v0.2.279

Features

Our Or Dead is now called traVRsal: https://github.com/WetzoldStudios/traVRsal

• New World: VR Gallery
  • the first VR gallery you can naturally walk through
  • showing the most recent beautiful photos from Unsplash
• Pyramid
  • much more interesting world
  • different kinds of exciting traps
• A.I. Take-Over
  • much more interesting world
  • big variety of walls, outside view, lamps
  • enemies can take more damage but also show damage effects
• PacMan
  • collectibles are at different heights providing a good workout warm-up
  • inner mazes are lower making it possible to constantly see the ghosts in bigger play areas
• Interaction
  • new interaction system
  • remote grabbing support
  • improved hand models & hand snapping
  • improved pistol mechanics & rewritten bullet physics
  • much improved player detection, hands will be recognized and shot at now
• World Editor
  • create and share your own impossible spaces worlds
  • manual and procedural modelling, puzzles & logic, enemies, collectibles, sound and more
  • 2D and 3D player emulation
  • extensive declarative & data binding capabilities
  • everything that is done in the included worlds can easily be done by everyone else as well
  • parts of existing worlds can be reused
  • all worlds are automatically documented in the world repository https://github.com/WetzoldStudios/traVRsal-worlds
  • for all details see the SDK on https://github.com/WetzoldStudios/traVRsal-sdk
  • this is one of the biggest additions and alone has hundreds of features
• Procedural Worlds
  • the minimum play space requirement could be reduced, now 1.44m by 1.44m is enough to play
  • completely new generation algorithm, encounter a different play-through each time you play a world
  • corner transitions, making it not possible anymore to guess which direction the next exit will be, leading to true exploration
  • many additional randomization options and logic, making for much more interesting worlds
• Challenges & Online Capabilities
  • statistics about a run are automatically collected and shown
  • post successful runs as challenges to others
  • play and beat challenges
  • earn points for the global leaderboard
  • choose a nickname
  • optionally log in with a traVRsal.com account to play the unreleased worlds you are working on
• Scenery
  • new main menu
  • new outro scene
  • new death scene, damage visualization and sounds
  • support for ambient sounds in addition to background music
  • worlds contain more metadata that is now displayed
  • worlds now have skies
• Technical
  • split all worlds into addressables
  • world repository & API server
  • much smaller main app, worlds can be updated without reinstalling the app
  • switch from VRTK to VRIF
  • switch from Unity 2019 to 2020
  • much faster world loading
  • much fewer hickups walking through a world (asynchronous activation)
  • much better exception handling (no internet, insufficient play space)
• And much more...

Bugfixes

• hundreds of them, most notably:
  • no sudden seemingly random death anymore
  • bullets often not hitting
  • enemy spawning
  • enemies appearing out of nowhere
  • improved snapping, pinning objects to walls

A Whole New Level

Features

• Level cover images
• Level detail dialog with long-description and optional settings
• New Level: "You, Pac-Man"
  • Walk through the labyrinth collecting points, special points (fruits) and power-ups (ability to chase and eliminate ghosts)
  • Ghosts (only Inky for now, Clyde soon)
  • Beat your own high-score
  • Evade or chase ghosts
  • Find cover in safe-zones which ghosts cannot pass
  • Music and many sound effects
• Level: Pyramid
  • Additional sound-track once reaching combination room, thanks to a contribution by Holger Breiner (you rock)
  • Many nature objects throughout like ivies and thorns
• Level: A.I. Take-Over
  • Training Ground level renamed to A.I. Take-Over
  • New enemy: Spider Bot, walks through the labyrinth on his own and explodes when near the player
  • Spider bots can be toggled in the level settings (recommended to try at least once! They change the game-play completely)
  • More voice commentary throughout, announcing enemies
  • CCTV cam in some corners
• More open rooms and less hallways when tile count is 5 or greater
• Switched voice of commentator and added a bit of effect
• Improved visual quality of switching between impossible rooms
• Hands can now interact with objects on other side of a portal
• Items can be dropped and retaken again correctly
• Support for Nvidia Ansel
• Performance improvements for faster level loading
• 4K screenshots in most public material

SDK

• Moving agents
  • Traversing nav-mesh including transitioning to other rooms
  • Ability to limit reachable rooms using "NoAgents" boolean property (automatic for intro and outro rooms)
  • Movement option: Random destination (more to come)
  • Free or tile-snapped movement
  • Support for agents carrying lights
  • Support for skinned mesh renderers
  • Support for animated agents
  • Optional sound while moving
• Reworked level descriptor, making nearly everything semantic now instead of generic properties
• Spawning rule restriction to target (or not target) corners
• Room restrictions now support also indices instead of only names, making it possible to target specific maze rooms
• New spawning rule orientation: RANDOM_SIDE
• Optional spawning layers to limit items of a group to be spawned on top of each other while other items are still allowed
• Companion spawning: once the main rule is satisfied, spawn an arbitrary number of sub-objects
  • New orientation options only for companions: SAME, OPPOSITE
• New placement option "StretchToCeiling"
• New maze generation option for tile count 5 and greater: HoleProbability to cut holes into a generated maze by removing random parts, great to generate bigger rooms instead of only corridors easily
• Support for individual named images instead of only a complete randomized gallery
• Navigation blocker component to create unreachable zones at runtime (e.g. safe-zones from agents)
• New voice commentary event hooks
  • See an object for the first time
  • Hear an object for the first time (triggered also when agents move)
• Custom cover image support
• Collectibles counting towards score with different point values
• Melee damage support through hands, targets can define if vulnerable to melee or not
• State change trigger (e.g. switching from hunting ghosts to vulnerable ones, including materials)
• New KPIs: deaths, score
• Simplified syntax to list properties (auto-guessing property type now)
• Support for sounds on death
• Tile position information now also contains distance to next and previous room
• All audio should now be routed through audio sources, allowing to expose the central mixer in a next update
• Much improved variable triggering mechanism accounting for physics inaccuracies
• Optional long descriptions for levels
• Optional level parameters that will be exposed in the UI and can be bound to spawning rules
  • Boolean with description for now
  • Persisted
• Additional checks for and info on incorrect level descriptors
• Automatic deactivation of one-way portals if starting at a later state

Fixes

• No more items being spawned in unreachable locations in rare cases
• Elevators run much smoother now
• Fast moving bullets are accounted for more accurately
• Improved snapping of objects, arrows now always pinned to walls
• Improved (delayed) initialization of world & variables (o triggering of actions during loading anymore)
• No more duplicate variable assignments

Technical Foundation

Features

• Vastly improved setup of play grid
  • Automatic initial configuration
  • Now tile count and padding can be set, the size is automatically derived, making it much easier to configure
  • Will use maximum available space (there sometimes was a margin left over in the past)
• Nicer first room in pyramid level
• Items cannot be dropped anymore after crossing first door
  • Too many players accidentally dropped their weapon
  • Will stay like this until new inventory and interaction system is done
• Fully automated semantic analysis of level (see separate blog)
  • The game now has complete information on the hand-crafted and procedural world
  • Generation of directional information (for navigation hints, future map etc)
• Multiple object spawning mechanics slowly filling the world with content
  • Items placed in dead-ends
  • Randomization
  • Highly improved snapping
  • Support for arbitrary item catalogs
  • Arrows pointing the way
  • Lamps
  • Spiderwebs, Fungus etc.
• First version of procedural voice commentary system
  • Event driven text to speech
  • Localization foundation
• User profiles (only one exposed in the beginning) keeping track of statistics and achievements
• Distance walked shown after each game and accumulated in main menu
• Experimental release for Oculus Rift
• Experimental support for transparent objects
• Performance improvements
  • Faster level loading
  • Much higher frame rate while playing, nearly no drops below 72 anymore

Fixes

• Level not accidentally moving out of play area anymore resulting in non-reachable portals (completely rewritten mechanism for boundary detection)
• Time grenade sometimes left time in slow motion permanently
• Switch box cannot be destroyed up-close

v0.0.95

Features

• Support for even greater play areas than 6 by 6 meters

v0.0.94

Features

• Big space support: all levels and rooms are now supporting big play spaces, tested with 6 by 6 meters
• World construction
  • Multi-floor rooms
  • Elevator mechanic
  • Ensure spawning of targets only in areas a player can reach
  • Support single holes, e.g. in ceilings
  • Location aware spawning, e.g. do not spawn targets at open ceilings
• Training Ground level
  • Much longer experience
  • Directional sign in intro room
  • Sentry targets react much faster to player
  • Sentry targets explode on destruction
  • Elevator maze room
  • Laser grid room
  • Destructible laser grid power source
  • First boss teaser
• Pyramid level
  • Minor enhancements
• Room transition logic v3: much fewer artifacts between transitions
• Improved dialog texts
• Icon included to be displayed in alternative launchers
• Performance improvements
  • Debug mode now displays FPS
  • FPS mostly at 72 frames now, only occasional drops
  • APK size reduced significantly
  • Level loading twice as fast compared to before, which allowed to squeeze in many new features that eat up the time again
  • Lots of legacy code clean-up/removal
• SDK (start of reporting for SDK related improvements for pilot customers)
  • Damage effect support
  • Animated materials
  • NoPropagate property
  • X/ZOffset properties
  • World state listeners to sync on "loading done"
  • Experimental MRTK-mode (requested SRP batcher support)
  • Additional level validation

Fixes

• Pyramid combination code not readable on higher grid sizes
• The whole room sometimes moves, making some areas suddenly inaccessible
• Light switch not working upon level restart
• Laser grid disappearing after level load
• Menu floor misaligned in big play spaces

v0.0.59

Fixes

• Reverted back to the old transition logic, which causes a bit of flickering in certain situations but was stable, no logic will need a bit more testing

v0.058

Features

• Scenery is now interactive! Shoot targets in intro level and towers scene
• New targets to shoot, hit targets now animate
• Loading screen, eliminates jerky UI during loading and also loads a bit faster now
• Lots of additional foundation work for future features
  • Scenery logic
  • First appearance of Ivy in Pyramid
  • Much extended spawning framework
  • All game sounds now run through central mixer

Fixes

• Eliminated two more occurrences of flickering when switching between rooms
• Sky no longer disappearing in settings
• Improved gun play when between room transitions
• Light switch sometimes not working
• A few performance improvements

v0.0.49

Features

• New open scene in training ground ("the towers")
• Hint that new version is available right in main menu
• Faster healing

Fixes

• Corrected colors and exposure in training ground
• Improved menu (no more displacement after loading level, fences not loosing transparency)

Bugfixes

Features

• Improved position marker when dead

Fixes

• More targets counted than exist
• No more friendly fire or killing self accidentally with gun
• Flashlight not shining into training ground
• Scenery and items needlessly scaled with grid
• Reduced flickering

Public Release

Features

• Menu graphics and settings screen improved
• Added guards room in Pyramid level at the end
• Improved Pyramid labyrinth textures
• Item tool tips explaining upon grab what can be done with it (nobody had previously found the matrix-style time slow-down feature unfortunately)
• Levels will now always be exited cleanly, also if boundaries change
• Lights will be correctly restored after level end
• 4 by 4 grid is still mandatory for now until 3 by 3 is working in 100% of cases