Quarterly Developer Recap: Immersive Transitions, Showdown on UE5, Movement SDK and more

Update Tax Information in the Developer Dashboard

Display Splash Screen Logos with Immersive Transitions

• If the metadata includes “stereo” your logo will be rendered as a stereoscopic logo. You can try out First Encounters to see this in action.
• If the metadata includes “alpha” your logo will be rendered using the alpha transparency blending, and the transparency of the logo will be determined by the logo’s alpha values.
• If the metadata includes “additive” your logo will be rendered using additive blending, which blends the image’s colors with the background’s color. This allows black backgrounds to be rendered transparently, but also creates some translucency with the other colors in the logo.
• If neither “alpha” or “additive” is specified, your logo will default to additive blending.

• “Background” layer is a simulation of the background of the new loading screen interstitial.
• “Additive Blend” layer is the sample logo with a black background. This layer is set to LINEAR DODGE blend mode to simulate the additive effect.
• “Alpha Channel” layer is a sample logo with an alpha channel.

Introducing the ‘Create New Unity Project’ Tool

Save Performance Costs with Movement SDK Retargeting

Explore the Revamped Showdown Demo in UE5

Fixes

• Color grading LUT updates: We switched color grading LUT with a more neutral option to better match the PC renderer. To amortize crushed blacks, we increased brightness and tweaked the contract.
• Explosion shader fixes: When we ported the project, a floating point overflow caused the explosion material to render completely black on Android. To fix this, we changed the Float Precision Mode to Use Full Precision for every float in the Mobile section of the Content/Particles/Explosion.uasset material.
• Explosion animation flicker: To fix flickering explosions, we changed the animation to use the Transform.Scale property instead of RelativeScale3D.
• PSO cache script update: We updated the PSO caching script so that it’s only necessary to wear the headset and run the script to get the PSO cache generated in the appropriate folder. You can see the updated script on GitHub, but note that this script differs from the original 4.27 compatible script.

To fix flickers with explosion animations, the Transform.Scale property was leveraged instead of RelativeScale3D

Performance upgrades

• SK_Male optimizations: For hands material, we packed ambient occlusion, roughness and metallic attributes into a single texture. For body material, we changed ambient occlusion and metallic masks texture compression to BC4, while maintaining the overall texture size when compared to BC1. For LODs, we used RenderDoc to identify which tiles took longer to render, and added additional LODs to prevent LOD1 from rendering from afar.
• Car_Flip optimizations: We split the car flip into four mesh actors that each render a single material, whereas the previous mesh actor rendered a single mesh with four material slots. We also removed unused UV channels and unused material slots. Lastly, we baked the material’s diffuse, normal and roughness properties and ported Deformation logic from the original material (World position offset calculation, see FlattenMaterialDeform), resulting in a reduced Instruction count and PS texture lookups from 733 to 405, and 10 to 3, respectively.
• Texture enhancements: We changed asphalt single-channel textures to use BC4 (single channel compression) instead of BC1, which results in less compression artifacts since BC4 is specifically designed for single channel textures.
• Static Mesh vertex count optimization: We simplified several static meshes to reduce the primitive count. In this case, we focused on geometry that could be reduced while maintaining visual quality considering the distance it’s rendered at.
• Decoration optimizations: Using the modeling tool, we split decoration geometry into five different submeshes to avoid rendering a single large mesh every frame (the original mesh rendered 60k triangles every frame). This can be achieved by selecting the Mesh > Tri Select tool, selecting the Volumetric Brush for Selection Mode and choosing the section of geometry that you want to separate. Once this is done, select ‘Separate’ to generate a new mesh. The resulting static meshes will use the same material (and thus the same VkPipeline).
• Improved environment materials: We reimported several environment assets from the original demo at higher quality since we can afford it with Quest 3 headsets.

An example of improved quality gained by reimporting assets (new on left, old on right)

New features

• Dynamic Resolution toggle: Added Dynamic Resolution support and runtime toggling of the feature through the debug menu. Note that the r.DynamicRes.OperationMode CVar needs to be set to 1 in order to be able to update the dynamic resolution state at runtime. Currently, the MetaXR plugin sets it to 2 (always enabled) in FOculusXRHMD::InitDevice.
• View distance quality toggle: We added view distance quality toggle to the debug UI, which allows you to tweak the static mesh LOD distance bias, skeletal mesh LOD bias and overall view distance bias through the View Quality Level scalability setting (see Showdown_P.SetViewDistanceQuality).
• View effects quality toggle: We added a new menu item to switch visual effects quality at runtime (affects material quality and detail mode).

WebXR Puma Collaboration

Bring Progressive Web Apps to the Meta Horizon Store

• Monetization: You can now utilize the Digital Goods API to monetize and open up new revenue streams.
• Android app features: PWAs have access to many 2D Android App features via standard web APIs, including background audio, Digital Rights Management (DRM) and camera access.