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June 26, 2024: Since my last update in February 2023, my WebXR VR game has pretty much sat as-is. Recent projects over the past year include some game programming projects. First, I made a multiple choice trivia game playable with gamepads where players wager amounts based on the topic the game selects. It has a bit of a Jeopardy game show feel in that regard. I have it using Flite for text to speech, to read the questions to players, which gives it a bit of a Star Trek III: The Search for Spock feel. I tasked ChatGPT with writing thousands of trivia questions and answers with mostly intelligent incorrect answers. Some testing footage of the game in action is here. Another very recent game I've been working on in May and June 2024 has been an up to 8 player on one screen, base building and 2D combat game similar to Rampart. The working title is "Lead and Vanquish", a riff on Command & Conquer. Some gameplay footage is here. The latest build number is 86, consisting of 4,134 lines of C. Development time is sitting at around 59 hours. Another programming project I started in the summer of 2023 was a crazy video rater and player program. It calls CVLC to play videos loaded off a flash drive and allows one to view and rate videos on said drive. Videos can be played randomly by rating. I figured that would be a neat party set-up whereby crazy and funny videos can play on loop. I also dabbled in creating my first TrueType font for that program, using FontForge. The TTF font is a bit easier on the eyes than the bitmap fonts I was using. That TTF font was also used for the welcome header text above.

Yet another fun project more related to VR has been building a stereoscopic video camcorder. A video on the early prototyping process is here. I built a couple of prototypes using a stereoscopic webcam module paired with some Libre Computer Renegade boards (4GB version), along with USB power banks and buttons connected to the board GPIOs. A C program I wrote that launches at boot runs the show, calling FFmpeg as needed to record the stream. It operated headless, using the LEDs on the Renegade to communicate status. Some initial SBS 3D footage recorded with the camera module is here. I've been dabbling with anaglyphs as a result with the footage. Anaglyphs are basically 3D videos you can watch with old school 3D glasses. I actually also made an anaglyph recording gameplay footage of my WebXR game, located here. Use can use red-cyan 3D glasses to view it. I'll have to post some more videos soon.

I also bought a Meta Quest 3 (128GB version) in late 2023 to see how much better it is than the Quest 2. It certainly has improved optics, resolution, and hardware speed. Initial impressions here. The color pass-through and higher resolution, outward-facing cameras are also quite nice. I also added Buy Me a Coffee, or rather, an energy drink. We'll see if that has any hope of defraying the cost of even hosting of this aggressively modest website.

I created a YouTube channel for showcasing projects. It can be found at: youtube.com/@mikesshorts-dot-com

February 20, 2023: I have been working quite a bit on making a WebXR VR game for the Meta Quest 2. The working title so far is "Baseketbolfgunquet". It's a mixture of throw golf, baseball (you can use a bat to hit the ball), basketball (the ball is basketball-sized), target shooting (you can use a ball gun to shoot at and move the ball), and croquet (you must advance the ball through a series of six wickets). See this for game instructions and a link to a preview version and see this for a brief play-through video.

Link to log-in page: https://www.mikesshorts.com/bbgq

Created by Mike Young on June 26, 2024. Last updated on June 30, 2024.

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