Experimental VR model viewer preview

Okay people from the future, here it is. The first public build for the experimental VR model viewer.

This is probably the last time I use a boring name for this app. I might start calling either aMod, amaMod, Amarillo's Mod or some variation of that. It seems I'm only capable of choosing dumb joke names.

How it works

I'm definitely going to be paying attention to your feedback in case something's broken. It should work normally. This app is made using OpenXR. That means that it might not work by default with SteamVR. You miiight need to set SteamVR as the default OpenXR runtime.

Or you can do the equivalent of that with the Meta app if you truly hate yourself.

There are still many things to figure out and to improve. You'll see Ada's eyes go a little wonky if you go too near her face. Her pose is also "hard-baked", so the model will look bad if forced to change pose. This is an expected trade-off of the technique I used to bring that animation to Unity. I made a custom rig for it so it's not meant to work as a regular game model.

Controls

• Left thumb stick: smooth movement

• Grip buttons: grab

• Trigger: use UI when pointing at it

• Right thumb stick: snap rotate / control UI

Teleport doesn't work for now.

Here's the plan

• I have created a new $10 tier for the VR version of my "player"

• The $5 tier will remain unchanged

• This Ada Bunny VR viewer works as a preview or demo

I will keep this experiment going for as long as you guys enjoy it. If people lose interest in the VR app I'll phase it out eventually.

(You can stop reading now. Anything below this is just pure blah blah blah)

Here's something you can totally not read

It's true that I'm doing many things at the same time, but I have an uber plan. I want to have a universal-amariversal character system that works across all my games. I took the first steps for this in the demo of Desktop Pets. The custom character schema there is made to be readable in different games. I want to expand it so that I can eventually use it to "encapsulate" the fanart characters I'm making here. That could mean that you'd be able to download a file and "open" the character in any of my games. Be it Desktop Pets, this model viewer (possibly to be named Amarillo's Mod), its VR version, and Vehicular Manslaughter.

That, at least, is the dream. I would love to have that but I guess it remains to be seen how feasible it is. All encompassing systems like that come with their limitations, so I'm not super sure how it will play out. But I'll be working behind the scenes on it.

And this part is definitely also not very important

Here I want to apologize to everybody asking "[name of game] update when?". I don't talk about this because I think it's generally rude towards you, but I'm mentally a little unwell. Not that I'm clinically insane, but just mental health issues that make some things more difficult at times. I've been working on new things because it's an easy escape. It makes me feel good and gives me time to put my mind at ease. I admit that I'm definitely not a great developer, so I'm not trying to excuse the lack of updates/progress on my other things. But I guess at least I owe a few words of explanation for all of those who are waiting on me.