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Easier building in the new desktop mode, community playing with face tracking
🕑 Added 2021-04-06 13:33:08 +0000 UTCHello everyone and welcome to another of our weekly updates!
We have some more good news for the desktop users! Building in the new desktop mode is now significantly easier, with gizmos and LogiX now being much more friendly to mouse and keyboard operation. Not only that, but VR users benefit from those changes as well, as they add new workflows there as well!
The new desktop mode and things around it also received more polish in form of small additions, tweaks and bugfixes based on your feedback, so some of the initial pains should be gone! The input bindings have been adjusted too, making Shift the sprint key again, with Z toggling the sneaking on and off instead.
There's still more to come to make the process even easier, notably UI aligned and freeform camera, which will remove some of the clumsiness of working from the first person view.
We're also seeing some cool uses of the Vive Facial Tracker in Neos, from silly avatars to people producing some machinimas and cool videos. Check out the community highlights below to see it in action!
Building made easier in the desktop mode
In the last week, we have focused on improving the building process in the new desktop model, specifically making the Developer Tooltip and LogiX tooltip much easier to use. To achieve this we have introduced new behaviors to both, that benefit both desktop and VR users.
The developer tooltip now has a new interaction mode for gizmos, using projection based on the direction the tool is aimed at, instead of the position of the tool. On the desktop, the projection mode is used automatically. Coupled with the cursor becoming freeform on interaction, this makes gizmos behave in a more familiar way, similar to tools like Unity, Blender and so on.
In VR you can toggle between the old behavior and the new, with the projection mode being particularly useful for manipulating gizmos and moving, rotating and scaling objects over large distances with ease, without having to scale yourself up, or fly too far.
The LogiX tooltip has gotten similar treatment, with new behavior to allow connecting wires using the laser, in addition to the tip of the tool itself. On desktop, this is essential to being able to easily connect the nodes, but it expands the workflow in VR as well.
Specifically on desktop the cross gesture to disconnect wires uses projection mode as well, with small tolerance (10 cm at the time of writing) to allow dealing with spatially arranged wires.
A lot of other smaller behaviors have been changed, tweaked and fixed as well, particularly positioning of spawned inspectors, nodes, grabbing things, assigning references in the inspector and so on, making the building process on desktop overall much easier and less frustrating.
There are still some major features planned that will further improve the usability on desktop coupled with the changes above, notably UI aligned camera as well as freeform camera, which should get rid of some of the clunkiness from editing in the first person view.
New default avatar, improvements to desktop and fixes
Alongside making the building process easier in the new desktop, we have also applied numerous tweaks, fixes and other additions to the desktop experience, as well as other general features.
For example the motion blur effect has been made configurable for in-game cameras (including the streamer camera). The key bindings and their behavior was also improved based on general feedback, as more things keep falling into place, based on general feedback we have made the Shift key the sprint again, with Z key toggling sneaking on and off, since it's used less often and more in editing scenarios.
We introduced a brand new default headset avatar as well, with a custom design and optimized assets! It even shows the user's profile picture on the front! The hand models have gotten a refinement and optimization pass as well.
We have also made some improvements to the cloud API and increased the database throughput due to increasing load with the growing community, which should ease some issues with slow responsiveness and messages not loading in some cases.
Community Showcase
Facial Tracking in Neos
With the new facial tracking craze, and finally hitting the shelves for the rest of the world we figured it was only a matter of time till folks in the community got their hands on them! Folks now can see where the facial tracking can really shine in personal projects, cinematic environments, or even just for casual expression! Thanks Jax, Froppy, and Reactant for giving us some nice showcases for Neos! Can’t wait to see what folks will make!
https://twitter.com/i/status/1376727150976466945
Ocean View by VRtualis
Feeling the warmth of the room, and the chill lofi in the background, you enter the map just feeling at ease and all anxieties melt away. A new map by the VRtualis team, another environment for folks to use as a cloud home, or for users to just hang in! This map just oozes quality for folks who just want to relax in a nice environment. Thanks VRtualis for keeping the effort up! 
Creator Jam 98 NotSims
Creator Jam is at it again! This week it was one of the first 24 Creator Jams! We had the JP and English Communities each have their own crack at the Creator Jam theme this week which was NotSims! People focused on building environments with Guhehe’s Building Tool making some wonderful environments! Check it out and see what folks made! Thanks CJ Team!
MetaVerse Easter Meetup
Happy Easter from the community everyone! This week we had a nice community easter party! People searched for eggs, ate some chocolate, and got really sleepy and took some naps!. So hopefully you channeled your inner bunny this weekend! (With bunny ears of course!) Thanks to everyone who came to hang that day! If you are ever new and want to just meet some folks, come to a meetup! You won’t regret it. 
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That's all for this week! If you'd like to keep up with the latest developments, definitely check out our official Discord below, we post in the #devlog channel as we work on things and #neos-updates as we push out new builds. You can also see the release notes here on Steam, with list of all the changes.
Our goal is now adding some extra polish to the new desktop mode, particularly the different camera modes and working on some other features as well as time permits. We'll have more for you next week, so stay tuned!
Comments
VitAnyaNaked
I'm absolutely glad that you managed to simplify the build process in the desktop, as well as many other additions and improvements)
