Sam's Cabinet of Curiosities

As we have planned narrative elements for Project Neon Atelier, we need a way to present to the conversation between in-game characters. Our idea is to implement a dialogue system similar to that of visual visual, with clicking to proceed through the dialogue line.  Each dialogue line is defined as a DialogueLine   instance, each consisting of the speaker's name, the speaker's position reference, and also callbacks for when displaying a line and finish reading a line.  An dialogue path system is be added, so that we can group together some of the related dialogues, and allow the player to go back to a selection menu to load the dialogue sections one at a time. However, the path is not meant for dynamic storyline, as our narrative is not meant to be driven by player decision.  Each point of path divergence is represented by DialogueOption object, which consist of the description for selection, a list of tuple with text and custom callbacks for each selection option, a...

  Over the previous weeks on proof of concept, our team had implemented the core tube bending mechanisms of Neon Atelier. For now on, we can start to deliver our effort to other parts of no less important gameplay. One important but yet mentioned element is the inspection procedure before hands-on light tube making. Instead of throwing the player directly to each neon light quest, players are first introduced with a brief outline of the neon light schematics on a VR canvas. Players will use a VR cursor to navigate the schematic, in order to mark significant steps for the upcoming neon light crafting. This prepares the players with early impression over the crafting procedure, relieving the cognitive load during the actual hands-on crafting. The schematics inspection gameplay is built on a VR canvas object. While XR Interaction Toolkit has a  TrackedDeviceGraphicCaster  that can be easier plugged onto an conventional UI Canvas object, the VR cursor detection is only partia...

With tube bending being an core element for neon light craft, as we implemented the tube gripping mechanism, it is natural to us to also work on the  tube blending along the way. Rather then wrriting a separate script, we implemented the  tube bending part by expanding the TubeGripManager from our previous blog , as the bending mechanism follows shortly after an grip step, and also reads for the same active  PathContainer reference used by the  TubeGripManager. We isolate our aims for the bending motion first by setting both an start point and endpoint of the bending. Instead of moving in straight line for the bending, the motion ought to be in curve, accounting for the volume of the tube. While the bending is expected to go forwards only (the quest are not about free forming editing), we do have to account for situation where player release the grip during mid way of bending. In this case, the tube should remain partially bended, with the grip collider in appropriat...