Showing at ATI Cornwall Innovation

We’ve been so busy working towards the Cornwall ATI Innovation event held on the 13th Feb 2020. A lot has gone into the game!

The game and technology went down really well at the event. We had a lot of business suited people in the game, understand how to play it, and enjoyed themselves doing so. Of course most of these people had never used VR before either – so always a great sign that the game’s controls are so easy that a non-gamer understands how to interact. The game was also setup in a really wonky space, but the game automatically adjusted and filled it so beautifully that players inside couldn’t tell where they were and people outside saw them using the space fully – walking around the whole area. 

In terms of what we showed, we got the game running at a buttery smooth frame rate and fast loading times due to all the performance work we’ve been doing. The biggest change was the introduction of our new baked lighting and using procedurally authored rooms.  

We’re now using Bakery and our own lot of maths to successfully embed some lovely baked lighting in rooms, even though they are procedurally placed and therefore not how Unity likes to treat static/dynamic objects. And lighting between rooms also seems to be working great! 

We’re also getting into using Houdini for creating our rooms, allowing them to be procedurally authored – allowing rooms and variants to be produced so much faster. Does mean getting to grip with a new tool and workflow, and of course learning how to convince an automated system into creating rooms. 

There’s still some automation we need to complete to be able to author content even faster. We’ve designed but yet to create our system which guides the placement of rooms according to a designer or writers directions. Looking forward to those!