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JeroWorks 3.0 requires a ‘Unity God’
==============================================================Hey everyone. Before I start, I just got to say… you folks are awesome. I got so many emails expressing their support after what happened between myself and Jero.
Thank you all, from the bottom of my heart. They really helped with my mood.
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So let’s get started here. Instead of being all upset and stuff, I used it as a way to repurpose the idea of JeroWorks– to bring back the old Jero that believed me, and swore would never leave me. Yes I know this won’t actually bring back someone who clearly wasn’t thinking straight and acted upon impulse, but it’s the closest thing I’ll have.
However, knowing SDK 2.0 will cease to exist one day, I’m forced to use 3.0. I’m sure there’s a way to do it, but I’ll need a ‘Unity God’ to help figure it out for me.
Thankfully I know a guy (or rather a derg and someone who I was once in an open relationship with): AtherianTheDerg. I still remember a few years ago, watching him spawn in a sword and was able to grab it as if it was a prop in the world itself.
THIS, is what I need for the next iteration of the whole ‘avatar dances’ thing (now just idle poses).
However, I wanted more than just plopping a clone of Jero infront of me. I want to be able to pick the clone up and place it.. like on a bed or something and then have it re-lock to the world. This is something I have wanted for years, and I felt 3.0 could do my wishes.
But getting Atherian to work on it, wasn’t an easy feat. I almost had to fully expose the project to him at one time (more on this later). First, he explained the ‘basics’ of 3.0’s systems (ints/floats/bools), and then asked me if I was “confused of anything related to 3.0”. I said “I dunno, maybe it’ll come to me later”. The only thing I wanted him to do was teach me how to set up the foundations.
He said I’ll be working with two systems;
1. ‘World Constraints’ (to lock the object to the world and then re-lock it after placing).
2. VRChat’s ‘Contact Parent/Contact Receiver’ system (to grab the object once its
placed).
For testing purposes, he did a basic cube to serve as the base of an avatar-like object. There he instructed me how to set up the foundation.. which sadly I forgot most of, as I didn’t think of using OBS to record. Damnit. All I remember is it had to do with making animations, hitting record, clicking on things, and ‘click on Zero’. However I’m hoping it won’t be too difficult to find a tutorial on Youtube of how to use World
Constraints.
Once that was all done (it took several hours), Atherian shows my avatar’s State Parameters and said “I could make this better for you. Give you more space.” He asked if I had TeamViewer, which I do (but it was outdated at the time and I had to update it). He took control and did it for me, which I’m thankful for as I’m sure it was really starting to get frustrating of him telling me what to do, where to go, what to click on.
And with that done, he told me that I can add what I want as an Int and then set it to all the poses I want. I thanked him and he went to bed.
I should had tested it ingame after he left, but I felt pretty confident at the time. Plus I forgot to charge everything and really didn’t feel like getting on anyway, just to test. Besides, I assumed Atherian was going to help me with the rest the next day.
The next day came. He.. didn’t really want to help me. He forgot what I told him of how I did this in 2.0. And when I explained the steps, he said it’s “very inefficient”. And “you won’t need multiple clones of the same object. You can just have one, and have it do all the poses. It cuts down on the poly count.” This really interested me.
Then shockingly, he told me to “write down all the poses you want” and he’ll do them. Uhh. But that would be exposing my project to you. I was just hoping you’d teach me how to do it, not actually do it for me. ..Fuck! I didn’t know how to process this. If he truly saw the reason behind this insanity, he might just completely refuse to help me and I’d be screwed!
I tried to think.. hard of how he could do this without exposing myself. Was forced to start the project ‘early’ by getting the VictonRoy model going. I was hoping the base model alone would be good enough. Then he’s talking about animations, and I told him
about how I use uMotion. While I was scrambling to prep for this, Atherian was learning how to use uMotion. I went to my Secret Project and grabbed the animations
from Project ‘Emeriss’ in hopes they’d work. They did, so that was less work on his
part. I felt somewhat confident they would work (being from the same model), but the pickiness of uMotion is what made me not fully confident.
Finally I was done and ready, just needed to get OBS going. It took him 4 hours and 30 minutes to do (according to OBS). His original idea failed as the object kept floating up into outer space. It was not looking good for me. He was getting tired and fed up with this. I could hear it in his voice.
His 3rd (and last) attempt seemed promising (to him): having the poses on a radial puppet. He believed he had it all set up and ready to go, and I thanked him and apologized of all the things I asked of him. He seemed to not mind it.
I stopped the OBS recording. It took nearly a half an hour until it fully encoded and saved. Damn that was a lot of footage for my GPU.
Later, I tested it ingame (Desktop mode). And this is what I saw…
Failure.
First I’ll explain what worked;
-Spawning in/out the object and it locking where I place it.
That was sadly the only thing that did work. And for what didn’t work;
1. As you can see from the .gif, the locking works perfectly when I move forward and backward, and left/right. But when I turn.. the object spins around on a circular axis to the left of me. Turning left causes it to rotate counter-clockwise, and turning right causes it go go clockwise.
It’s like the anchor is being ‘moved’ somehow, based on the angle the player is facing. Or there’s a second anchor to the left of me that locks the rotation (that clearly wasn’t doing its job).
Also…
2. The poses aren’t working (at all) in the radial puppet.
3. I cannot grab the object with my left fist (found out later this only works in VR).
When I told Atherian my findings, his response was “…idk”. He was clearly done with my idea and wanted no part of it. My mind didn’t really want to accept that, but my common sense told me to let it go. It took awhile until my brain felt “ok, screw him. He isn’t going to help me anymore. I’ll have to find someone else.”
At that point I felt ‘fucked’, and still do as I type this. I didn’t know how to ask this in
the VRChat Discord, but I finally was able to explain it. One of the Unity Gods said to try the World Constraint system from this ‘VRLabs’, as this “shouldn’t happen”.
Curious if Atherian used the same thing (before I put in the effort), I asked him and.. yes. Yes he did use it. ..FUCK!! NOW WHAT?! How in the fuck am I going to get help
now?!
I’m still waiting for help in the VRChat Discord.. it’s all I got. I don’t have any other friends who are ‘Unity Gods’ I could use ask. I am screwed!! Once 2.0 dies, I AM SCREWED!!
How am I screwed? World Fixed IK(has been Thanos snapped off the Internet. RIP) and Final IK(costs $90 on the Unity Asset Store) will likely not work
with 3.0, and they were the framework I needed to do this.
Later still, I finally got in VR, but I was only going to get on to see if the issues were still happening.. and they were, and it’s even worse.
Though the grab feature I wanted does work perfectly, I can’t figure out how to place it. It just teleports back to the default location, or to a different location.
But now it’s like, the system is so broken (I dunno how I broke it). Now when I do Open Hand, the object teleports to my hand. And I dunno where in the fuck the reset node is infront of me. It’s such a buggy mess. No wonder Atherian gave up on this. It would drive him insane.
In Unity, it’s so bizarre. What I see in VRChat, isn’t happening here. This should be working, but it’s not! UGH!! Fucking HATE these ‘works fine in Unity but not
in VRChat’ bugs!!
The only thing that keeps coming to mind (that keeps saying “I could be the solution to the problem if you use me as a new project”), is the fact VRLabs has a 1.2 version of World Constraints. I dunno what version Atherian used. It could’ve been 1.2? Maybe he didn’t look at something clearly. This is what keeps coming to mind. Or maybe it’s just me trying to ‘grasp at straws’ hoping it’s something really simple I could fix that would solve
all.
I just feel “I need to try again”. But I do not know how, when again I wasn’t recording when Atherian was setting up the framework. I can’t exactly find any video tutorials on the whole ‘Contact Parent/Receiver’ thing (that closely matches this, and would tell me what animations to make for it and how to set them up.. and also the 3.0 work).
My brain seems to refuse to learn how 3.0 works, over how complex it is. It isn’t as simple as an ‘on/off’.. you have to do a lot of ridiculous extra steps!
Which is why I feel for the whole posing thing, I should just go back to the basics and do the multiple clones thing, and then have a Bool for each one. …Yes it’s ‘inefficient’ by Atherian’s standards, but I believe it has a high chance of working. And that’s the only real thing I care about with this project: favorable results. Screw making things efficient, when you make them so complicated the end user doesn’t know how to operate what you set up!!
That’s the trouble with making things ‘efficient’.. it makes them unnecessarily
complicated.
I’ll go back to this project and try again, one day. Because I need to keep this blog post moving.
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Emotional support derg
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It’s actually a good thing I came on. Malice was dealing with a very terrible thing. His father’s dog (Timber) had passed away in the morning. I gave him my condolences
in Discord, but I didn’t truly realize just how much this beloved pet meant to him until last night.
Earlier, I was still in “I have to find help from a Unity God for this buggy mess!!” mode. Remembering Baddee knows a lot about 3.0, I was hoping he knew about what I’m dealing with (and knew how to fix it). Went to him and asked. A friend of his overheard our conversation and asked me “I heard you’re looking for a Unity God?” I said “yes, yes I
am” and explained what I wanted to do as simple as I could think of. He thought about it and asked if I been to ‘SRS CAFE’. “No, I’ve never heard of that world” I said. And then he left to go to this world, and would invite Baddee and me there.
I looked at Baddee and said “I don’t know how a world is going to help me with this”. He said “likely he knows someone there that can help you”. I was thinking “YES!! Ohh god yes!”
Went to the world.. there was no Unity God. The only reason, was so Baddee’s friend can show me things you can do in Udon. I tried desperately not to be rude and just say “no offense but none of this is going to fix my issue”. It’s like the guy did not fully understand. But by the time I was about to show him exactly what I was talking about, his headset’s battery was about ready to die. *sighs* Damnit. I had to accept this.
So I showed Baddee instead the really buggy mess. He said he could try to look at
what Atherian did and see if he can’t fix the issue, and I thanked him. But today he went about face, having to be blunt with me feeling this “isn’t healthy for you to be so obsessed on wanting this done so badly”. Mmmm… I do not fucking CARE anymore what others think of me (when it comes to this project).
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Going back to this post segment, Malice wanted invited and I let him in. This is when I was explaining how I did the project in the past. And then Legal wanted to join. I
told Malice and he got a bit frustrated, saying that Legal’s been trying to join him
for “20,000 times today”. Geezus. And I thought I was bad when it comes to being
lonely.
However this wasn’t the case when Legal showed up. Says he has a game controller that was malfunctioning and acting like “an auto-clicker”, and managed to fix it.
Malice was going through a lot, even having to deal with an oven fire that he was able to quickly deal with. And because of his adrenaline from that, he had another seizure. And then he starts talking about the dog being limp when he first saw it… oh god. That can mess up even the strongest of people.
The more he talked about it, he started to choke up. That’s when my “I have to be there for my friend!” instinct kicked in. I stopped thinking about the project and comforted Malice as close as I could, while he cried for 10 minutes.
I totally had the right words to say (not).. but finally they came to me. And that’s when I started thinking about how Jero reacted (again). I said to myself “if only you saw this, Jero. If only you were here right now, and could see he’s not a god damn
racist.”
Focusing back to Malice here, I told him that the beloved pet is in a better place. And I’m pretty sure the pet doesn’t want to see him be upset. That the pet wants him to be
strong.
At least this is what I wanted to say.. but I got my words mixed up by complete accident. Still through, he understood what I meant and stopped crying. The next thing I know, he fell asleep. I stayed there as long as I could, only thinking about him and feeling thankful I did come on when I did. Jelly though never showed up, but… mmm. I want to comment about it but I also know I’ll only be repeating myself. All I can say is the drama that Jelly does to Malice is similar of what Blender does to me– both of them having trouble with the whole ‘commitment’ aspect, forgetting important things like “I love you” and being there for us at our times of need.
That’s… really all I can (safely) say in order to show my respect to Malice, and to be
honest, what I said here is already too much. Malice can’t just let Jelly go, like I could
with Blender. It would literally kill him. He has no choice but to just give up.