Beginner questions on entry point and "Now Playing"

I'm creating a scene which will be used to shoot a non-VR video and using editorvr to place objects and cameras. It's beta software so I should be starting simple right? No, I'm using a huge environment I created with Gaia and learning CineMachine. I've learned a couple of things that might help others in this situation. For starters, I originally created the scene in 5.5.0f3 and then tried to get it into 5.4.3x. A lot of crashes later I found that I had some bad prefabs, however I also found that accidentally switching to a camera with deferred rendering will crash the editor. Also the Virtual reality supported checkbox will often get checked out of the blue. This is just a minor annoyance as it only breaks my CineMachine virtual cameras and I have to just uncheck the box and recheck it when I want to go back into VR. Yesterday I had a pretty productive day using the editor but there are two things that are slowing me down.

When I go into VR, I'm a good distance from my set. It's not too bad but it still takes a while to fly to where I'm shooting. I have absolutely no experience altering the unity editor. I've looked for where I might be able to influence this but struck out. If someone could offer some guidance, I'd really appreciate it.

Also, sometimes when I'm really having a great time thinking how cool it is as I'm adjusting things from 'inside', all of a sudden, the display inside the HMD will switch to a scene where all I see is a GUI that says "Now Playing". I assume maybe the complexity of the scene has overwhelmed the system. Inside the performance isn't great but usable, I'm on some pretty powerful hardware. Once this happens, there seems to be no way to get back in without closing the editor window which would be OK except for the problem above where now I have to travel again. The editor window on the monitor when this happens is still working as one would expect.

Any one have an idea how I might overcome these problems? Thanks!

 

Hmm...I've never seen the problem you described of the "Now Playing". Are you using a Vive or Rift and does this look like Unity or Oculus Home/SteamVR that it is bumping you out to?

Re: your question about being a good distance from your set, are you looking to start back wherever you were when you last opened the editor?

 

Sorry, I realized I should have said I'm using a Vive. It's not the standard Vive home screen though. I've never seen it before. Basically it's a pretty empty space with a 2D GUI panel that says "Now Playing" at the top. There is a square below it that is something familiar, it is probably supposed to be an image of what's playing but seems to be a placeholder, when it happens again I'll pay more attention . Too bad I couldn't take a screen shot. Then there are a group of animated progress type or waiting type white vertical bars at the bottom that move and give you hope it's doing something and will come back but it never does.

Yes, starting back where you were would be super useful! I was thinking maybe I could write a bit of code to set a starting point like I would move the camera rig in an "in game" scenario but I don't know how the position of the HMD is represented in the editor. The Gaia created scene is really huge and I tried creating some smaller ones but just wasn't as happy with the composition. Also even with the terrible performance and artifacting due to the scene being too detailed for a VR project, it can be quite breathtaking. Not quite like stepping into Witcher 3 but close.

 

I don't think the "Now Playing" part is coming from Unity, then. Does the Unity scene fade out when this happens?

Re: saving the camera location on re-start, would you be willing to submit a feature request for that? If you do, then you'd be able to get updates when the feature is being considered and/or merged back into a release. In the meantime, I believe you could create a simple tool that implements ITool and IUsesCameraRig to reset the camera to a specific location.

 

Yes the scene fades like you lost tracking only you don't see the home screen. Took a picture using my phone in the HMD. Not the best quality, HA! This is what I see. If I look down in addition to the concentric rings I see a bright blue ring (like a chaperone, I'm using a seated room setup) and a white square directly below me. It's hard to tell with the lens distortion but that looks like a big V inside the square under now playing so I'm guessing it's coming from the Vive?

Yeah, I'll look into the feature request, have never done one but will look at it this evening.

I would love to learn to add a tool to the editor but are there any docs I could look at? I'm old enough to remember what life was like when I couldn't just google something but I'm a bit lost. Are there any examples? Is that IUsesCameraRig or IUserCameraRig?

 

Typically, when Steam pops up the "now playing" screen intermittently, it's due to a lack of update from the application. In other-words, Unity is blocking long enough that Steam is detecting it and thinks the application has temporarily "hung." Which, technically, it has. It happens often when VR games drop their framerate or stutter due to loading. But of course, it's probably that Unity is processing something heavy. Ideally, VR apps would be engineered to prioritize the update cycle above all else and run heavy processing asynchronously such that this never happens. My guess would be that the heavy scene you've loaded is exposing enough blocked or slow points in the update cycle that Steam is properly intervening. The question becomes: What exactly is slowing Unity down? Is it something that Unity should be moving out of the main editor update thread and to an asynchronous sub-process of some type? Or is it that the scene really is improperly heavy?

 

For extending EditorVR we have a developer guide here.