Welcome to VR Me Up developer log number 9. I’ve been working on improving the usability of the client application and one of the comments I got back was that it wasn’t obvious how to set your avatar character, so I decided to pop up the Avatar selection dialog by default when you first start the application. It’s possible to disable this automatic popup by adding an aopt=0 query parameter to the URL.
<a href="https://vrmeup.io/?aopt=0">Hide the selection dialog on start</a>
You can always get back to this dialogue, in the future from the hamburger menu next to your avatar name at the top of the screen. You can select from a few pre-defined avatars and there will be more to come in the future. Keeping in mind that we’re getting close to Halloween I’ve also added a few Halloween themed avatars from Polygonal Mind. They have a great selection of free avatars.
I’ve also added the ability to set the Avatar’s name on the avatar setting dialogue as well. This will appear over your Avatar’s head, but will not be visible to you. It will only be visible to other travelers in the world looking at you.
A new feature has also been added to allow more control over the lighting in the world as can be seen with this Halloween themed Zone, I’ve made the sky color a lot darker. I think this adds a lot of atmosphere. You can contrast this with the default blue theme or the Red theme of mars. I set this up for the mars zone as well and I think this adds a lot more immersion to a Zone. I hope to add Sky boxes in the near future which will allow even better looking scenes.
I’ve also been working on a Halloween zone and some corresponding spooky assets that include things like pumpkins, Graves and even some monsters, not too scary I hope. As with all the other zones, the house can be fully explored and is quite large with rooms and even a deep dark secret that you can discover. Well, maybe not that dark, he is more light green. Have a look around and see what you can find.
You can go directly to the haunted house and look around yourself and remember you can explore it in a browser or you can explore it in a VR headset in fully immersive 3D VR.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this developer log and I’ll see you in the metaverse!
VR Me Up!