You didn't directly ask for it but we did it anyway: Xtreme Paddleball now supports the Oculus and Oculus Touch! The former requires the latter, actually. Lots of other changes too!
Oculus Support!
We're all friends here! Great big VR engine upgrades means that Oculus Rift is now fully supported, with little to no discernible difference, other than the in-game controller models, which will definitely get an upgrade sooner than later. Speaking of engine support, though:
Engine Upgrades
In order to get Oculus (and, we can now confirm, PS4) support in there without burning everything to the ground in the process, we had to upgrade both Unity from a mid-2016 version, as well as the VRTK integration, the previous version of which pre-dated the Oculus Touch altogether. Gross. That leads to a few other subpoints:
- The Unity upgrades made our old lightmaps entirely incompatible, so we had to relight everything. As a result, some scenes look a bit different. Whether some of the changes are good or bad is entirely up to taste, but regardless, we'll be doing some fidgeting as time goes on.
- All new bugs, probably! Took a lot of tape and glue to get things running again, so let us know if anything particularly calamitous happens.
Seated And Standing
XPB was initially built with the Vive in mind, because it was the only one that had motion controllers at the time, and also room-scale is great. But here we are, and the Oculus not only has Touch now, but is also designed from the starting point of a seated experience.
...so we've got that now! Toggling can now be done from the main menu (it's temporarily where the Settings button was/will be,) or from the pause menu in-game. Which reminds:
New Pause Menu
Sorta! Less of that weird floaty and easy-to-accidentally-trigger nonsense, and more just a big "PAUSED" and instructions on how to switch from seated to standing and vice versa. We'll figure out a quit/restart option soon that works logically for all possible controllers.
Camera Centering
It's technically in there, but it's a little weird right now. Click either Touch joystick, or press the Vive touchpad in the center to snap to the nearest 90 degree increment.
Helping Hands
We've seen enough people taking a dishearteningly long time in the first area, so we've softened things up in a couple of ways.
- Events that are designed to occur at certain hit counts now automatically take place at various time increments.
- There's a handy little note on the desk that gives a gentle nudge in the right direction.
Convenience
- It's now impossible to grab the ball without already holding the paddle, so there will be fewer frustrations in high-stakes situations.
- The motto that appears in the first stage now appears on your paddle, so you can look at it if you want, but not be blinded by it.
Bug Fixes
A lot of little ones, but one of the biggest is the one that caused the second level's reveal to happen instantly. Which is stupid.
Known Bugs
- The application window says it's a trial version even though it definitely is not a trial version thank you very much
- AI is still dumb as a bag of rocks but also magic (i.e. bad at collisions)
As always, thanks for all your support and let us know if you like the game or have any trouble with it!