Recap of July's Open Source Developer Discussion for High Fidelity's Platform

The Open Source Developer Discussion is a great place for developers to bring their ideas to High Fidelity's leadership team.

Contribute to High Fidelity's open source code base by submitting your proposals and PRs ahead of time for our development team to review.

Here is a recap of proposals and submitted PRs that were discussed and merged.

Open Source Project Proposals

Make High Fidelity Pimax Ready

Submitted by XaosPrincess
Feedback: Greenlit by @ZappoMan for @Menithal and Piper to work on.

XaosPrincess suggests a custom display plugin that works with the Pimax5K+ HMD (head mounted display). The proposed PR would adjust the resolution to resolve the grey stripe issue; it appears the OpenVR display plugin is getting selected and doesn’t have the ability to ask the device what size it is. The PR would also enable trackers to calibrate even if the headset can’t be identified.

Make the Create app work nicely with inspect.js and derivatives

Merged PR since the meeting: Make Create app use Ctrl key to duplicate entities instead of Alt
Submitted by @ctrlaltdavid
Feedback: Greenlit by @ZappoMan

Two PRs will be submitted by @ctrlaltdavid: one to change the key binding so that the Create tool will use control+down to duplicate entities instead of alt+down and one that will update the inspect.js script with various improvements.

Discussed Pull Requests (PRs)

Build openvr plugin on linux

Submitted by @Codes4Fun
Feedback: @Codes4Fun needs to fix warnings left on PR.

This PR would fix compiling issues and disables windows specific code in the OpenVR plugin with a Linux target. Although we want to get this merged, @ZappoMan notes the warnings need to be fixed. Since the meeting, @Codes4Fun has closed this PR.

Clear more disk caches

Submitted by @orenh1
Feedback: Will be merged once KTX cache is only cleared after a restart.

This PR would enhance the clear cache behavior from the developer menu. @ZappoMan explains there is one pending item that @orenh1 and @samcake have discussed on the PR: The back and forth with clearing of the KTX cache while Interface is active. Otherwise, we’re eager to merge the PR.

Material alpha-blending modes

Submitted by @SaracenOne
Feedback: @SaracenOne has closed this PR and is working on a new strategy.

Although @SaracenOne wrote this implementation with a fallback mechanism, more recently, he wants to try a new approach, changing it to explicitly specify the alpha-blending mode. @ZappoMan notes there is a conflict in material blending.

Empty Weights FBX fix

Submitted by @SaracenOne
Feedback: Our development team has noted a couple of warnings on this PR; @SaracenOne will review.

This PR would force unweighted vertices to be weighted to the root bone in FBX loader rather than the root of the model itself. @SaracenOne will review feedback.

Unity Avatar Exporter Improvements

Submitted by @SaracenOne
Feedback: @Huffman has left comments for @SaracenOne to address.

This PR fixes bugs and adds new features to the Unity avatar exporter. @SaracenOne explains you can manually override the scale of a model on the Unity importer, and the exporter was not respecting that. It needs to read the import scale settings from the Unity meta file and bring them in properly. @Huffman has left comments for @SaracenOne to address, needing to know more about what the globalScale value would be with these changes.

Kasen Plugin Infrastructure v½ Codename "Modkit Mini"

Submitted by @kasenvr
From Proposal: Open Source Modkit, Submitted by @RevoFire
Feedback: Greenlit by @ZappoMan; project has been approved.

This PR will help foster open source contributions alongside the main application code base.  @ZappoMan prefers the Modkit to not have dependencies on Qt, and only use native C++ types. The overall goal is to increase the possibility for rapid iteration and decrease the barriers to creation and distribution of extensions. After some iterations, the project has been approved.

High Fidelity's next Open Source Developer Discussion will be August 7, 2019 from 4 - 5 p.m. PDT / 11 p.m. - midnight UTC. We look forward to reviewing and discussing the submitted PRs and proposals.

Right before that, our Core Engine team will be doing a “Deep Dive on High Fidelity’s Engine” technical learning session and Q&A for external developers on August 7, 2019 from 3 - 4 p.m. PDT / 10 - 11 p.m. UTC.

The August events calendar has recently been updated! View all events here.