A Virtual Landscape
The process of developing this virtual experience was a lot of fun for me. There were a lot of technical kinks to work out in the process of taking the unity project from my mac and getting it to work on the pc’s at the studio. I spent all day Friday and Saturday at the studio and I even went in Sunday morning to make sure the .exe file was working on the server. The first problem I encountered on Friday was how to add teleporting to the game. At first I was just adding flat teleport areas and it didn’t work well at all. Luckily there were a lot of people at the studio this weekend and all of them were happy to help with user testing. I told RJ about my issues adding the teleport function and he responded by making a video on adding a teleport area script to a terrain object. This was a huge improvement and made my world a fun place to get around in. The bridges in my world however still were not able to be traversed so I added 3D Planes above the bridges and scaled them to the size of the bridges and this allows the user to teleport pretty much anywhere in my world.
When playing my world in VR the whales are mostly invisible and this is because only so much information is rendered at one time and since the whales are 3D objects and they are far away from the user they will only show up when a user is close to them, on a mountain top for example.
I added a sphere object and gave it a moon texture and even added a teleport area script to the sphere but for some reason the moon became invisible when I added the teleport script. The idea was to allow the user to teleport up to the moon and back down to the terrain.
Max and Katie were big helps in getting my world to work. It would not be up and running in VR if it were not for their help, especially with navigating the server for the first time. When we tried to get their files to open in Unity we ran into a lot of problems. Specifically this Invalid Project Path error message. We tried a few things to solve the problem but with no luck. This may be a glitch in Unity and it also may have to do with which version of Unity the projects were built with.
I was lucky to have so many people available to user test the world even though it was pretty rough for most of the testing, I got some great feedback and I found myself enjoying the experience of being in the virtual space and watching others.
The game is now on the server at the studio in the folder Mind Dimension Transfer. In that folder is a .exe file that works and it’s a pretty fun VR experience. Feel free to try it out and let me know what you think. I may be a bit biased but it seems like a lot of other folks enjoyed it as well. I will capture some in game VR footage tomorrow and update this post. I still have a few odd issues that I want to solve. For example the grass and some of the tree branches follow the users headset direction as if the headset is generating wind. Also the water that I have placed throughout the map is only visible in the left eye in the headset. In the right eye there is no water and it’s pretty disorienting in certain areas. Next I would like to add a puzzle of sorts for the user to solve. Thanks for all the help and user testing, Max, Katie, Caleb, Cal, Hudson, and especially RJ! You guys are legends!
