Last weekend the recording of my session VR in a Box for the recent Microsoft Techdays was uploaded to YouTube. If you have any feedback let me know. I might do a follow-up if necessary.

You can view and download the slides over here:

In case you are looking for the APK to try it for yourself: VR_TechDays.zip

When I was building my entry for the JS13K games contest , I tested my app on the Google Daydream. One issue I ran into was that it was hard to focus my eyes in VR. I thought it was just me at first and during the contest, I didn’t have the time to investigate any further anyway. Now that the contest is over I’ve decided to dig in a little deeper.

Debugging

I’d like to start with a little background on how to debug a WebVR app running on a phone in a Daydream View. Since the app will probably be running in Chrome on the device ( although debugging Microsoft Edge works as well!), I use the Chrome remote inspector. The remote inspector can be accessed by starting Chrome on your dev machine and navigate to chrome://inspect. When your phone is connected to your PC via USB it will show up there, but it is possible to find it over WIFI as well. Select the page you want to debug and click ‘inspect'.

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Now you can debug the page as you would normally.

To test if the page supports WebVR you can check if ‘navigator.getVRDisplays’ exists. Just type this in the console:

You should get one of these three responses.

“undefined”. In this case, WebVR isn’t available. Not native, and not through a polyfill.

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In this case, you’ll see an implemented function. This function is implemented in the polyfill.

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Best case scenario. The function is implemented natively.

In the last two cases, you’ll be able to call the function and get info about the device. This function returns a promise, but with the following like you can view it in the console.

Now, you can dig into the result and see what is in there. For example the device that is used.

Issue and Fix

It turned out that for some reason my WebVR app was defaulting to ‘Google Cardboard’ and not Daydream, while other examples had access to the Daydream native VR. This seemingly weird behavior is caused by the polyfill, flags in Chrome and a meta tag.

After a lot of debugging, testing and digging around, I learned the following:

• The polyfill defaults to cardboard, even when running it on a Daydream device, which causes the wrong settings for the Daydream lenses. This makes it very hard to focus your eyes on the VR.
• To get WebVR running on your Daydream supported Android device everywhere on any page, you need to enable it through a flag. Go to about://flags and search for ‘WebVR’. After doing that it runs natively.
• If you don’t want your users to have to enable a flag, there’s another way. That is by adding a meta tag. You have to enable the experimental feature by registering an origin trial. This is very easy to do. Start by going to the OriginTrials Gitbub and follow the link there to a form to register. You’ll receive a token you can add to the page to enable the WebVR feature for every visitor.

That last point, the meta tag, is what is used in the examples from ThreeJs.

Today I spoke at the Microsoft Techdays in Amsterdam about Google Cardboard, Unity3D and Visual Studio.

There will be a recording available later which I will add to this post. But I promised the APK I’ve built during the demo.

You can download it here:  VR_TechDays

In case you are looking for the .FBX model, you can find that here: VRBox FBX Model

Thanks again to everyone attended!

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JavaScript has its quirks and difficulties. One of them is null & undefined. If there’s undefined, why does JavaScript even have null?

Equality

Let’s start exploring null and undefined by having a look at the following comparisons:

How can null be bigger or equal to zero, less or equal to zero, but not be equal to zero?!

To understand this we have to know how JavaScript handles these comparisons. There are two different kinds of operators used in the example above: Equality Operators  (==, ===, != and !===) and Relational Operators (>, <, >= and <=).  And both work differently.

Equality operators compare at an object level. If both _operands, _the things left and right of the operator, are of different types a strict comparison (=== or !==) is used. Because null is an object and 0 is a number they are not equal.

In the case of Relational Operators, both operands are converted to the same type. In the example to a number. Under the hood, JavaScript is doing the following:

Which makes much more sense. Number(null) return the value 0 and 0 is equal to 0.

Let’s try the same examples with undefined:

First thought would be that this should result in the same outcome. Although JavaScript is doing the same, the result is different. Again, JavaScript is converting undefined to a number, but Number_(undefined)_ is not 0 but NaN. The JavaScript spec says that every comparison with NaN results in false, even a comparison with NaN.

There’s even a little bit more to the _ comparison algorithm  _than this, but this explains the idea.

Why null?

Does JavaScript need a null value? Though it would be possible to write an entire application without using null, and often it does, there is a place for null. The difference in usage is intention. A null value is intenionally abcent, where an undefined value is often unintentional and just the default value.

For example in a function retrieving a piece of data. When that data isn’t there, this function returns null. Otherwise, it returns the data. This way one can tell if the value is returned by the function and is set to null or if the variable that should contain the result isn’t set at all.

In other words: null !== undefined

On the 13th of September, the JS13k Games jam 2017 has ended. The challenge in this contest is to build a game in JavaScript that fits in a .zip file of 13k in one month. New this year was the A-Frame category. A-Frame is a web framework for building virtual reality experiences on the web. I love 3D and VR, programming in JavaScript and a challenge, so I decided to participate (again) this year. Eventually, the biggest challenge turned out to be time. I ran out of time, with about 5kb left of the 13kb.

Since I always wanted to try creating a roguelike game that was going to be my game type, and that I would love as much as I love the no game throws from P4rgaming. The world should be generated randomly, with monsters and loot. You should search for pieces of you spaceplane that crashed onto this planet. At first, I wanted to create portals to go from level to level until the player would have found all pieces. I later, due to the time constraint, changed to 1 level with 5 pieces you have to find. I wanted a ‘low res’ pixel-arty Minecraft-like look.

A-Frame

A-Frame uses a declarative HTML syntax which makes it very easy to understand (and to copy-paste). A-Frame supports all the major virtual reality devices, mobile devices, and the desktop. It is built on top of  three.js . This way you can leverage the full potential of 3D on the web.

A-Frame works by writing components to use in combination with the markup. The way this worked reminded me a lot of the way games are built in Unity3D: Creating a ‘script’ and attach it to a game element. It took me a few days to get into this mindset, but when it hit I started creating components for every element of the game, like the player, the mobs, ground tiles and the materials.

For moving around I chose to limit to a ‘gaze’ at the tile next to your character to move to that tile. This feature is implemented in A-Frame and could be handled by having a ‘click’ event handler on a ground asset. This even could be filtered by using a css class on the ground elements.

Map Generator

A hard part to build was the map generator. Though there is a lot of information on the web on building a dungeon generator on the web, pretty much all of them are too complex for the 13kB limit.

One thing I kept in mind is the fact the 13kB limit is the zipped version of your game. Having some very repeating data inside the game should theoretically be compressed quite a lot.  I decided to go for a type of generator that would place and connect various ‘rooms’. The rooms are constructed from 2D arrays containing 0s, 1s and 2s. Where 1s are floors and 2s are exits. I also wrote a function that mirrors the rooms horizontally and vertically.

To save bytes on holding the generated map in memory, I used a canvas instead of an array. The canvas has every function I need to write and read data for the map.

Every tile in the game is represented by a pixel on the map. Each pixel is made of 4 bytes. I used the first to represent the floor, the second to represent an item and the third for a mob. The actual value of these bytes varies per type of mob or item. The best side effect of using a canvas is that I added it to the DOM to debug the map generator. Below is an image from the map. You can clearly see the bright green pixels, which are the pieces of the plane.

The next step after generating the map is to write it to the 3D scene. In this, I used a couple of for loops to look at each pixel and draw a floor tile if the first byte is a not- zero value. I also gave the A-Frame entities an ID with the position on the map. That way it became very easy to find an entity based on its position on the map.

Shaders and Art

To get the game to look the way I wanted I wrote a couple of shaders. Two vertex shaders and a fragment shader. The first vertex shader is pretty simple, it only transforms the vertices to 2D space and calculates the UV coordinates for the sprites. The second vertex shader is slightly more complex. It is used to billboard the sprites. They are rendered that they always face the 3D camera. The fragment shader is used to render the sprites and uses a few tricks.

Speaking of sprites. The sprite sheet I used is this:

Note that there are colored floor tiles, mobs or items in there. The shader I wrote is replacing the gray colors of these with a color from a second sprite sheet.

I was planning on creating a lot more ground tiles in different variations. The plan was, for example, to have a grassy biome. This biome would have all kinds of variations of grass tiles. Some all green, some with yellow flowers and some with stone tiles. I even thought of doing animations on lava and water by cycling through a couple of different rows from the palette. But, again, I didn’t have the time to do so.

For creating and testing the shaders I used ShaderTool  and FireFox. ShaderTool makes it very easy to write you GLSL code and test it by wiring up the inputs. I used FireFox for fine-tuning and debugging. The GLSL dev tools in FireFox let you modify the shader while running. Very handy.

The biggest issue I ran into while creating the shaders was handling the opacity correctly. I eventually added a parameter as a cutoff value. If the alpha drops below this threshold, the pixel is discarded.

Text

Near the end of the contest, someone mentioned on Slack that the a-text component was downloading a font. Since using external stuff besides the A-Frame library was prohibited, using the a-text component wasn’t allowed as well. I solved this issue by creating a new component that renders a text on a canvas and uses this as a texture on a plane entity. Too bad this took some time to build and caused other items on my todo list to be removed.

Future

You can play the game at  JS13KGames  or at my GitHub . You can find the source there as well. Since the game isn’t entirely finished I’m thinking of continuing working on it. A few features I’d like to add are a better following camera, more intelligence on the mobs, an inventory for the items and durability on them so they break and better biomes.

Just want to close by thanking Andrzej Mazur and c9bets for having this great jam every year!