✤MURO Marching : Monument✤

 Have you ever wanted to build something bigger than yourself?

 

     Monument by Sylan Troh takes this feeling and turns it into a social experiment, similar to my previous post about Crazium's Worlds, which you can read here. When you join the World, you begin in a desert valley. A massive tower looms ahead, tall enough to that it fades into the clouds, and you're greeted by a sign.

 

     "Have you ever wondered what it would be like to build a monument? Something so large, that a single person could never hope to create on their own? The tower before you is synced across all instances: each brick you place is permanently added, and will be visible to everyone. Mine rocks, chisel them into bricks and help us build a monument together!" - Intro message upon loading into the World.

    Initially, when taking these photos, I hit a bottleneck when my game camera was unable to capture the tower. Despite several attempts, I failed to capture the entire scale of the tower in a photograph, resulting in landscape shots with no tower in sight. A recent update seems to have fixed this problem, because now I can use the in-game camera with no trouble.

 

   To add to the tower, I begin by picking up a pickaxe and breaking off chunks of rock from the cliff face. Then, I take all the stones I mined and a chisel from the workstation, and proceed to carve each chunk down into a brick. After loading all of the carved bricks into woven baskets, it's time to make the long trek to the top!

 

    The design of the monument includes a long, spiral staircase that takes you up a winding path to the top floor. There's no railing, so it's easy to overshoot and fall off if you get impatient. When I reach it, I'm so high up that I can no longer see the desert below. When I go to unload my baskets and place the bricks, the spots that I'm able to put them light up blue. When I click, the brick disappears from my hand and fades into place in that spot.

 

 

    A real person placed each brick of this massive monument. You can watch in real time as bricks materialize into existence with a flash of blue light, signalling someone somewhere else has filled in that brick. Even without speaking to them, you can feel connected to these strangers in your united goal. The tower is already massive! There's no way to pinpoint the exact bricks we laid, but my friends and I visited this world and helped fill in several layers of it. And the results speak for themselves! So many people have contributed to this tower, that the top stands far above the valley.

 

    What do you think? Would you participate in a project like this? Let me know in the comments! Finally, here's the World's credit list, photographed on the right! 

 

Thanks for reading, and I'll see you next time!

✤MURO Marching : Interactive Water✤

    Hi again, everyone! How was your summer? I love everything about the season, except for the heat...

 

    Today's post is about interactive water! That doesn't sound that impressive on the surface, but when you think about it, what goes into recreating water in a digital medium?

 

    Solids and gases have the benefit of being easy to establish visually. Collision, in game mechanic terms, is a property of whether or not the player can pass through an object. If I place a plain white cube in a space and turn the cube's collision on, I've successfully created the illusion of a solid object for the user. For gas, it's the opposite. Turn off collision, and make it see-through. In only a couple of steps, you can create both. 

 

 

    Liquid, however, is more complicated. Sure, I can create a flat, see-through surface, turn off collision for the user, and label it as water. That's what a lot of games do! And if your only need is to have water nearby, it's serviceable. But what if you wanted to have water pour into something? What if you wanted players to be able to interact with it? The more you think of what water is naturally capable of doing versus what you have to intentionally make it do, the more complicated it gets.

 

    Realistic water movement requires constant calculations. Computational fluid dynamics is an entire branch of fluid mechanics, which is itself a branch of physics. The more calculations, the more demand and strain on your PC, so less is usually better.

 

    The water I'm looking at today is a mashup of different assets, put together by iyFale Edvifin! The World photographed is ODN Pool ［VRCLV 2․0］, a rooftop pool with a video player and lights. It's a great party spot! I think the night mode with the auroras turned on looks super dreamy, and splashing in the water is so much fun.

 

 

    So what's so fantastic about this water? Well, look at it! Making realistic-looking and realistic-moving water is already a feat. But this water is Quest compatible!

 

    What's Quest Compatibility? The Meta Quest headset line is Meta's take on a VR headset, optimized for ease of use and portability. As a result, the Quest headsets have less processing power than a headset plugged into a computer. In VRChat, Quest users must follow stricter guidelines when uploading Avatars and Worlds to ensure the Quest can handle the volume of user content. That means for something to be compatible with the Quest, the creator has to know how to balance visual quality with performance. Making it so you're capable of splashing your friends, air bubbles spread under the surface after a splash, your vision blurs, and more, all while keeping it Quest compatible, is impressive! (Note: These photographs are taken on PC, so they may not accurately reflect how the World looks on Quest.)

 

 

    I'd also like to start including the credit lists from Worlds in MURO Marching because it's interesting to know how many individual assets go into making a World! What do you think? Should I start including credit lists when they're available? Let me know in the comments!