Geenz joining team as graphics programmer, ticket system, prioritizing issues
Added 2021-02-15 21:13:06 +0000 UTCHello and welcome to another of our weekly updates!
A quick note before we get started, we’re now officially moving the weekly update from Sunday to Monday to make it easier on our schedules (especially with Creator Jam going on Sunday) and to keep our weekend more free.
We have a few important things to announce, but first, we hope that everyone had a great Valentine’s day! We have welcomed a new member to our team. Geenz has joined us as a graphics programmer, bringing his large expertise with rendering systems to improve our current graphics pipeline as well as any future ones.
Our moderation team has now unveiled an official ticketing system to provide a clear line of communication for any moderation issues available at moderation.neos.com. We also released another update to our guidelines based on feedback from our mentors and shared some info on how we prioritize features.
In the meanwhile, we’re progressing on implementation of the desktop mode, with the new input binding system being nearly implemented. Keep an eye on the #testing channel as we’ll be in need of testers soon!
And last, but not least, we’d like to wish a happy birthday to Karel, our co-founder and CEO! Thanks to his hard work, Neos has kept going everyday ever since its inception, making sure that we stay afloat, sustainable and focused on improving the platform based on your feedback. Happy Birthday Karel!
Happy Valentine’s Day!
We hope that everyone had a fun Valentine’s day, whether you spent it in Neos or elsewhere! To share some of the love with you, we gave away 30 GB of total storage to 6 lucky winners on our regular Friday livestream through a game of pictionary. It was quite fun, some of the words were really challenging, not just for you, but for us to draw as well!
If you missed the stream, you can watch the recording below. We also showed live lip tracking support inside of Neos, more on that to come soon! If you missed your chance, don’t worry, we plan to do more of these events in the future, make sure to follow us on Twitch if you haven’t so you don’t miss it!
Geenz Joining the team as graphics programmer
We have a new addition to the team! After a few months of discussions and getting familiar with their work, we have decided to officially onboard Geenz!
Their background includes working with some of the world’s biggest and most innovative AR and VR companies and helping to refine other metaverse platforms’ rendering systems to bring them more in line with modern rendering principles. Their work in Neos will focus on improvements to the existing graphics pipeline and its future iterations.
Part of our focus is now getting them up and running with our codebase and as part of that we’re also using it as an opportunity to improve our internal build process as well, making it easier to iterate and automate more tasks in the future.
New Moderation Ticket System
Our moderation team has been busy over the past few months as well, setting up processes to better handle and keep track of any moderation problems. Developed by Raith, we now have a new ticketing system available at https://moderation.neos.com
Here any user can submit a moderation report, report exploits or appeal a ban that might’ve been issued to them. The system doesn’t require registration, simply supplying your email and Neos username is sufficient.
As our community grows, having formal systems for handling problematic situations becomes more important to keep things nice and clean and provide everyone a clear line of communication and we hope this system will serve this task well!
How are features prioritized?
One of the common questions we get is what the prioritization process for features and bugfixes is. This is a pretty complex topic and to give you some more insight into it we put together an overview on our GitHub, as well as here.
At any time, there are many different features and issues that we’d like to implement or fix, but there’s only a few that can be worked on at the time. There are several factors that determine the priority:
- Severity: If it’s something with serious global impact on usability or security of users, it will be very high on the list.
- Demand: The more people request a given feature or issue to be fixed, the higher its priority. This changes over time, so don’t hesitate adding your voice even if it was already requested. Becoming a supporter or donating will give your requests higher priority as it helps grow and support our team.
- Complexity: Some things are significantly quicker to implement/fix than others. If something is a trivial fix it might get addressed very quickly even though it doesn’t have as high demand or severity
- Prerequisites: Certain features or issues cannot be (efficiently) addressed without other, much bigger features or architectural changes done first. Our goal is long term sustainability and stability of the codebase, so certain things can take a lot longer to get addressed despite the demand. We will try to communicate whenever this is the case.
Note that the priorities are constantly shifting and evolving based on the feedback and demand from you, the community. If something is determined to be low priority at the moment, it doesn’t need to stay that way, just make sure your voice is heard through the right channels and we’ll listen!
If the request is not feasible on our end, we'll try to offer alternatives or explain why it can't/won't be implemented. We know it sucks getting a request denied, but we'd rather be upfront about it rather than give an empty promise on something we know we can't deliver.
Sometimes you might also see certain features being done out of order completely. Developing can be quite a draining task sometimes and we like to work on certain things just for fun or for the satisfaction of it to refocus our brains. Plus it makes sure that certain low demand, but nice things get attention from time to time too!
Progress on desktop mode - input binding system nearly implemented
Our work on the proper desktop mode is now in a full implementation swing. With the design of the new input binding system mostly set, we have started the hard task of transitioning Neos’ code to this new system.
This is a pretty tedious task, as it requires reworking, cleaning up and reimplementing larger chunks of code that deal with user interaction, from the tools, grabbing, locomotions to avatar anchors, while making sure we don’t break anything major.
It’s a task that’s definitely worth it in the long term though, as some of the code we’re throwing away is pretty crusty mess of hardcoded interaction checks, some of it dating back all to the early alpha versions. Replacing it with a much cleaner, newer design makes it easier to do adjustments and build new features in the future.
With the transition nearly done, we’ll be in need of testers pretty soon. Keep an eye our on our #testing channel on our official Discord - you can also request a Danger Tester role to receive pings whenever we have builds available for public testing to catch any major issues before they go live.
Community Highlights by Turk
Hello there everyone! I hope you all had a wonderful Valentines Day! Hopefully everyone had plenty of the 3 C’s! Cheese, Chocolate, and Candy for all! This week we don’t really have a theme to go for the community updates so I figured I’d throw out some of the interesting creations this week.
Retro Basement Hangout
Hey all you retro fiends! Hope you are in for some good content, or a good whiff of the dank. Take a step downstairs and take a look at some prime nostalgia. This might not apply to all, but sometimes you know you just wana go down to your basement? Well then proceed to play games in your basement and snack on stuff all day, Thanks to TinyBear & Aegis Wolf you can do it VR! Good job you two! I expect people to chill here and play some Doom or Mario Kart in the future.
Valentine’s Day World
Hope everyone’s Valentine’s Day was well, if not that’s okay! This world has plenty of candy and sweets for you to enjoy and partake in! Wanted to make something out of chocolate? Wanted to share your love with everyone by giving them hearts? Maybe ride a vehicle powered by love? No worries then! Orange has uploaded a map to let you get creative with your Valentine endeavors, thanks orange!
The Great Meander
Inspired by that one episode from Adventure Time, it’s a pillow fort world! This was a part of Creator Jam 89 as it was a build day set aside for everything pillow and pillow fort related. We have custom pillows, bunk beds, blankets, couches or even pillow weaponry! Many a fort was sieged this day and many a feather was fluffed. I even see some cache of body pillows somewhere. Many thanks to everyone who participated! Thanks CJ team for hosting the event!
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Anyway that's all for summary of this week, we'll see you next Monday with more updates! And remember, you can always see the latest on our official Discord as it's happening. We'll be working on getting the new input binding system out as soon as we can and then tackling some of the highly voted GitHub issues when we do, since we've gathered a good amount of votes.
If you missed it, check out our last weekly update to learn more about how you can vote on issues to bump up their priority and let us know what's important to you!
