This Sprint was a case of sometimes you have to take a step backwards to go foreword. This sprint we did the refactor to take out all the code associated with the Daz/Poser avatars. These Avatars were very detailed and had lots of capability in terms of morphing the avatar and changing clothes. Unfortunately, we were never to satisfactorily find a way to merge the meshes in a way that would stop body poke throughs within the clothes. This was especially noticeable with replication that every multiplayer game has to have. So, we decided to save the code we had created associated with Daz/Poser Avatars in an archived project to go back to if we ever wanted to pick it up again. Strategically we probably won’t go back to it unless we get sometime of partnership and help from Renderosity who is the company now owning Daz and Poser and do some type of joint venture. This means that we are all in on the RPM avatars at this point.
As part of this move away from Daz/Poser Avatars, we cleaned up the UE project build by removing all the blueprint work associated with those avatars, deleted the meshes, materials and textures of the avatars from the build and also deleted all the animations for these avatars. This refactor will skinny down the build significantly in terms of the size of the distribution file downloaded from Steam and will speed up the update process as it is much smaller now without all the Daz/Poser avatars, clothes and animations.
The sprint wasn’t all about deleting things from the build as we still made progress on the Music Visualization side of things. We built the Light Cue Light Shows Construction panels that allow game players to build their own light shows and store them. You can also import and export these shows to your hard drive. This menu system for constructing light cue light shows was quite complex and included many abilities to build and change light shows. Here is a video showing the new User Interface and how to construct a light show using existing light cues that were created last sprint. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olmV431v1fI We took the map that you see in the previous video and added it to the myMO build so that game players can have a type of workshop to build their light shows in the game.
This is all part of the new focus on making myMO a building game, as well as a DJ/Looper game with dance events. The focus of the next few sprints will be on making it so that game players can customize existing clubs and build their own clubs based on templates. It is a small step towards the Creator’s version of the game we have envisioned that will allow 3d modelers to fully develop clubs and venues using Unreal Engine much like Helios currently does.
So, again two steps back and one step foreword for myMO this sprint!
