I said the 4th, and the 4th came and went. Sorry. If you had friends lined
up that night, I feel bad about it. The short version is that the build is
still in review with Steam. Every game gets checked before it goes live,
mine came back with a list of things to fix, and I have been working through
that list since. Some of it was store paperwork and some of it was real
problems in the build. I am not going to hand you another date I am not sure
of, so the store page says Coming Soon and it stays that way until review
passes. When it does you will get a real date with notice.
I also got sick partway through, which did not speed anything up. But I will
be honest, I am a bit glad about the delay. If it had shipped on the 4th,
none of the last month would be in it, and creators would have walked into
every one of these problems on launch day instead of me hitting them first.
Most of that month went into avatars. You can now bring one you built for
another social VR platform without taking it apart. Almost all of them use
the same humanoid skeleton, the problem was never the shape, it was that
nobody agrees on what to call the bones. The kit works your skeleton out
from its shape instead of its names now, so nothing gets renamed and the
file you upload is the file you started with. Tails, ears and hair get
physics set up for them automatically. VRoid characters work too, though
getting the first one in took an afternoon of fixes, including one where the
avatar was perfectly made and drawn eighty metres in the air. And if you
ever uploaded an avatar that showed up with a grey face, that was three
separate bugs wearing the same costume, all fixed. Update the kit, press
Build, re-upload, nothing in your project needs changing.
For creators making games rather than places, the scripting nodes grew up.
There are about forty five of them now and they read the way you would say
them out loud: Get Players In Realm, Add Player Points, Show Message To
Player, Is Player Talking. The bit I am happiest with is what you do not
have to do. A goal zone that gives whoever touched it a point and shows them
GOAL is three nodes, and it works online without a single networking node.
The kit also checks itself now. Someone uploaded a world that looked fine on
a monitor and rendered black in the right eye in the headset, caused by one
missing line in his project settings that nothing in the entire chain ever
warned him about. The Build button checks for that before it cooks, and
there is a Verify Files button that tells you if anything in your kit install
has drifted.
The multiplayer fix is the one I am most relieved about. When a host left
and the group chose to stay together, everyone was supposed to land back
where they were standing, and only the new host actually did. Everyone else
got put back and then quietly dragged to the spawn point, because the move
was happening on their own machine and the server disagreed with it. Three
migrations in a row now and nobody has lost their spot. That got found
because four people gave up an evening to test it, which is most of why any
of this gets fixed. Come find us on Discord if you want in on the next one.