Hello there, and thank you so much for checking in!
Progress on UI 2.0
“Wait, the UI 2.0 update is real???”
Yes, yes, we haven’t just been teasing it for nothing. As many in our community will no-doubt remember, we have been discussing a redesign of our UI for quite some time now. Over the last few months, we’ve managed to make significant progress on the design and implementation of it, and have finally approached a point where we can provide a little sneak peak of what can be expected.
Here is a short preview of it in action:
Keep in mind that this design is still far from complete, and still contains more than a few placeholders, but we wanted to give everyone a general idea of our progress so far.
The UI backend has been completely reworked with further expansion in mind, so future additions, and even mods, will be able to implement new UI elements and features much easier going forward.
Also, as you’ll notice, we’ve introduced a new Tabs system at the top so that multiple pages may be stored and revisited with ease. Now you will be able to view someone’s profile, check out a world, spawn a prop, change your settings, and much more without having to repeatedly navigate to those pages.
While we do not yet have a timeframe for when this will be available, we hope to spread some of the excitement for this that we’ve been feeling here at ABI. Improving the general user experience is very important to us, and this is just another step in that direction. Please look forward to more news regarding further UI updates in the future, and let us know what you think!
Changes to Public Testing Builds
Earlier this month, we discontinued our public Experimental branch in favor of a new testing format. It was meant to allow our community to test and preview new features ahead of time, before being pushed to a stable release of the game. However, due to the large amount of changes that were usually present in Experimental updates, it would take some time to address community feedback and conduct internal QA testing before another update could be provided.
So, we figured we’d cut down on a lot of that time and switch to a Nightly format that consists of much more frequent, and at times less stable, releases. This allows those who provided feedback on certain issues to test related changes as soon as possible, which can be a major positive for the occasional unique issue that takes time to make it to a stable release.
Additionally, our Lua scripting system that had been introduced in the last few Experimental updates has been moved to its own Scripting Nightly branch. This was done so that it has time to mature, and allow the development team to work on other features and fixes without having such a major feature halting future stable releases before it’s ready. Not to worry though, creators can still easily access this branch by simply joining our community Discord server and snagging the beta code.
Improving User Input
We are aware of various issues that have been affecting user input with certain UI components in the game, specifically when it comes to interacting with them using the VR laser pointer. Props seemed to exhibit this behavior a bit more, but such issues weren’t unique to that content. So, we have began working to resolve them by making changes to how we work with Unity UI.
For the technically inclined: This was due to Unity UI being manually driven instead of driving it through Unity’s Event System, which works far better in virtually every case.
We are currently looking for feedback to ensure a smooth transition for when these changes make it to a stable release, aka nothing is horribly broken as a result. An Interaction Nightly branch is now available for public testing, and as usual all relevant information is available in our community Discord server.
Addressing Avatar Reloading when Recovering Connection
Occasionally, players will be disconnected and reconnected from our game server, which is most noticeable by the fact that all avatars worn by other players are reloaded as a result. This can happen for a number of reasons, which we are working to mitigate over time. However, in an attempt to make it as seamless as possible, regardless of the reason, players are immediately reconnected to the same instance, in the same position, without any loading screens or world transitions.
As mentioned, an unfortunate side-effect of being disconnected from the instance in the first place is that player avatars are unloaded, requiring them to be loaded yet again. Sometimes, especially in severe cases, this can break the loading queue and prevent any avatars from loading further.
We know that this has been a point of frustration for players, and so we have begun rolling out some fixes to address these issues to one of our public testing branches available alongside the regular Nightly releases. While the solution on the surface is to simply not unload avatars in such situations, it’s a bit more involved than that, but that is more or less the end result. Expect these fixes to be included in a stable release in the near future.
Final Notes
As always, thank you for your continued interest and support of ChilloutVR's development.
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