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Implementing OAuth 2.0 for Neos cloud, another CDFT batch coming soon and more
🕑 Added 2021-04-21 01:20:15 +0000 UTCHello everyone and welcome to another weekly update!
This week we have some work in progress developments for you. We have made more improvements and tweaks to our desktop mode, adding occlusion handling to third person camera mode to avoid the camera clipping through walls, improving input and camera handling and some more.
The Neos cloud infrastructure also now celebrates its 4th year since it was brought up in Neos alpha! It has grown considerably since and gotten much more robust as the userbase grew. Perhaps fittingly, we're currently adding OAuth 2.0 support, which will allow 3rd party services to be linked to your Neos account in a secure and controlled way.
Also importantly, we have another CDFT batch coming up thanks to recent NCR mints! If you haven't applied yet, we recommend doing it soon before it goes through! It's perfectly ok to nominate yourself, just use the form in the link below.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/neos/announcements/detail/2069908530540834346
We also talk about some more related upcoming features, like cloud variables and showcase some awesome community highlights, including a Puyo Puyo game with voice lines from many members from the community!
Implementing OAuth 2.0 for the Neos Cloud
Today the Neos cloud infrastructure celebrates it’s 4th birthday, since it was first implemented during the alpha stages on April 20, 2017! This cloud service powers the Neos accounts, sync worlds/items, your inventory, messaging system, credit transfers, world publishing, session discovery and other features.
Revisiting a saved copy of the original cloud home from Neos Alpha in third person desktop mode
Somewhat fittingly, we’ve been implementing a new crucial feature over the past few days - adding support for OAuth 2.0, an industry standard protocol for authorization. This will allow for 3rd party services to access some information on your Neos account and even manage it for you, without you sharing your private password, which you should never share with anyone!
The work is still underway, but we got the base system working now. Part of getting this to work required implementing a proper web frontend for our Neos Cloud backend as ASP.Net Core website, using the same tech stack (C#/.NET) and libraries as rest of Neos and the infrastructure.
Currently the website is very rudimentary and only shows basic account info after you log in (although it lets you change your password easily). Eventually we’ll expand on its functionality and use it to replace the current Neos website for managing your Neos account online, but that’s for some later day.
On the left is the Neos website, on the right a sample application that got linked to the Neos account.
In the meanwhile, the OAuth 2.0 will allow linking your Neos account to external services. This is important for some of the major projects on Neos, like the account registration for VBLFC or The Metamovie project, as well as our internal things like the moderation ticket system or the Wiki.
If you want to try out the website you can access the development version here, but please note that it’s still work in progress! We’ll announce more details on how apps will be registered once the system is fully up and running.
Improvements and refinement of the desktop mode
We have also made more improvements to our new desktop mode, including the third person. The input binding system was internally expanded to support more clever key blocking to fix shortcuts like Ctrl+D or Ctrl+Shift+D not working, due to conflicting with Ctrl+Right Mouse to pan the camera.
The latest version now supports blocking keys based on the order that you press the buttons in. Pressing the Right Mouse button first to grab the object and then Ctrl+D or Ctrl+Shift+D to duplicate or delete respectively will trigger that action, while pressing Ctrl first and then Right Mouse button will pan the camera instead.
The camera positioning and adjusting has been improved in third person mode as well and now properly handles occlusion, automatically bringing the view closer so it doesn't clip through the walls. This gives you more flexibility and fixing some of the oddities, but there’s some more to come in that department too, as there are still some weird behaviors.
Another CDFT batch coming soon
Our ICO has gotten a significant amount of mints recently, getting us close to the 75th NCR batch. Every 25th batch is dedicated to our CDFT (Community Developer Fund Token) holders - people who significantly contribute to building Neos and its community, converting a portion of the CDFT to NCR from the batch.
If you haven’t applied for CDFT yet, we recommend you do it as soon as you can! It’s perfectly fine to nominate yourself. If you applied before, you can update your application with new info on your contributions too.
We have implemented a system to handle this batch in the cloud automatically to avoid errors and mistakes by doing it manually. We’re going to do a test run with KFC first to make sure everything works as it’s supposed to, so you will get extra of our testing token too!
Upcoming: Cloud Variables
Following the OAuth 2.0 implementation we put another of our planned features into the pipeline that should provide a general benefit, as well as solve some of the problems for the upcoming events and projects.
In short, this system will allow syncing and persisting data into the cloud independently of persisting items, avatars and worlds themselves. This could be used for syncing some settings and values on your avatar across different versions (and worlds), syncing values across worlds and instances (including between userspace and the world you’re in) and more.
Notably it’ll also allow external applications to associate information with a particular user account, using variables that only the variable creator can write to (meaning it’s not modifiable by the user themselves). That way events can assign tags and roles to users and automatically setup the user with appropriate roles/avatar or spawn them in the right spot.
For games it will also allow you to persist various values, like score, level, settings and other arbitrary information.
We’ll have more info to come on these soon, but we wanted to give a bit of a heads up on what’s coming as we were getting some more questions for these features.
Community Highlights
Hey everyone, hope your day is going well! Today this week we have a few nice new maps to go check out. Some games, some maps, some workflow so hopefully it’s something that’ll catch your eye! Also if you ever have content you’d like to see put up here from items, to worlds, or anything feel free to poke Turk!
Puyo Puzzle World by kinoko_b
This map has been taking both the JP and EN Community by storm, a nice puyo puyo map in VR! Folks can pick their favorite community members and hear some memorable voice lines that folks can defeat their friends with. If you don’t know what Puyo Pop is think of it like Tetris, but with a twist! Big shoutout to kinoko_b they’ve been making individual art along with each new character that’s added to the map! Stay Awesome Kinoko!
Troughwater by Arito
An eerie wistful atmosphere glooms on you as you hear the rattling of the winds and the shifting of the sand. A quiet little town out in the ol west, ready for people to make a new life here for themselves. This map has a really nice feel! There’s also some wanted posters around, hopefully you can nab those bad guys! Thanks Arito!
VRSYS Office Space Template by VRsys
A surprise from one of our NeosPro Group’s VRSYS, shares with us a map of their VR Business endeavours. A really nice office space template for those who need to telecommunicate or just hold business while in VR. There’s a lot here from workflow boards, to planning tables, to even note management as well. Stop on by if you yourself are also in the space and want to see what these folks are pioneering.Thanks VRSYS Team!
Evening Hangout by Grost
Another lofi experience from our chill bot Grost, but this time it’s very warm and very relaxing. Evening hangout a map to kick back, relax, and check out the ocean, or hang in the open area with folks in either a build or social mood. Thanks for the warmth Grost!
Room of Rain Recreation by Jellyosaurus
It’s the Room of Rain! A classic map many of us know! From what I’m aware Jelly was given approval from the original map owner themselves to remake it in Neos. It seems this map is really popular or nostalgic for folks. For those of you coming over from other platforms I hope this makes you feel more at home! Thanks for the map Jelly!
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That's all for this week! We'll have more for you the next one as we continue to work on things. If you'd like to keep with the latest developments, check out the #devlog channel on our official Discord. And as usual, big thanks for being part of the community and to everyone supporting Neos in whichever way they can, without you we wouldn't be there. See you next week!
