- by Lux
Today we are celebrating the launch of Flipside Studio 2020.1, along with a completely updated brand and website refresh.
With over 32,000 recordings, a 48-episode comedy show produced live by Caffeine Studios, and a kid's show streaming on Super RTL, the largest private broadcaster in Germany, all made with Flipside Studio, we couldn't be more excited to be rolling out tons of new features and seeing what our users will create with them.
Flipside Studio now supports not only one type of multiplayer, but two (is that another first in VR?!). Now you can choose the best type of connection for your productions.
Here's a handy reference to help you choose:
We've added the ability to add physics colliders on characters so that their interactions with the environment feel more realistic. You can generate colliders for a character in the Flipside Creator Tools with a single click, and then tweak them to suit your needs.
Note that body physics can be very performance intensive, so we recommend going through the generated colliders and removing ones that aren't necessary to achieve the shots you need. Often you can get away with just a collider or two on the arms and midsection of the body, but it can scale all the way up to individual fingers if needed.
We've added a new facial expression mode that lets you add blinking and expressions to texture-based faces, which lets your characters have more expressiveness while recreating that classic cartoon style. You can also mix and match styles now too, so part of your face can be animated with textures and another can be animated with blend shapes or even Unity animations. The possibilities are pretty much endless.
Flipside Studio can now appear as a virtual camera device that apps like Zoom, Skype, etc. can use as your video source. To enable it, go to Settings > Output on the desktop camera switcher interface and look for the DirectShow settings.
The teleprompter controller has been revamped to include auto-scrolling with a slider to adjust the scroll speed.
We've made a number of improvements to how eyes move on characters in Flipside Studio, including improved idle movement with simulated saccades and world-space points of interest, more natural blinking, and improved range of motion when eyes lock onto targets of interest.
We've added a TwitchActions component to the Flipside Creator Tools that lets you define custom Twitch chat commands that users can type which then trigger actions in your custom sets. This can be used for anything from triggering sounds and visual effects to voting on the direction the show's narrative should take.
We've added a ton of new interactive functionality to the Flipside Creator Tools, letting you build sets with interactions as complex as games. There's even a scoreboard element that keeps score for everyone in the scene.
Build your own guns (or pea-shooters!), choose-your-own-adventure stories, and more with over a dozen new components. The best part is you can hit Play in Unity and test them all in VR without having to build and upload your sets, making the Flipside Creator Tools a very powerful tool for crafting interactive VR experiences.
We've added support for an unlimited number of camaras in the VR camera switcher, which is now found under the Show Tools menu, and you can have as many VR camera switchers as you need too.
We've increased the recorded and multiplayer audio quality in Flipside Studio from 16 kHz (the standard for VoIP) to 24 kHz, which noticeably improves the voice quality particularly in frequencies between 8-12 kHz. We did this while also improving our audio playback performance!
With this release, we have now completed our upgrade from Unity 2017 to 2019, meaning all assets should be made using Unity 2019 from now on. This was our first major Unity upgrade since supporting user-uploaded assets and taught us a lot about how to migrate successfully when users also have to update their assets.
If you're still making assets in Unity 2017, now's the time to head over to the Flipside Creator Tools page to find the new version of Unity to use and update those assets! We've done a lot to make it backwards compatible with 2017 assets, but some compatibility issues couldn't be solved automatically.
Flipside Studio
Flipside Creator Tools
Flipside Studio 2020.1 is now the current stable release on Oculus Home and SteamVR, so those of you on the Beta channel that don't want the latest experimental features can access this release on the regular Stable channel now. We will be introducing a new beta with some exciting new features in the next few weeks, so feel free to stick to the Beta channel if you're interested in testing those out.
If you make your own custom characters and sets, you will also need to upgrade to the Flipside Creator Tools 2020.1, which can be downloaded from here.
From the Flipside XR team, we want to say a big thanks to all of our users who have helped shape this release by testing and and finding bugs for us to fix. You've all helped make Flipside what it is today.
Sincerely,
Team Flipside
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