PIU VR!

Merry holidays and such!

Geril here.

This year was... a lot. Didn't have time for personal projects or anything. Well, at least at the end of the year we had a bit of time to just do whatever, so we're trying to achieve Lussy's ultimate goal: getting a Pump it Up arcade system in our household.

Sadly, we don't have the space or the money for an actual PIU arcade cabinet, so we went for the next best thing: emulation. But not just plain old emulation with keyboard or basic flimsy dance-pad inputs, no. We're going VR.

Well, for the inputs at least, we're not sure about the headset. We may not need that.

So in our time over the holidays, we grabbed one of Lussy's old boots, and attached the Vive controller to it. The position recognition was fine after we figured out the right way to attach the Vive controllers. What Lussy didn't like was that the moment for the actual contact with the floor was imprecise.

Because of that, the next step was to attach pressure sensors to the boots. After some cutting, wiring and duct taping, Lussy found the right positioning for the sensors, and the VR boots 0.7 was born!

We did the whole thing in Unreal 4 – because of course we did –, and used a control rig to make a basic mannequin character mimic the foot and leg movements. It was pretty hard to figure out the right rotation values, but in the end Lussy made it work with the tech we made.

I made a basic dancepad mesh and we reused some of our old assets from our older rhythm game prototype, so we actually have some visuals. Nothing fancy, but it helps us understand what's going on. Can't wait to work on it more.

In January we'll probably have no time to work on it. The start of the year is never easy and now that we have a company it's getting nightmarish. But we'll see.

Pump It Up arcade hardware!

Hi!

Phew, it's a really hot summer this year. We'd rather just lie down in a cold air-conditioned room, face down, and sleep. All day.

But!

Today we're showing you something different than usual.

My (Lussy) probably biggest wish as a kid was to have my own Pump It Up arcade cabinet. For those that don't know, Pump It Up is a Korean rhythm arcade game similar to DDR, but there is one additional panel on the floor and they are arranged differently. I prefer it to DDR because of the different panels, and also because of its soundtrack.

It was really hard for me to research anything about the arcade hardware, but a few days ago I found a main board for an older cabinet type, the MK-3. What little research I was able to do showed that this was the model that my old favorite software ran on, so I ended up buying it. It's a proprietary PC motherboard with some custom chips thrown in for good measure, and a glorious CD-ROM drive to read the software off of.

There are a bunch of parts missing, most notably the power supply, so we weren't able to test it yet. When we do get it running, the biggest challenge will be to find a set of pads for it, and find a place to store them at. We can't even begin to imagine what adventures this little machine will have us go through until we make it complete and get it in working order, but we're looking forward to them.

By the way, we are still working on our own rhythm game project, and the gameplay concept testing phase is coming along nicely, however there's still some work we need to do before we can show it off.