump on through to the blog post here to read all about it: https://liv.tv/blog/liv-client-v0-0-17-released

As always, reach out to us on Discord if you want a quick response!