Week 18

Welcome to the 8th edition of the Sunday Report! (Time flies)

Let's get to it!

Performance

Let's get the most important thing out of the way first. Now that the performance overlay is a thing, it's become a bit easier to cure issues for users, which has resulted in my focus shifting to getting rid of camera panning stutters and some bitrate congestions issues. Which means we'll see some improvements on frame pacing and network optimisations.

2D->3D Spatial conversion

Well as some of you might've noticed: the realtime spatial conversion mode has been released for Vision Pro. It's still crazy I got to this point already. Which in all honesty to me is a milestone for Asobi. That said, I still see room for improvement which you should see with future updates.

One thing I almost forgot was that about a year and a half ago I responded to a reddit post that I would continue building my own Remote Play app for Vision Pro, which said;

Stuff I have planned;

- Realtime 3D conversion if feasible (it induces latency, so not sure if this will be something we'd want although it'll probably look cool)

Chat audio

Shareplay

Play over internet

And well 3 out of 4 are done. So let's see what I can do about bringing shareplay into the equation.

Also, in due time you'll see this feature pop up on other platforms as well.

Screen modes

So I'm looking into the holy grail of Remote Play gaming. Which means something along the lines of expanding the view on screen since remote play is stuck at 16:9, which is annoying since you don't want those black borders on the side. In the past, the solution to this would be to either stretch or zoom in on the action and this has been it for years now.

So not long ago I created the light spill mode to solve this (see video here) which in my opinion has been a fantastic solution for this.

However it's not the holy grail in my opinion. And as you can see for the image gallery attached to this post, I've done some explorations on making new expanded modes. These should all be added to Asobi on iOS soon to give you alternatives to the light spill mode.

That said, as you can see there's also an image of a potential holy grail mode. Especially now that we're living in a world with machine learning and neural engines I've started work on a Asobi specific ML package which would do realtime image expanding.

What the model will do is expand the view based on what's happening on screen. Which would mean that the game you're playing will become fullscreen without having to deal with essential information falling off screen or being stretched in any way.

Of course these things are difficult to achieve, take time and are resource intensive so I currently have no ETA on when this will be properly working. But as I see it, this will most definitely be the Holy Grail/End boss for playing on any device at any aspect ratio.

Asobi controller mount.

Some time ago u/N_schifty responded to a post of mine where he asked if I did anything with my magsafe/stadia mount idea -> which I responded to that I had zero time and should go at it if he wanted. And yeah, he actually did it.

And I actually printed a few of them as well. It works great! I am still gonna bother him of course to maybe make a couple of optimisations and maybe see if he can rename it to "The Asobi Mount". Who knows, maybe we'll see some Asobi merchandise come at some point.

Either way, big shout out to u/N_schifty for bringing it to life!

Porting Asobi

Response to the Android PlayTest has been better than expected! So thank you all to those who are participating! Originally I planned to only have the PlayTest for this weekend, but I've decided against it. The plan's currently to let it run until version 1.0 has been released.

This will also be the case for the Steam and Meta versions. I am however considering changing the plan and do them 1 by 1, or maybe do some kind of waterfall method of play tests. Last Friday showed me that it can be quite overwhelming to handle all the feedback coming in via the reddit post and DM's. So I'll get back to you guys about this on how I'm going to proceed.

The plan is however to update the Android play test version soon with a couple more options and features until it has parity with the core Asobi version.

So more on this soon.

Sunday Report

As I said earlier, this is the 8th edition of the Sunday Report. To be honest, I'm actually surprised that I still have something to write about, but here we are!

So there's 2 things:

There might not be a Sunday Report next week due to scheduling, I have a meeting to go to in London next week which means I'll be either in Chinatown eating Korean BBQ or on voluntarily stuck on the Thames on a Uber Boat. I'll try my best to write something, but no promises.
Do you guys have any wishes? Stuff you'd like to read more about? More in depth? Other projects? Anything else? Let me know!

In closing I want to add that I'm grateful for all the support! Humbled even by all the support!

Be nice & game on! ❤️

P.S. something green is coming closer. 👀👀