Aug 16 2018 What’s Up 08/2018

Vhite Rab­bit

I re­cent­ly found­ed this com­pa­ny with Flo­ri­an Isik­ci, we are plan­ing to move in­to a small of­fice to­geth­er and have a big­ger idea we want to per­sue and build. You will hear more about that AS­AP, but we will keep that a se­cret for now.

Since we want to mon­e­tize that idea as late as pos­si­ble, we’re ad­di­tion­al­ly do­ing con­tract de­vel­op­ment for Re­ha­go with whom we are build­ing a vir­tu­al re­al­i­ty train­ing for se­mi paral­y­sis. This is cur­rent­ly us­ing up most of my time.

We­bXR

I’m com­plete­ly con­vinced by the idea of games in the im­mer­sive web. Since I wrote a small VR-fo­cused game en­gine with Vhite Rab­bit and we have two un­fin­ished games ly­ing around for that, I want­ed to get those on­to the web.

Hence, I port­ed our game en­gine, and am now work­ing on We­bXR sup­port for it. Pret­ty close to done, ac­tu­al­ly, and look­ing for­ward to fo­cussing on that again soon.

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, I had this idea that I may be able to do We­bXR sup­port in Un­re­al En­gine 4, which com­bines my ex­pe­ri­ence with UE4 at Vhite Rab­bit with my ex­pe­ri­ence with We­b­VR/We­bXR + Em­scripten (I wrote the We­b­VR 1.1 ver­sion of the em­scripten vr API, and es­pe­cial­ly the doc­u­men­ta­tion for it).

As I wouldn’t be able to man­age this fi­nan­cial­ly, I would ei­ther have to sell it on the UE4 Mar­ket­place (which I don’t like, be­cause We­bXR should be free) or have EpicGames fund it some­how, e.g. as a free­lance con­tract. So I sent an Email to the CTO of EpicGames, but SIG­GRAPH week was prob­a­bly not the smartest time to do so and I may try again lat­er.

Un­re­al En­gine Games

Vhite Rab­bit has two Un­re­al En­gine 4 games, Cook for the Gi­ant VR and Wastepa­perbin VR, of which the lat­er is free and is cur­rent­ly see­ing a spike in pop­u­lar­i­ty. I mi­grat­ed it to the new­est Un­re­al En­gine re­lease, but was not able to find the time to fix a cou­ple of bugs that I want­ed to get to for the next re­lease of the game.

We al­so have an un­re­leased project idea ly­ing around, that I’m su­per pas­sion­ate about, be­cause it us­es a smart new sick­ness-free lo­co­mo­tion tech­nique… but time is short, maybe the sum­mer ue4­jam will al­low us to fo­cus on this a bit?

UE4 Test­ing

Dur­ing the af­fore­men­tioned con­tract, I found test­ing in Un­re­al En­gine to be very help­ful again. Hence, I went back to my “Ad­vanced Test­ing” plug­in for Un­re­al En­gine and sub­mit­ted it to the mar­ket­place. Even­tu­al­ly I will open source it, but that will have to wait un­til I have the time.

I al­so wrote a blog post on UE4 Au­to­ma­tion Test­ing if you are in­ter­est­ed.

Work

On top all of that I’m still em­ployed at KN­IME as a stu­dent work­er. While I’m al­lowed to chose when I work work pret­ty freely, I’m kin­da be­hind my quo­ta for this month as I was fo­cussing on the con­tract, so I will have to get back on that, which leaves less time for all the oth­er things.

Con­clu­sion

More projects than time, def­i­nite­ly, as al­ways.

Thank­ful­ly it is lec­ture free time at Uni­ver­si­ty, where I re­cent­ly fin­ished by Bach­e­lor’s de­gree and did the VR Es­cape Room as a fi­nal vol­un­tary project.

Al­so, the Vhite Rab­bit of­fice will hope­ful­ly in­crease my pro­duc­tiv­i­ty n-fold.

Writ­ten in 31 min­utes, ed­it­ed in 10 min­utes.