I'm Back
Both in the sense that I'm back to posting updates in this project, and that I'm back to square one.
Sorry for not posting for a while. I've been trying to find out how to package my VR project to an android SDK. I've tried a lot of things. I had a plan for a little while that I was going to finish the game and then maybe get help with the packaging process, but the more I researched online the more I realized that I should have probably been making sure it could package at every step of the way. What I found online was that some people make their whole careers on trying to get things to package, which isn't confidence inspiring and really made me worry that maybe this whole project was a little out of reach for me.
Instead, what I found is that I can package to Windows pretty easily, and that the game when packaged to Windows will still open in Steam VR. So the new plan is just to make a PCVR game instead of something that can run on standalone headsets. That makes a few things a bit easier, because if I'm working on something for a PC I can expect a bit more processing power than the standalone. I think with Meta leaving the VR sphere and Steam releasing the Steamframe, that probably won't be too much of a kneecap. I guess we'll see.
The problem with that is that the ATMOM project I have and have been working on all this time won't package to Windows or standalone, and I have no idea why. I've changed way too much on it, and the base it was built on, the GDXR template, already had so much going on that I didn't understand.
So what have I been up to? Basically making the whole things over again from scratch, no GDXR Template. The only asset I'm using is Advanced Behaviors, and in the AI tree I still overwrote everything to make the enemies act completely different. It hasn't been as bad as I'd feared. I'm actually a lot better at UE5 than I realized. Plus, the features I've built are way more lightweight and seem to work a lot better than the ones I had frankenstiened into GDXR. I had basically rebuilt everything I touched in GDXR, and it's actually been a lot easier to make it from scratch.
So yes, I'm still working on At the Mountains of Madness, and there has been another setback. But I've overcome them now, and at the end of every day I make sure the project packages and do some revision control. I've learned from my mistakes, and I'm still working on it.