This term has been off to a bit of a rough start. We have become more organized through the use of Trello, but there have been unexpected problems that popped up. Last term the Oculus Quest was working well on our systems, and working with Unity. This term, we updated to the latest version of Unity, and have had issues with connection. Personally my system keeps telling me I have hardware issues that are preventing me from running the test environment.
At one point, I had figured out how to get it working, which was great! About 5 minutes later, the screen would go black instead of showing the environment. Other teammates have run into other issues, such as Windows deciding that the Quest is a multimedia storage device, and not registering it as a headset.
Despite the issues, I am confident in my team and our ability to get this all up and running. Soon, we will iron out these issues and be in full development. We have had pretty good communication so far, even though I forgot to post a blog last week.
This next week I am beginning to develop some of the UI elements, such as health and mana bars. Under normal circumstances, those would be very simple to program, but with VR, everything is more complicated. Instead of being a part of the display, the information must be part of the environment, so placement is key. It needs to be easily seen while the player is playing the game, but it can’t be so noticeable that it becomes obtrusive. It will also mean objects will need to be communicating with each other to receive and process information. As someone new to Unity, I will be watching a lot more tutorial videos. But, that is just an exciting excuse to develop new tools for my game development toolbelt.
