Storyteller: Fireside Tales is an immersive VR (works on monitor too) audiobook player.

Phew! 

Yesterday was a long day – I spent essentially every moment from arriving home from work until the time I went to sleep at 6:30AM working on improving the build for Storyteller. 

Here’s the download, if you just want that (bug fix and new feature list below)

Download: Storyteller: Fireside Tales – Alpha 0.2 Build 

Updates/New Features

• Added tesselation to the player body and head – I don’t know if this is really doing much since the model isn’t really set up for it, so let me know your feedback, as it’s a ~10-15 FPS hit over turning it off. I can also turn it down more, as it’s on pretty high right now.
• Added some dripping effects for the puddles, as well as sounds. I tried to make the sounds for the drips low enough that they sound good but are not distracting.
• Fog!
• Reflection capture probes. These should make everything look a bit nicer and don’t cost much.

New Menu System

• Instead of one large book, which had a convoluted method for determining what word was being looked at, I’ve switched to using an array of 9 books floating in front of the player.
• Text his hidden by default – when you look, it appears and starts to (smoothly – I hated that ticking fade in the first build) fade to the activation/highlight color from the default color.
• The activation time is now 4s. With the smoother fade between colors, I felt this time was also a nicer feel. Long enough to not accidentally activate something, but shorter than the 5s wait from before.
• The logic and code behind how the timer for fading works, as well as for activating a book, is far cleaner and more efficient than before. 
• It’s overall a lot less buggy and feels much nicer to use.

Text shows up when looking at a book.

A shot of the menu books when nothing is selected.

Bug Fixes

Thanks to kind testers on Reddit, I was able to narrow down and quickly fix several issues related to running the game on the Rift. 

• Resolution was stuck at 1280×720, windowed. This is bad. This kills the Rift.
• In addition, the build was a Shipping version, which means no console when pressing ~ (tilde key) in order to force it to a different resolution or fullscreen.
• The build was using a .pak file, which, while it does result in a nice awesome small little package for your game, also makes it a pain to change settings in the (extensive) INI files.
• An issue with the way the camera was setup was (unbeknownst to me, as I had not had the debug rendering enabled in a while) causing the raycasts for menu selection to be extremely strange, basically causing the beginning point to swing wildly up and down (it was parented to a bone and getting animation, d’oh).