Sorry for the long silence. This year so far has just been too stressful to do anything but work. And because work created most of the stress and drama in our lives, it kinda fed off itself, overwhelming us to the point where we couldn't take it anymore.
So after three years, we're leaving the project we've been working on.
There were specific things that prompted the actual resignation (or more like, the last straws that broke the camel's back), but even if we end up writing about them, it won't be now, only some time in the future. We're not sure we want to even talk about the project we were on - and that makes assembling our portfolio quite hard.
Anyway, now that we're done, we can do things that we actually want to do, like improve our development skills, make our own little projects, spend time on hobbies or just in general, be less stressed.
We have several opportunities, we'll see what we want to do with our lives, but one thing is for sure, we'll need a bit of chill after this whole mess.
Also, we wrote a few posts in the last eight months that we never released, mostly because we were too tired and overworked to think about the blog. Here's some of those, just to log what happened with us in 2022 so far:
March:
We rarely talk about our actual work nowadays, but there's something that we really want to share: we've been working with iPhone's Live Link Face app, based on the Apple ARKit. Connected with Unreal 4, it allows us to use real time facial capture. It works well out of the box, but to make it work the way we wanted it to, Lussy had to adjust many things, and create logic that mimics missing features and makes everything move smoother.
One of the issues with this tech is that it can not separate the two eyebrows' movements. We worked around this by using slow-moving eyebrow blendspaces fed by the eyes' lookat position. Also, shoulder movement was added to the head movements. Honestly, what really sells the method is the simulated physics on the hair.
We'd really like to show you what we did, but we can't.
June:
This month, we got our hands on a Steam Deck.
Nice little machine, and it's a weird experience after the GPD Win 2. The most interesting thing about it is its operating system. Steam OS is a custom Linux that acts like Windows, making independent Windows-like directory systems for each software.
Control-wise it's quite agile, I (Geril) can customise it any way I want, and because we already have a Steam Controller, we know what to expect from its touch pads, and already got used to its quirks.
As somebody who played WoW a lot on the GPD Win 1 and 2, I found the Deck's options a big jump forward. There's many ways to adjust and optimize the controls, it is even possible to add scrolling menus and context sensitive values to change the controls' attributes.
We've played WoW, Hatsune Miku, Fallout 4 and a bunch of indie titles. We've even used Discord while playing WoW, and it worked just fine.
The next step is to figure out if we can use Unreal Editor on the Deck. It's not easy to set up a launcher on it, desktop mode has to be used to add the software to Steam as a Non-Steam title.
Lussy is exploring the hardware's latency with rhythm games, and on its own it works fine, but on the TV or with a controller, there is some noticeable latency.
Maybe the official dock will solve the issue, we'll see.
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Anyway, in the coming months, look forward to a lot more content.
