Reality Decks Beta 0.6

I’ve just pushed out Reality Decks 0.6 to our beta testers. Here are the changes:

• Scratching or playing with the vinyl should now feel more natural (e.g. try a spinback/spin forward while record playing)
• Fixed an issue whereby some avatar eyewear disrupted the view
• Fixed frame rate judder when loading a track or browsing large folders
• Fixed some audio glitches
• Artwork disabled on the record temporarily as it was causing some frame rate judder

I’ve spent lots of time over the past few weeks refining the core audio engine of RD. Sample accurate signal processing code can be grueling!, throw in low latency requirements and syncing to 90fps, it’s certainly been one of the more challenging parts of the project but also one of the most rewarding to see it now working well. In the process I’ve been able to develop some unit testing techniques built around mathematical principles rather than just listening for audio anomalies which means I’ll have a much better regression testing framework going forward. I’ve also been able to simplify the code greatly. I hate impenetrable signal processing code done in the name of performance, so I’ve put lots of time and thought to getting this part of the engine neat and easy to change in the future.

Huge thanks to the beta testers who have been feeding me a with a constant stream of feedback, bugs/improvements and encouragement! The only major issue I know of right now that requires a restart of the app is that occasionally someone’s touch controller will start to vibrate and never stop. I haven’t managed to reproduce it yet so didn’t manage to get it fixed for this release.

That’s it for 2017, will 2018 be the big year for VR?, see you on the other side!