Posts

Single-Handed Mode

A while ago, I was contacted by youtuber superbowserraymond1 , who asked if I could add a mode to Biped Blocks that plays more like Getting Over It , a (hard) 2d climbing game where you play as a guy with his lower body stuck in a cauldron, and climb by swinging around some kind of sledgehammer with your mouse. So we iterated a bit to try to reproduce a relatively similar experience with some simple tweaks to Biped Blocks, and thus Single-Handed Mode was born. In this mode, you have a single long stick instead of two hands, and the head sphere is extended downwards so that you can more or less sit on the ground in VR. One side effect of the tweaks that I did is that you can jump ridiculously high, I haven't come up with a good way to deal with that yet. superbowserraymond1 made a video about the mode, where he climbs to the top points in the intro and obstacle course levels. The actual gameplay begins about one and a half minute into the video . This mode is definitel
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Meshes simply don't know how to behave

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It's been a while since I posted last time, but I've been quite busy with new developments for  Biped Blocks . While I explore those a bit more, I want to share some of the underlying ideas. So today, I want write about why I think that the inside of a 3d model is really important, and how that makes me want to explore modeling it at the same time as the surface. Now, let me start by saying that I have almost zero experience with 3d modeling (at least by any conventional means). Even moreso with animation. I do have quite a bit of experience with 3d graphics programming, both some writing software 3d engines back in the day, and with OpenGL and Direct3D. This post is about the kinds of data that I wish were embedded in 3d models, and what I'd want to do with it. What I wish is that modeling the inside of a 3d object would be a natural part of modeling the object itself. I can't imagine how long it would take for standard tools to support this (if ever), but I'
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Building a VR world in VR

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Before  Biped Blocks  even had a play mode, it was an editor (how else was I going to make the scenes for the play mode?). I've really been wanting to share the editor for a long time now. But I realized that even though it works fine for me and the kids, it might not be that self-explanatory. So the last week I added a font system (and made a font), a help text system, an undo system, some new menus, and did all sorts of little tweaks... Finally I have a version that I think I can share! Maybe it would have been easier to use an existing editor, I don't know. But this approach allows me a lot more control, it's in VR, and I think it's an interesting experiment in itself. Today, I want to introduce the editor and share a few of  my thoughts about it. The Bipeditor The purpose of the editor is to be able to place boxes of different sizes, colors, and orientations (since that's what the world in  Biped Blocks  is made of!). So far, there are tools to move
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Some more thoughts about grounding

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Last time , I wrote about my first attempts to make hand walking in Biped Blocks accessible to more people by reducing the disconnect between the motion of the player and of the VR world. In this post, I'm going to get more technical. I'll try to give my view on the problem, and describe how I came up with the four visual options that I implemented in Biped Blocks. The Problem Hand walking allows you to move seamlessly through a big VR world without having to physically go the same distance in your room and bump into things. The price that you pay for this freedom is that the VR world has to be able to move in relation to physical space. Moving through the virtual world while actually standing still contradicts our physical experience, since it's not accompanied by any signals from the vestibular system (our sense of balance). Apparently, some people are more sensitive to this kind of thing than others, and I believe that this is the main cause of discomfort wi
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Can I make hand walking accessible to more people?

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So, as you should know by now, I really like hand walking mechanics for VR. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, read about it  here  and  here .) But some people seem to have a hard time with them. After the last time that I got feedback from a friend who said that they didn't work for him, I started thinking about ways to make them more accessible. Could I alter the visuals to make the experience feel better? Below, I'll describe some options that I've implemented to try to help. I was going to write all about my thought process that lead up to these experiments, but the post turned out kind of long, so I decided to start with a short(er) post about my results so far. I'll follow up with the background story soon. Grounding It's not obvious what problem we are trying to solve or how to approach it, but here's what I've I tried so far. The idea I came upon is to add a visual component that provides a stationary frame of reference even
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Climbing outside the box

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Now we're finally getting to the thing that made me want to start to blog about all this in the first place. Ever since I made my  Biped Box experiment, I'd fantasized about what it would be like to move around in a similar way through a world that was more than the inside of a box. I did some more experiments inside, but they left me frustrated at how limiting it is to be stuck in a box, so in May I finally decided try to build a bigger world. Building my first VR World I decided to start simple: Everything would be made out of boxes. It's a pretty simple shape to work with, and it's solid. The boxes wouldn't have to be axis aligned though, that felt too limiting. I wrote a small editor to place the boxes, which I will try to write about soon. But first I want to tell you about my experiences with the result. I built a small world to jump around in, with a big box for ground, and some kind of big vine stretching up into the air, to some boxes that w
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Walking (and jumping) on your hands in VR

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Last December, I decided to get myself an early Christmas present in the form of an HTC Vive VR headset. After a while, I started getting all kinds of ideas for things that might be fun to try to implement in VR (mostly games), so I thought I'd see if I could actually code something for it. I downloaded OpenVR and got the samples to compile. On New Year's Eve, I did my first hand-walking test (by changing not so many lines in OpenVR's hellovr_opengl sample). The experiment eventually lead to a lot of other exciting things that I also want to write about. But I want to start start from the beginning, so today I'll talk about the original hand-walking test. So, why did I want to experiment with ways to get around in VR? Getting around in VR The Vive is built for room scale VR, which means that it can track the position of your headset as you walk around in your room. Pretty much all Vive applications that I've tried let you walk to cover short distances. When
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