VR Expansion Plugin

[Kilargo]

Any default replication wouldn't be any faster latency wise, its still ping limited regardless of who is sending.

You can run the replication at a lower rate and lerp between last and current values to reduce the cost as well. I'd imagine that eventually when I see where they end up on their plugin I will make some default replication setup and merge it into the main SteamVRExpansion module. For now i'm sitting on it though since their plugin is very much still early alpha and has some strange design choices.

ok cool. I'll tweak the replication and lerp as required. Thanks again.

[Smiddsy]

When working with secondary grips, is it possible to not have the event Secondary Grip Released not fire when the main grip is released? I'm attempting to create a tape measure where you can drop the body of the device on a surface while maintaining the secondary grip to allow for the rendering of the tape. Currently the road-block I've hit is that when releasing the tape body the Secondary Grip Released event is triggered, causing the tape to self-destruct. Any thoughts?

[mordentral]

When working with secondary grips, is it possible to not have the event Secondary Grip Released not fire when the main grip is released? I'm attempting to create a tape measure where you can drop the body of the device on a surface while maintaining the secondary grip to allow for the rendering of the tape. Currently the road-block I've hit is that when releasing the tape body the Secondary Grip Released event is triggered, causing the tape to self-destruct. Any thoughts?

Not really, SecondaryGrip is a grip modifier, when you drop the grip itself then the secondary grip modifier is removed. Normally for that tape setup I would have a seperate component on the tape end of the tape measure that the other hand grips, not a secondary grip. That way you can pull out the other end of the tape seperate from the main body.

Trying to do it with a secondary grip seems like the wrong approach there, two seperate grips (one of the body and one of the tape end as a component) seems more suitable?

You could also store the secondary hand and not implement a secondary grip at all if you wanted to avoid the extra component, the secondary attachment itself really doesn't have much use with what you are trying to make there.

[Simply Clueless]

I just want to thank you so much for giving us this amazing public, you have saved me so much time with doing my own research and now I can get straight to work and making my ideas come to life. One of my ideas were to have weighted physics objects that you can grab as seen in games live Blade and Sorcery or the unreleased Boneworks. Is there a way to do that through your implimentation of the grabbing mechanics?

[mordentral]

I just want to thank you so much for giving us this amazing public, you have saved me so much time with doing my own research and now I can get straight to work and making my ideas come to life. One of my ideas were to have weighted physics objects that you can grab as seen in games live Blade and Sorcery or the unreleased Boneworks. Is there a way to do that through your implimentation of the grabbing mechanics?

Yes, using the Interactive Collision With Physics grip type is a constraint based grip, you can pass in specific bone names to it and it will grip at that specific bone. Also in the advanced physics options on the grip struct there is the capability to change the grip type from an acceleration based constraint to a force based one, which will give more realistic behavior with that kind of thing.



These are the physics settings that you would likely want to use for that kind of thing:



You then have to play with the grip stiffness (and/or the custom angular values) until you get a force amount that works well for you.
It sets the physics grip location to stop setting the center of mass since you want the object to be weighted correctly and turns the constraint type into a force based one. Keep in mind that Angular stiffness and damping will likely have to be a very high values as its units are different than the linear stiffness ones.

You may want to actually turn on setting the COM again if you are gripping something like a sword as it would make the pivot work better.


You can grip the same object multiple times with physics grips since they are force applicators, I actually have it on my TODO list for today to make it easier to manage multiple main grips on a single object, been pushing it off because its going to require people to re-factor a bit.

[Smiddsy]

Not really, SecondaryGrip is a grip modifier, when you drop the grip itself then the secondary grip modifier is removed. Normally for that tape setup I would have a seperate component on the tape end of the tape measure that the other hand grips, not a secondary grip. That way you can pull out the other end of the tape seperate from the main body.

Trying to do it with a secondary grip seems like the wrong approach there, two seperate grips (one of the body and one of the tape end as a component) seems more suitable?

You could also store the secondary hand and not implement a secondary grip at all if you wanted to avoid the extra component, the secondary attachment itself really doesn't have much use with what you are trying to make there.

I had a suspicion that I was misunderstanding the purpose of the secondary grip, thank you for clearing that up for me!

As a follow-up question, how would I go about differentiating between grips on the separate grippable components? At the moment I have one parent GrippableSphere component with a GrippableBox component where the tape end of the tape measure is. I've implemented the VRGrip interface to get access to the On Grip event, but how do I know which component was gripped?

[mordentral]

I had a suspicion that I was misunderstanding the purpose of the secondary grip, thank you for clearing that up for me!

As a follow-up question, how would I go about differentiating between grips on the separate grippable components? At the moment I have one parent GrippableSphere component with a GrippableBox component where the tape end of the tape measure is. I've implemented the VRGrip interface to get access to the On Grip event, but how do I know which component was gripped?

Generally the best method is to have your sub component have a method of notifying the parent, like an event that you throw from it OnGrip that the parent binds too. I don't have default ones because generally sub objects parent containers don't care if their children are gripped or not.

There is also the OnChildGripped event that is part of the interface as a quick way of doing this, but it requires checking against the sub components. It would do if you only have one child that is grippable though as you can just cast to it and use it.

Generally by the way I would have used as grippable static mesh actor for the base, and then the end of the tape could be your grippable box. Also if you are only doing linear measuring you could use a VRSlider component to extend the tape.

[Smiddsy]

Generally the best method is to have your sub component have a method of notifying the parent, like an event that you throw from it OnGrip that the parent binds too. I don't have default ones because generally sub objects parent containers don't care if their children are gripped or not.

There is also the OnChildGripped event that is part of the interface as a quick way of doing this, but it requires checking against the sub components. It would do if you only have one child that is grippable though as you can just cast to it and use it.

Generally by the way I would have used as grippable static mesh actor for the base, and then the end of the tape could be your grippable box. Also if you are only doing linear measuring you could use a VRSlider component to extend the tape.

Thank you again mordentral, that worked perfectly! Your suggestion to change to a static mesh grippable was a great idea, and we now have a working tape measure!

[mordentral]

Pushed a new update to both Repositories, keep in mind that this one will require some actual node changes.
I usually try and keep that kind of update to between engine versions, but it is early on in 4.22 and I really wanted to work with this over the course of this engine version.

Changed the IsHeld Implementation and added AllowsMultiGrip to the VRGripInterface to prepare for some future features.

See Patch Notes:
https://vreue4.com/patch-notes?secti...anges-04-18-19

[Kilargo]

None of the Valve SteamVR plugin is setup for replication currently, in fact the layout of it is somewhat against replication being easily added. I'm waiting for a solid stable version of it (hopefully with some suggested changes) before I decide where to take my module that implements the same thing and how best to merge the two. Currently it doesn't look very good for me being able to avoid a lot of custom implementation.

The reason your hand animations are duplicated is because their animation node is directly querying SteamInput for the current hand poses, this means it will always take the local players hand poses. I will likely need to create an alternative node that takes an optional transform input to work off of instead of the hard coded query.

Also though, in most cases you will likely want to replicate and use finger curls / splays for your hand animations, it is more friendly to pose blending and has far less overhead for replication, in that case it would just be replicating the curl values and applying them in the animation graph to blend between a fully closed and fully open hand pose depending on the grip.

Its really only when nothing is held that you would want to fall back on the full transform list.

Ok so I have an update!

I've gotten replication to work except that my client seems to be taking input from the server every other frame resulting in flickering. Not sure what I'm doing wrong, but will keep working at it and post here with the solution for others.

Attaching my code in case anyone can provide an answer.

[mordentral]

Ok so I have an update!

I've gotten replication to work except that my client seems to be taking input from the server every other frame resulting in flickering. Not sure what I'm doing wrong, but will keep working at it and post here with the solution for others.

Attaching my code in case anyone can provide an answer.

Ug.....those really should be passing / returning an array of values. I wasn't very happy about them breaking them out per finger like that when an index map would work just as well.

When I eventually make my hard coded replication i'll be replicating them as a 0-1 scaler since it takes significantly less bandwidth.

As for your "flickering" issue, you need to ignore the "tell client" part on the owning client as its re-setting the client by not ignoring it. Also this should all be on a replicated struct or something and not multicast RPCs.

[Kilargo]

Ug.....those really should be passing / returning an array of values. I wasn't very happy about them breaking them out per finger like that when an index map would work just as well.

When I eventually make my hard coded replication i'll be replicating them as a 0-1 scaler since it takes significantly less bandwidth.

As for your "flickering" issue, you need to ignore the "tell client" part on the owning client as its re-setting the client by not ignoring it. Also this should all be on a replicated struct or something and not multicast RPCs.

Ok. I don't know how to work with structs yet but I'll research those when I solve this. Thank you for your help.

As for the flickering. I'll try to figure out how to get the owning client to not fire the "Tell Client" event. I figured I could do something the attached picture, but depending on whether I choose "true" or "false" it either has no effect (keeps flickering between server and client input), or the server takes over input completely and I get full mimic instead of flickering.

Sorry for taking up so much of your time. You've been amazingly helpful.

edit: I also tried: get reference to self -> get controller -> is Local Controller

[mordentral]

Ok. I don't know how to work with structs yet but I'll research those when I solve this. Thank you for your help.

As for the flickering. I'll try to figure out how to get the owning client to not fire the "Tell Client" event. I figured I could do something the attached picture, but depending on whether I choose "true" or "false" it either has no effect (keeps flickering between server and client input), or the server takes over input completely and I get full mimic instead of flickering.

Sorry for taking up so much of your time. You've been amazingly helpful.

edit: I also tried: get reference to self -> get controller -> is Local Controller

You want to check IsLocallyControlled on the TellClients multicast (On the received end) and ignore it, not on the actual call server side.

[juggajugs]

Hey,

I used this plugin on my project but my characters head can still go through objects? How do you properly set up the VR Character so that it collides with all objects?

Thanks

[mordentral]

Hey,

I used this plugin on my project but my characters head can still go through objects? How do you properly set up the VR Character so that it collides with all objects?

Thanks

It collides with static objects by default, you need to manage other collision channels yourself as to which ones it should collide with and which ones it shouldn't.