Back in Action

Good news for me. For years now I have not been able to work in 3D, and for a while I couldn’t even play most 3D games because, while I have always been susceptible, I developed increased sensitivity to simulator sickness. This has been quite frustrating for me as I generally enjoy 3D games more than 2D, and because I felt like I was doing something worthwhile in working on my wheelchair sim project. I have been keeping up to date with Unreal installations, and continuing to move the project through each version to make sure it builds under the new versions, but I haven’t done much new work.

Fortunately, my sensitivity has abated somewhat and I’ve been able to play some 3D again, like Subnautica: Below Zero, Elite: Dangerous (except, the spinning when the ship goes out of control, that I cannot take and wonder if there is a way to suppress, it’s like the final minutes of “The Martian”, a movie I otherwise thoroughly enjoyed watching in 3D…I was never cut out to be an astronaut!), Yakuza 0, and some others. I still have to be selective, but it’s reduced. I looked for a resource for people with heightened sim sickness for games that they were still able to play. I found plenty of articles discussing the effect in general, but I haven’t found a list yet. GameCritics does a neat thing where they include the accessibility features, or lack thereof, in their game reviews, like colorblind modes, concerns for deaf & hard of hearing gamers (subtitles, whether there are audio-only game cues), and remappable controls:

Accessibility notes on the most recent game review at gamecritics.com at time of writing (https://gamecritics.com/brian-theisen/tetragon-review/ )

But game reviewers must be self-selected to generally be people that don’t get sim sickness, and if any site consistently mentions it, I haven’t seen it. Since I am quite susceptible, I’m going to try to point out on this blog which games I’m comfortable playing for extended sessions, in case it helps anyone else. I am, however, going to have to permanently forgo VR. This is a tough thing for me to accept, since I think it is so very, very cool, but it’s not worth the nausea. I will still leave VR enabled in Ayuma Project 1, but I’m not going to test it any more.

I’m also now able to work at least a little in Unreal and Blender again, though it’s been a long time and I have a lot to re-learn. The latest version of Unreal seems to have made substantial improvements that make the frame & movement rate consistent in my project build – a sort of stuttering, and weird speed-up/slow-down vehicle movement, were fast sim sickness triggers for me as well as just annoying and I could not figure out how to solve them, but my latest build in Unreal 4.27 is smooth enough on my system for me to work again.

Looking at a mobility vehicle I’m working on adding in, with glass that still has refraction enabled. (Ayuma Project 1 WIP)

Another issue was the reflection/refraction in glass surfaces was not working right at all, causing a sort of fun-house distortion of the world that I could not take. I’ve read quite a bit about why it happens, tried several methods of making alternative glass materials. Maybe it’s different with ray tracing, but for now my solution has been to switch entirely to glass materials that have no refraction at all. It still looks reasonable, and no more mind-bending warping.

Creating new versions of glass materials with no refractions served as a workaround to the kaleidoscopic problem. (Ayuma Project 1 WIP)

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UE4.13 preview looks good

I cloned the wheelchair mobility sim work-in-progress Ayuma Project 1 over to the new 4.13 preview, and nothing broke, so hopefully when the 4.13.0 arrives, there won’t be too many things to fix up 🙂  This is a learning project for me, and I discovered that I was doing collision incorrectly, relying on per-poly collision for a lot of things. This worked quite well for interactions with the player pawn, (the wheelchair model) but for other skeletal meshes it did not work properly at all. I discovered this while making the BMX bike into a physics asset so the player can shove the bikes around (which turns out to be more fun than I expected!)….so I went back to Blender and redid nearly every model and made proper UCX shapes, as well as converting the models to a better Blender > UE4 workflow and various other cleanup/improvements.  Speaking of the BMX, I got the original model from an open model download source, like TurboSquid but not there, and now I’ve tried to find it back to give credit but cannot find it back yet…if I can, I will give proper credit in a future post.

The BMX Bike physics asset is falling through the top layer of the sidewalk due to a faulty collision setup (Ayuma Project 1 WIP)

The BMX Bike physics asset is now properly colliding with the sidewalk, though in this image it is rigid as it is not yet rigged for animation. (Ayuma Project 1 WIP)

I’ve uploaded a progress build, 0.03, (Windows 64 only) for those of who would like to check it out. I expect to put up another one fairly soon. There’s also an elevator pad, which for now you control with the Q and E keys, following part 1 of the elevator tutorial kindly provided by MrFantasticGhost. Later there will be buttons – and elevator cars! – instead of needing to use keys.

As always, thank you for stopping by and reading!

Great news! Mobility & Accessiblity sim Ayuma Project 1: preview test build, v 0.1, is built

BUILD SUCCESSFUL

Great news! The accessibility sim I’ve been working on, today I got it to build. Lately I haven’t had much visual progress to show because I’ve been getting the existing vehicle game engine to work with my armature & mesh, which (like many an actual wheelchair) has such a short, narrow wheelbase with very different radii between front and back tires. For a long time, the wheelchair model behaved almost normally, but then would just go flying off – especially if the collision mesh bumped into anything from the side. I also spent a bunch of time getting the front wheels to caster correctly, and they do (though you would have to lean forward in VR to see them or rotate the distant cam, and I don’t have either of those working yet).

This is my first time trying to package and export a UE4 project, so here goes. I’ve uploaded a zip file on heidialamanda.com, our primary domain for Alamanda Art LLC, which is the copyright holder for original game content. You should just be able to download and extract the set to the location of your choice, and then click on the exe to run it. The zip file is 442,384 kb, and posting the link like this may really eat up bandwidth, but I’m going to try it and see. I will at least roll the file location, so you need go to the linked page and then click to download the file, not bookmark the zip file location itself as it will change – and I may have to take it down if it gets too much downloading. I’m putting it up as just Windows (64-bit) for now. I had a bunch of legacy errors keeping the project from building, and I found out how to get past them and get the project to cook.  The controls are mostly the defaults from the UE4 vehicle demo level, so WASD, or a stick on the XBox One controller (only one I’ve tested) controls chair movement. Tab switches between fixed camera behind the chair, and mouse-controlled view in the chair. There’s no sensing that the chair has become stuck or destabilized, so if that happens, type “~” to enter the console, and then “RestartLevel”. If you have an Oculus Rift installed, you can try entering “Stereo On” in the console; I’ve tested this and it worked on my system but I definitely have all the prerequisites installed.  It might work with other VR displays, if Unreal Engine supports them (if you try it and have success, please message me!) When done, enter “quit” in the console.

The (only current) spawn point is in front of a nearly empty building, just a couple chairs and some lights. Eventually a condo will be in there, with an elevator up. If you proceed straight across the intersection towards the gray building, you will see a staircase and (what I’ve tried to make as) an ADA compliant wheelchair ramp.  If you go inside, you’ll see a back staircase to an open outdoor area (future sculpture area), but you cannot go that way (right now, if you try you’ll get stuck). To get up, you have to go back out, back down the ramp, further down the sidewalk, past some more stairs and under the overpass by the water, and then there’s another ADA ramp up. But you still can’t go to the sculpture area, because there’s no ramp down into it yet (there’s not even a perpendicular curb ramp at the top of the big ramp yet)

Also, across from the gray building, the houses have a narrow sidewalk, with dead ends. A car is parked nearly into its driveway – a common sight – but hanging out enough across the sidewalk that you will have to go out into the road to pass it. There’s also a bicycle with it’s wheel jutting into the walkway a bit. Especially in VR, seeing this first-person did help me gain a bit better insight into how frustrating this must be, when just walking on the grass is not something you can do.

Imagine having to push a few of these out of the way, from your wheelchair, just to get where you’re going.

 

Unreal Engine 4.10.1 installed!

The error I was experiencing with my Unreal Engine 4.10 installation, which was supposed to update from 4.10.0, has resolved, more or less. It never worked as an update. I tried uninstalling my Visual Studio 2015 redistributables, rebooting, and updating Unreal Engine, and it failed. I then removed every single Visual Studio item from my system, rebooted and tried to update Unreal Engine, and it failed. I de-installed UE 4.10.0 completely, and got a much larger install download – 4.4 GB or so instead of 2.3 – and that ultimately failed.

Finally I did two things together, and I don’t know if either, both, or neither is what led to success. I installed the complete Community version of Visual Studio 2015, (45 GB or so) including all the options so whatever missing tool set might come with it, and rebooted a few times for that. And I also discovered that my desktop shortcut for the Epic launcher for Unreal Engine, which manages the update installs, had reverted to not launching with administrative rights, so I checked that box again. After one more reboot, just because, I told the 4.10.1 install to resume, and in a couple minutes, *poof* there it was. My project files appear to open just fine, and I can resume work on my wheelchair sim project, Ayuma Project 1, and start prototyping another idea I have. For those of you that come to this post because you are having similar errors with you Unreal Engine 4.10 installation displaying E-1223 or otherwise missing prerequisites, here is what that whole section of my installed programs list looks like with it now successfully installed and working.

Speaking of which, the most popular click item on this blog is the wheelchair dimension diagram in my initial post about Ayuma (which could be an acronym for As Yet Unnamed Mobility & Accessiblity) Project. I didn’t make that image and I could never find back where I got it from, so I am glad that others are finding it there also. More people wanting to understand the dimension requirements for wheelchair accessibility is probably a good sign. Maybe it even means more people are making VR wheelchair-oriented sims, which might be good news (I do have some reservations about it, and not just because I hope people will want to spend a little time with this one).  Here I will repost the wheelchair dimension image, to help it get seen by a few more eyes. I would credit it if I could trace back where it came from; I suspect it was a government site. Let me just say it is not mine. As always, thank you for your time coming to read this blog 🙂

Dimensions and environmental dimension requirements for wheelchair user accessibility. Source unknown, but I’ll keep looking.

 

Learning about UV texturing

To continue making progress with this wheelchair accessibility sim, it’s time for me to start learning about UV texturing in Unreal Engine 4. Up to now, I’ve just been working with flat color materials (to simplify the process of figuring out issues like weird shadows, and because they work well with VR, etc.) but now I need to start making some signs.

Today I’ve started with an extremely simple sign. Method: In Blender, I added a cube to a basic rectangular bollard and shaped it to fit a common-dimension access notice sign. Then I assigned three materials to the mesh, for the post, sign and sign face. I unwrapped the mesh (Smart UV project, with some island margin) and baked the light map, then exported the light map. I opened the resulting PNG in Photoshop, and copied and transformed the access sign graphic onto the face region of the light map (which turned out to be facing the right way the first time) and saved that image back out as a new PNG. Back to Blender, I selected the sign face material in the Outliner, then opened the texture manager in the Properties window and created a texture with the new PNG, and re-baked the light map. Result:

Ayuma Project 1 work in progress – bollard with wheelchair access sign texture applied

Not bad! Not very efficient though, in terms of work flow or system resources. The texture is large and I’m not using most of it, since in UE4 I’m actually using other flat materials, but it’s a start – the sign shows up and lines up. No doubt it’s a better plan in this case to make separate meshes just for the signs themselves, and then attach them to various post or other meshes.

Ayuma Project 1 work in progress – access sign beside staircase.

One of many, many things I’ve come to know about in working on this project, in reading about signage I learned that New York City is changing to a modified, more kinetic version of the familiar wheelchair symbol – I will certainly be making up signs with this version. You can read more about the icon, and can donate to support their work, at the accessibleicon.org website.

Courtesy accessibleicon.org

Wheelchair accessibility sim Ayuma Project 1 gets mentioned in Ars Technica article comments

A 3GB update to UE4.9 is downloading right now, and I took a quick break from pondering which anti-malware program to go to for the coming year to look at this blog’s stats, and noticed a spike with some incoming from Ars Technica. It turns out my VR-oriented wheelchair accessibility simulation project got a mention in the comments of the article “Virtually ready: Diving into VR’s most promising PC launch titles,” by Kyle Orland and Sam Machkovech (Sep 11, 2015).

Ars Technica VR article comment from user Ostracus: “Related in a way but one of the things VR may be good for is simulating what life in a wheelchair is like.”

The comment links to my first post about the project. What a happy surprise! Thank you, Ostracus. I don’t have an Ars Technica account yet, but in the meantime, if anyone that does have one sees this post and passes it on to them, I’d appreciate it.

The comment’s content provides a nice context for discussing some tricky issues; l will save that for a following post. The project has been on necessary hiatus for the summer, but now I am returning to it in earnest and will post more about progress as it goes.