Ok, so my initial goals for this week included setting up this blog and then adding start and end screens. I got this blog up and running pretty early in the week and one thing that I noticed was that my gameplay videos really looked like shit using the built-in quest capture. The aspect ratio is terrible and it’s just all together un-impressive. What I’d really like to do is have nice mixed-reality capture gameplay videos to give a better sense of immersion, so as part of the blog-related work that I had planned for this week, I decided to prioritize adding support for the oculus mixed-reality capture (MRC) tool.
I thought it would be pretty quick to add this in, but in actuality, I spent a lot of time working on this and I wasn’t successful. I timeboxed myself on this since it wasn’t really something that I had initially planed for this week and I wanted to make sure I achieved my initial goals for the week, so I moved on without getting it implemented. I found a great repo for the implementation of MRC when using the XR Iteraction Toolkit: https://github.com/TonyViT/MrcXrtHelpers. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get video working in my project, but I experienced the same issue with the Oculus MRC sample scene in my project, which uses the default Oculus rig instead of the XRT rig, so I don’t think the issue has anything to do with that plugin.
The start screen that I created is super basic. Like super, super basic. I decided to use the VRIF’s UI helper system, so I swapped out the unity XR rig with the prefab from VRIF so that I could take advantage of it. At the very least now, when the user wins or gets a game over, they can play a new game. I’ll style this a bit more in the future, but for now thats not really a priority.
My stretch goal was to add a basic points system, and I got that in place. It’s really basic, each brick is worth 50 points, and there is a basic combo multiplier that resets with the ball goes out or hits the racket. The combo multiplier makes things more interesting for sure, but in the future, instead of resetting when the ball hits a racket, it would have a time-based cooldown mechanism.
This week, my goal is to add a persistent “high score” for the local application and to fix MRC. I’m not super confident that I’ll accomplish much more than that since covid is running through our house right now, but if I do, I’m going to research patterns for implementing a global scoreboard and maybe try to task it out and also task-out power-ups and pick up some low-hanging fruit from there.