UDCE anniversary and little announcement
Today is the year of the Ultimate Desktop Character Engine! Exactly a year ago, UDCE was released in early access.
Initially, UDCE was planned as something that would allow the display of characters that any user can easily download and share the character with everyone.
When the program was released, it displayed characters on the desktop with the possibility of customization and settings, and only FBX format files could be downloaded, the incompatibility of different versions of which often led to errors when loading characters from some programs with some settings. Gradually added the ability to download directly from Unity, the ability to add new animations, and after a while - support for .VRM format and transparency. During this time, UDCE has grown, having received many fixes and new features.
During this time, the community uploaded many different characters and animations to the workshop, sharing them with other users.
Now it’s becoming clear that, unfortunately, the right path of development was not always chosen, and some functions turned out to be redundant, the interface was overloaded, and the documentation did not have time to update after all the changes. Also, due to incomprehensible error messages, users were not always able to understand the cause of the error while loading incompatible formats. And due to commercial difficulties, the release of new updates has become much less common. But UDCE is gradually improving, reaching the planned result.
Despite the fact that the initial exit from early access was planned only 3 months after the release in early access, I want to release a really high-quality and finished product with a simple interface and clear documentation.
Thanks to the community feedback, this year many problems have been fixed, many new features and capabilities have been added. However, we still have where to strive.
UDCE 2.0: little announcement
At the moment, the development of the last major update for early access is almost completed: UDCE 2.0. However, the new update uses the latest Unity editor (2019.3b), which is in beta. Therefore, while the release of Unity 2019.3 is expected, there is time to finalize the update, add documentation, and look for bugs.
There is no exact release date for the update, because the update release depends on the release of Unity 2019.3, which should be released around the winter.
UDCE is not just a program that displays characters on top of all windows or on the desktop. It is an environment that should be capable of more. There are programs that allow you to change the background of the desktop. On photo, video, program ... UDCE was created to display something BETWEEN the windows. Very often, users use many windows that overlap the desktop. And UDCE can display elements (for example, audio visualizer) not only on the desktop, but also on top of other windows, without interfering with the work with the main window. Or two. Or three ... That’s how the functionality is planned when leaving early access.
There is still a lot of work, but I hope that UDCE will be a complete product that will be simple, convenient and pleasant to use.
Thanks to everyone who helped and helps to develop the Ultimate Desktop Character Engine!
P.S.
Some users have problems downloading FBX files. This is usually caused by incompatible versions of FBX. However, the problem is that the documentation does not indicate all the requirements for the FBX version (because some of them are incompatible), as well as some nuances. This can be confusing for some users. An update to the documentation that comes out after UDCE 2.0 should give users a clear understanding of how to download problematic FBX files in case of an error and what restrictions exist.