Building Shortbow: New High Fidelity Tutorials

Here at High Fidelity, we’re big fans of VR games. One of the team’s favorites is The Lab’s Longbow experience. Sometimes, though, defending castles calls for teamwork. So we decided to showcase how developers can build and host their own multiplayer version of a bow and arrow tower defense game in High Fidelity.

Affectionately dubbed ‘Shortbow’, this game is now available on the High Fidelity Marketplace, so anyone can add their own castle to defend in their domains.

We wanted to make it easy to create and customize your own game, too, so we’ve also turned Shortbow into a tutorial series for building the game from scratch using the editing tools available in the High Fidelity Sandbox.

If you’re just getting started with building in High Fidelity, there are also two new tutorials to help you get your domain set up and running on your local machine, and walk through the process of editing entities and scripting basic behaviors.

New Tutorials

Introduction to Building in High Fidelity

High Fidelity is an open source world building platform that enables you to create and host your own virtual reality worlds within a connected metaverse. This tutorial walks through the process of:

• Installing the High Fidelity Sandbox
• Setting up a personal High Fidelity server hosted on your machine
• Connecting to your Sandbox server with the browser
• Configuring user permissions for your domain

Getting Started with Scripting in High Fidelity

To prepare for building more complex projects, this tutorial starts by taking a look at the tools provided within the High Fidelity Interface client to edit a domain. These tools allow users to add and modify different entities in our domain.

In this lesson, you’ll learn how to:

• Switch in and out of desktop and VR modes
• Turn on the editing and developer menus
• Add a cube to our domain
• Access and use the script editor in Interface
• View running scripts and start new ones

Building “Shortbow”

UPDATE 04/25/2019: While the Shortbow tutorial has been discounted, please check High Fidelity docs for more awesome tutorials on what you can create.

The Shortbow tutorial 4-part series walks you through the process of developing your own game using the High Fidelity platform. Learn about the different types of scripts, how to set up a project directory for building games, programming behaviors on enemies, creating usable weapons, the relationships between client and server entity scripts to see what it takes to build a full multiplayer VR game! In the tutorial, we’ve provided links to download the assets used and all of the code to show how it all comes together.

• Chapter 1: Making a usable bow and arrow
• Chapter 2: Programming Enemy Entities
• Chapter 3: Setting up a game environment and scoreboard
• Chapter 4: Writing a game manager

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be releasing more educational content to cover different aspects of building in High Fidelity, so if you have questions or suggestions for what we should cover in our tutorials, let us know!