- by Lux
Please note: This update is only available for those who are part of our multiplayer beta. If you're looking to collaborate on a show or just want some of the other goodies, sign up for the multiplayer beta here. We're working hard to quickly get these updates back into the general release branch so everyone can enjoy them, but that's still an update or two away.
Characters now have the ability to teleport into chairs and be positioned correctly. The teleporter will snap to the chair to indicate a seat you can sit in. This works whether you're physically standing or sitting. Your head height will be adjusted so your character is in the correct sitting position.
It also works regardless of the character size, so tiny characters will automatically adjust forward and their legs will dangle off the seat, and large characters will adjust to squat in smaller seats.
Sitting currently works with the built-in prop chairs, but most seats you see in sets won't work until the sets have been updated with our new Chair component in the latest version of the Creator Tools. The Chair component will let you that.
Note that there may be issues with the bone structure of certain characters that makes them sit incorrectly. Reach out in our Discord community if you need help fixing one of your characters.
Actors will also see the teleporter snap to actor marks as well as to the new TeleportTarget component in the Creator Tools, so you can create snap points anywhere you like that actors can instantly snap to with their feet and head pointed in the right direction for the shot.
We've added the ability to star takes that you want to keep track of. Press the star button and you'll see a star icon appear on the cartridge and on the back panel when the cartridge is loaded.
You can also click the star icon when you're browsing your takes to toggle between all takes and only the ones you've starred.
Guests can now see the same list of connected users that the host could see, so everyone can see who's in the scene together, and also have the ability to disconnect themselves.
Previously, when you rotated the world with two hands in build or ghost modes, Flipside would snap the rotations every 45 degrees to keep users from feeling simulator sickness. Thanks to VR Tunnelling Pro, we're now able to offer smooth world rotation, which we feel is a much improved experience.
- by Lux
Please note: This update is only available for those who are part of our multiplayer beta. If you're looking to collaborate on a show or just want some of the other goodies, sign up for the multiplayer beta here. We're working hard to quickly get these updates back into the general release branch so everyone can enjoy them, but that's still an update or two away.
We've made several improvements to our characters this round:
This is the first part of a series of character improvements that we have in the pipeline. We will continue to release improvements as they become stable.
- by Lux
Please note: This update is only available for those who are part of our multiplayer beta. If you're looking to collaborate on a show or just want some of the other goodies, sign up for the multiplayer beta here. We're working hard to quickly get these updates back into the general release branch so everyone can enjoy them, but that's still an update or two away.
With this update, Flipside's multiplayer connection routing is now using an all-new backend that will automatically scale to handle larger numbers of users, and does a better job routing peer connections through firewalls.
We fixed a bug in our microphone input that affected a few of our users since the last update which caused input to fail and lip syncing to stop working.
Note: After this update, if your microphone is not picking up or the lip syncing isn't working on any characters, click the settings icon in the bottom of the desktop camera switcher, then go to the General settings tab and select the correct microphone input device. Flipside should remember your input setting after that.
This update contains a number of smaller changes too:
- by Lux
Please note: This update is only available for those who are part of our multiplayer beta. If you're looking to collaborate on a show or just want some of the other goodies, sign up for the multiplayer beta here. We're working hard to quickly get these updates back into the general release branch so everyone can enjoy them, but that's still an update or two away.
The desktop mirror feature that lets you bring your desktop view into Flipside now supports multiple monitors via a setting in the General settings tab.
It can also now be embedded directly into your custom sets using the ScreenElement component. This means you can do things like build a computer into your set whose screen reflects what your actual desktop is showing. Pretty neat stuff!
Note: You'll need to update to the latest version of the Creator Tools to see the desktop mirror option in ScreenElement.
Tired of restarting Flipside to switch microphone input devices? Now you can switch in-app by clicking on the settings icon on the bottom of the desktop camera switcher, going to the General settings tab, and selecting your Microphone Input Device from the list. Change should happen automatically when you select a new one, and your preferences will be remembered for next time!
We've added a setting to enable our first filter effect, Bloom. You'll find it under the settings icon in the desktop camera switcher under the Output tab, alongside the OBS settings.
Use the slider to compare a shot from our Winter Cabin set with bloom on and off.
- by Lux
Please note: This update is only available for those who are part of our multiplayer beta. If you're looking to collaborate on a show or just want some of the other goodies, sign up for the multiplayer beta here. We're working hard to quickly get these updates back into the general release branch so everyone can enjoy them, but that's still an update or two away.
You'll find our new Ghost Mode button on both the desktop camera switcher or the in-VR camera switcher. This will make your character invisible so you can play director without getting in the way of the shot, or animate props by grabbing them and moving them around. Ghost Mode also has the ability to move the world around and scale it up or down by grabbing it with one or two hands, just like Builder Mode.
It takes work to get a set setup exactly how you like, and it should be hard to accidentally undo all that work. That's why we've added a confirmation step whenever you use the "Clear All" and "Reset to Original" buttons on the underside of the Sets palette.
We've also made lots of smaller improvements throughout the app. These include:
- by Rachael Hosein
Please note: This update is only available for those who are part of our multiplayer beta. If you're looking to collaborate on a show or just want some of the other goodies, sign up for the multiplayer beta here.
We've had a lot of requests for this and although it's still in experimental/we're-still-working-out-the-kinks mode, we wanted to get it into your hands as soon as possible. You can now view your desktop in Flipside - that means you can stream whatever is on your desktop (local videos, whatever you have pulled up on the internet, etc.) in your Flipside show.
Follow these steps if you want to try out this feature:
Important notes:
Learn more about the Desktop Mirror in our Show Tools documentation.
If you didn't know, Flipside supports 360º video skyboxes...and now they loop! So don't worry if your skybox video isn't long enough. We've got your covered :)
In the Featured category of the Sets palette, you'll notice a new Creator Tools Example Set. This set walks you through the different functionality you can add to your Flipside set through the Flipside Creator Tools.
You can also download a version of the Creator Tools that contains the example set so you can reference how we set things up. If you're a Creator Tools pro already, don't worry, you can also download a slimmed-down version that doesn't include the examples.
Important note: Unity has issued a security notice, so our Creator Tools users should upgrade to Unity version 2017.4.22f1.
Everyone in the Flipside community has been so great with helping us iron out issues and bugs. Thank you! To make things a little easier, when you encounter something a little wonky and need support, you can click on the Settings icon on the 2D camera switcher, then go to the Support tab to file a bug record that includes everything we need to help solve the problem.
Important notes:
- by Lux
While this is primarily a bug fix update for our multiplayer Beta branch, we did sneak one new feature in:
When in character, you'll now see a ghost-like outline of your character, so you can see exactly where your hands and body are positioned. Here's what it looks like.
We experimented with a lot of possible solutions to this problem, which was made a lot more complicated by the fact that we don't control how most of our characters are made. Other solutions like just showing your body directly would fall apart with larger characters like our elephant, whose trunk being visible got in the way of seeing what you're actually trying to do.
This solution should work automatically with all custom characters, but if you spot any that don't work well, let us know on Discord. This is also the first step towards more improvements we have in development for characters.
We also made the following bug fixes and improvements that should make things feel better across the board:
For details on what we're working on next, check out our roadmap!
- by Lesley Klassen
Happy New Year Flipsters!
We're blasting into the new year with a new update. In the last update, we released our multiplayer beta and users are exploring the new changes to the user interface and playing with the new multiplayer features. The feedback has been great. We will continue to make updates to the Beta until it's stable, then we'll push those changes live for all our users. If you want to try out these new features, Sign-up for our Beta!
We've heard you loud and clear. Characters are now represented as photographs rather than miniature models on our palette. This means character previews load faster on the palette so browsing for your favourite characters is much easier and uses less data (for those who have lower bandwidth caps). Thank you to Cybermynd for this suggestion!
Thanks to all our beta users, especially Discord user Derky Sprawl, The VR Girl and vrgamedevgirl for helping us track down key multiplayer bugs!
Check out this snippet from one of Derky Sprawl and The VR Girl's #madeinflipside collabs.
Learn how to use an external microphone to improve the audio quality of your recordings. This tutorial explains how to select an external microphone for the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive.
Oculus recently made changes to Oculus Home to allow apps to stream directly to Facebook. Flipside Studio now supports this feature. You will need to connect your Oculus account to your Facebook account and opt-in to the Public Test Channel on Oculus Home for this to work. Learn more through our online documentation.
Creator Tools additions (v0.15)
Download the latest version of the creators tools.
We're working hard on ironing out all the bugs with our multiplayer beta. Here are some issues that we're currently digging into.
If you're encountering a new issue, please let us know on Discord or on our Trello Roadmap.
- by Lux
This month marked our 20th Flipside update of 2018, which included our much-anticipated cross-platform multiplayer feature, letting you create content together over distance.
That many updates feels crazy enough on its own, but it's also been one crazy year all-around. We started 2018 just getting Flipside ready to submit to the app stores, and we ended up accomplishing a heck of a lot since then.
We made a music video for Del Records artist T3R Elemento's single En Menos De Un Minuto, which reached 20M views this month!
Flipside was used live on stage more than a dozen times this year, first with Jasper de Tarr from Raktor being a guinea pig for our Mixed Reality support, followed by our CTO Lux's TEDxWinnipeg talk about how avatars are changing our sense of identity, then with acting duo Stephen and Caity in their Pixels live animated improv shows at the Winnipeg Fringe Festival and Winnipeg Improv Festival.
Flipside Studio was used to make a 30 minute show with the team at Tell 'em Steve Dave for their Patreon subscribers.
Bobjenz, one of our users, teamed up with Roblox for this year's Ready Player one release.
Josiah Brooks of Draw With Jazza created an animated short film titled "Sexy Benjamin" using Flipside.
And our list of custom characters is now over 125 strong and our list of custom sets is over 75 strong and growing all the time, thanks to prolific creators like Cybermynd and VRGameDevGirl.
To top it all off we were also nominated for VR Innovative Company of the year at this year's VR Awards held in London. It's been an amazing year and it will only get better in 2019.
Looking ahead, 2019 looks to be just as crazy. We have new shows in the works, new partnerships we're looking forward to sharing with all of you.
We have a ton of ideas, many of which come straight from our users on our roadmap, and a ton of polish to add to Flipside in order to make it the truly stand-out live animation platform it's quickly growing into.
We couldn't be more proud of how far we've come, and while we're looking forward to some rest over the holidays, we couldn't be more excited for what's to come!
Wishing the Flipside community a warm and happy holidays until we meet again on the Flipside in 2019.
Sincerely,
The Flipside Team
- by Lux
As we continue to build out Flipside Studio and learn from our users, we decided to make update #20 the first update that's only available to Flipside's Beta users. With so many new features, we want to work with our most active creators to make sure we get it right. If you want to explore the full potential of Flipside Studio, sign up or opt-in to our Beta.
NOTE: This update is an experimental release. In order to use it, you will need to opt into our Beta channel on Steam (instructions below) or sign up here and we will add you to our Beta channel on Oculus.
When you press the Friends button on the palette, you'll see our new Friends & Notifications panel appear.
This is the new social hub in Flipside, where you can find your friends, invite them to collaborate, and find notifications for things like friend requests, invites, and also the occasional Flipside announcement.
Multiplayer works across platforms, so it doesn't matter if your friends are using an HTC Vive and you're using an Oculus Rift. You can still hop in, connect, and create content together over distance.
Please note that because multiplayer is still an experimental feature, some things may not work as expected. Please report any bugs on our Trello roadmap or Discord #support channel.
We've also made a some big improvements to the Flipside Creator Tools. Note that these also require you to be on our Beta release channel (see above). Follow this link to update to v0.14 and enjoy the following improvements:
We've moved the second level buttons on the palette menus from the top to underneath the main menu buttons. This was something we've been meaning to do for a while and got it done just in the nick of time!
And that's not all! We also fixed:
With 2019 just around the corner, stay tuned for more updates and improvements because our plan is to keep on keeping 'em coming your way!
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