Some personal news
“I deserve to be happy.” I have never believed that, and I still don’t, but I’m working on it.
Always Forward
A short video poem I made while working on a game concept. Sometimes uphill Sometimes downhill Sometimes nothing You don’t always have to move forward vrhermit, 2022
Archiving my old podcasts
I just wrapped up archiving my old podcasts. Just in case anyone ever comes looking for these, here are the links. Massively Unqualified: Development link VRHERMITS link Project Update link These shows have been pulled from the Apple Podcast listing. The RSS feeds are gone, and I closed our hosting account.
Exploring the PlayCanvas VR Starter Kit
These are my notes from a deep dive into the PlayCanvas VR Starter Kit. I spent some time going through this project template to learn how it works and to see if I can learn how to expand on it to build some VR features for my projects. TL; DR: Most of this post is…
Ten Days of PlayCanvas
This was supposed to be the “A week of PlayCanvas” post, but I kept putting it off. I’ve had a chance to familiarize myself with PlayCanvas and wanted to take a few minutes to capture my thoughts. When I decided to check out PlayCanvas I wanted to learn just enough about it to be able…
Checking out PlayCanvas
I’m setting aside some time this weekend to learn the basics about PlayCanvas. It’s one of the only tools available to WebXR developers that I haven’t used at all, so I’m going to change that. This is a working list of things I want to learn and try this weekend. I’ll update this list as…
Fire Flower
I saw this flower on a walk this week and was struck by the colors forming the appearance of fire. Using the Adobe Capture app, I generated some derivative outputs from this image. Colors #779B2D #BEDE92 #F3C643 #E49339 #C84A22 Patterns and Shapes I might have to make something with these colors, parhaps using them on…
Canvatorium Recap Six
It’s been over a month since my last recap post, but I’ve continued making progress. Canvatorium is starting to serve its secondary function well: being the place where I try out ideas for other projects. Lab 027 This lab was a place where I learned a bit about Clones, Instances, and Thin Instances in Babylon…
Canvatorium Lab 027
Poking around with Clones, Instances, and Thin Instances while testing out an idea. I never got around to working on the idea that caused me to investigate these features, I went to work on the Stoa labs instead. At some point I’ll come back to that… Still, rendering 5,200 box meshes using thin instances is…
Canvatorium Lab 030
Adding water materials to the Stoa project resulted in an unacceptable degradation in performance. This is one of those times when I am a bit jealous of 3D graphics outside of the context of virtual reality. The Babylon JS Water Material looks fantastic in traditional 3D scenes but doesn’t look great in VR and leads…
Notes on Land’s End
Few VR games have surpassed the simple stylized beauty of Land’s End. Low Poly geometry, noise textures, colorful materials, water, and great lighting all contribute to making these bits feel like a place. I’ve played this on Go many times. It’s something to reach for when I want to clear my head or have something…
Notes on Red Matter
With the recent announcement of Red Matter 2, I decided to revisit this game on Quest. Red Matter was one of the first games I bought for the Oculus Quest in 2019. It’s made by the same developers who made Daedalus. I was impressed by it back then and I’m just as impressed now nearly…