I renamed an important folder so, y'know, probably delete your VRCBCE folder before updating? Don't say I didn't warn ya!

Hey! This release is happening because there hasn't been any real changes to the prefab in almost a month with 2 major pull requests still being worked on for 1.6.0! There were a couple of changes made after 1.5 though and I'd prefer to have a proper unitypackage for them rather than tell people to pull directly from master over and over.

Those changes are:

• The desktop-view camera was moved further down physically in order to more likely fit underneath most ceilings (it shouldn't look any different visually)
• Sync types on all UdonBehaviours were hardcoded to prevent end users from accidentally messing with them and breaking things. We're also using None sync on several things now- which means slight performance boosts! :D
• The japanese font was removed in favor of utilizing VRChat's fallback JP font. This DOES mean the characters for the japanese subtitle won't render in-editor, but it's fine in-game! This should shave another megabyte off your world size!!!
• Some cleanup to both remove redundant scripts and make an important folder far clearer to prevent misunderstanding.

I uh, should've definitely done this weeks ago. Though me and Panda were fairly preoccupied with both personal work, secret VRChat stuff neither of us can talk about, and her coming to visit me for nearly 2 weeks. We went to several disney parks, hit up some water parks, AND gave each other lots of hugs! Ya pool table maintainers had a BLAST of a 12-day trip; sliding, zooming, and consuming. So it's been a bit. Apologies!

THIS IS A BIG UPDATE! IT IS REQUIRED THAT YOU DELETE YOUR VRCBCE FOLDER BEFORE UPDATING! (THIS INCLUDES THE "FSP" FOLDER; I GOT RID OF THAT, YOU DON'T NEED IT ANYMORE)

Hello! Apologies for the multi-week delay: Panda and myself have been getting increasingly busy with VRChat world work. Panda's working on her spookality entry while I got sidetracked with the latest VRCPrefabs world jam and made something for it (and subsequently took a mini-break from Unity afterward). On top of that, I've had to balance a few other side projects for people that have approaching deadlines as well (like recording voice work for a certain annual animation series), leaving sparse time for pool table work (outside of the usual free time playing video games).

Let's get to it then! ✨

NEW COTTONFOX TABLE FRESH OUT OF THE FOREST

YES. THEY'RE LITTLE FOXES. THEY SQUEAK WHEN THEY COLLIDE WITH ANYTHING. 10/10

The ever-skilled @jamestruhlar (Juice) decided to create a pool table themed around their CottonFoxes: an avatar base they created of a tiny plush fox resembling a ball of cotton. They're cute, round, fluffy, and now can be smacked into each other at high velocities for your amusement!

The table itself is fantasy-like and themed around nature, modeled in a similar style to previous works focused on their CottonFoxes, like the CottonFox Isle

Unlike the other tables, you may notice that this one is floating in the air. While not necessarily special or cool on its own, this DOES allow the table to take advantage of a particularly cool new feature...

Elevation changes

Walking around to the backside of the table will reveal to you a nearby floating handlebar pickup that you can grab and move. The entire table is tied to the pickup using a Position Constraint (locked to the Y axis), and thus- allows anyone to move the table up and down to scale with their height accordingly! You can play a game while the table is at floor-level, almost like you're playing on the ground under a canopy of trees; and you can also play a game high up in the air, with relevant parties playspace'd up to get out of the way of people- perhaps having conversations below. Now, we didn't have time for this release to implement a "reset height" button (that's planned for 1.5.1), so.. uh- we kindly ask people to not be a dick about table placement 😅

Juice and myself did a fair bit of back-n-forth work to ensure that the table's visuals were top notch while being as performant as possible (more can be done still!). Overall, I'm happy with how it turned out aesthetically and am more than glad to welcome it to our roster!

(Oh and by the way: The table has a tiny phone propped against one part of it, and the phone's screen takes up a decent amount of UV space... allowing you to change it to your hearts content 😉)

AWESOME! ANY OTHER COOL THINGS TO TALK ABOUT?

LOTS of work was done to improve collision behavior after a ball has been pocketed. The issues of balls often "flying off the table" or "rolling back onto the table" when being pocketed at high velocities or at weird angles has been my personal biggest pet-peeve. And I've toyed around with a lot of solutions to try and ultimately have my cake and eat it too. I think I've conjured up a solution in the form of a special set of box colliders wrapping around each hole for both the primary and metal tables, as well as modifying the metal table's custom colliders to be more lenient AND greatly reduce the chance of balls getting stuck in the middle! It's more effective on the metal table than the primary one; the primary table still has a decent chance of bounce-back when pocketing a ball at max velocity, but there's no way around this without causing other issues at this time. However, due to the basically nullified chance of balls flying OFF the table now, I was able to double the velocity clamp which makes pocketed balls look far more natural! Extensive testing has shown the metal table to be almost entirely reliable even with heavy use; you have to actively try to make a ball bounce back or get stuck in the rails!

There are more elegant solutions we can still experiment with in the future (like toggling larger colliders but only for a brief period of time immediately after a ball is pocketed, or fine-control the velocity programmatically), but this will do for now.

We've also gone and done a number of quality-of-life changes to the various UI panels! We've added support for multiple score panels existing in a world (with the score panel itself being abstracted into its own prefab), all mirroring the scores of the current game. On the prefab itself, we've utilized this by hiding the info canvas during gameplay and replacing it with a secondary score canvas; allowing players to check the current state of the game without having to move to a particular side. I also painstakingly went through and shifted values around to make the structure of all the UI canvases cleaner and more sanely scaled. Additionally, @daalta (Faxmashine) graciously provided us with a better rounded rectangle UI sprite for use in our canvas backgrounds; no more pixelated canvases!

Okay, aside from that... I feel as if I owe you all an apology. You see.. all this time, we here at VRCBCE have been deceiving you about the quality of our textures. All this time, you've been playing 9-ball with balls so.. digital. So utterly fake looking. It's almost as if you're just looking at the normal 8-ball texture but.. recolored. Gross. It's a good thing that @synergiance took it upon herself to create a texture based off physically referenced american pool balls with hand-made numbers to boot! Check it out!

NEAT! WHAT ELSE IS NEW?

• Multiple changes were made to make the prefab more resiliant against misconfiguration and import errors. Several components no longer require direct references to other components to reduce the chance of nested prefabs breaking things "just cause". Panda also made changes to mitigate the Utilities.IsValid errors that a few people were having on import due to U# getting confused. If you were having those issues, this should fix things for you! (Make sure to do a clean install)
• The 4-ball point visual system has been completely reworked to utilize a particle system now rather than its old custom solution. This means we can both take advantage of billboarding AND make the point particle more visually appealing with stuff like dynamic scaling and fading-to-transparency! It's probably more performant too?? Good stuff.
• HDR color values were exposed for the table's colors in the Core Table Code prefab, allowing you to not only change the colors the table uses- but also their emission!
• Multiple changes were made to fix wildly incorrect ball pocket positions after a table was enabled mid-game (a common occurance in worlds with the table off by default, including the most popular movie world at the moment 😅)
• Fixed the cue ball oftentimes endlessly spinning after being sunk on the metal table.
• Fixed the issue where the cue grips were able to collide with and push the balls out of the metal table's rail system (#114)
• The desktop camera now works with Post Processing... oops. 🥴
• Finally settled on a lightmap scale for the metal table. (It's 0)
• Some misc. prefab cleanup of random things
• And of course, we removed Herobrine

FINAL NOTES

I've changed the README a fair bit and added a section about properly adding credit for your worlds. The TL;DR is that it's best to credit "VRCBilliards" as to cover everyone fairly and reflect the new organization's name. Please go give that a look!!

Once again, HUGE thanks to @jamestruhlar for their amazing work on the CottonFox table, it looks AMAZING! 💖

As me and Panda are both going to be super busy throughout the rest of October, NO MORE POOL TABLE UPDATES FOR THE NEXT MONTH! Afterward, I've got some interesting new features pending implementation. Even more new tables, special table themes, enhanced haptics, more user options for customization in-world (like changing ball color before a game) and even a new UI or two are all coming soon...ish™

Maybe one day we'll even get a physics programmer to rewrite the physics in a way that isn't completely terrible and allows for more creative and reliable play!

...Today is not that day.

THIS IS A BIG UPDATE! IT IS REQUIRED THAT YOU DELETE YOUR VRCBCE FOLDER BEFORE UPDATING!

Hi there! I'm releasing the update this time around, as I'm responsible for most of the work and may or may not have convinced Panda to let me have a go at it 😅

We've got some exciting changes for you all this update, with plenty more to come soon™!

Let's get started! ✨

BRAND SPANKIN' NEW METAL TABLE

YEAH. LOOK AT IT. KEEP LOOKING.

Had your fill? I don't blame you! This stainless-steel beast of a table was graciously created and provided to us by the fantastic Ivylistar!

It features an intricate rail system, prominently visible beneath the glass, which pocketed balls roll through to rest within the rack at the end. As consequence, we've not only abstracted whether pocketed balls should teleport after the round ends or utilize unity's physics system with custom colliders, but we've also exposed the location racked balls get teleported to. Both of these should make it easier for the end user to mod the table and create unique ones that fit the style of their world! 🎉

In order to make the table look as good as it is, we've introduced Silent's fantastic Filamented shader to the repo, which is a modified version of Unity's Standard shader with better shading models for metallic surfaces with specular highlights. It's really good, and we're also now using it for most of the other materials as well. 😎 Overall, this should result in better looking tables in both realtime and baked lighting scenes.

OKAY- THAT'S PRETTY POGGERS, TELL ME MORE!

The large UI canvas on the side of the table has been split into 2 smaller canvases on each side; one for the teams/scores, and the other for information (name, version number, link). The score canvas also was redesigned to fit better with large names and be more reasonably spaced. As a result of the split, both canvases fit nicely on the side of the table without hanging off and it looks far better overall!

The end game buttons were also moved to the same side of the table that the info canvas and toggle UI button resides, making that side feel nice and complete 😊

The floating TextMeshPro text in M.O.O.N's UI has been swapped with Esnya's equivalent icons since they just... look nicer than floating text (and are also more readable on the metal table). This applies to the enable table button, the end game button, and the toggle UI button. Similar (but different) icons might be created at some point for diversity 🥴

IMPORTANT TO NOTE:

We've also made some changes to clamp the velocity of pocketed balls in order to reduce the chance of balls flying off the table at high velocities. This wasn't as much of an issue previously, but with tables like the metal one which don't rely on ball teleportation, it's important to ensure they don't just permanently roll away. We've exposed a variable for the velocity clamp (0.5 by default) which allows you to tweak it to meet your preferences. The current default value makes it so the balls almost never fly off, but have a chance of "bouncing back" onto the table for a bit, as well as obviously making the pockets look ever-so-slightly "artificial" with the speed of the ball rapidly decreasing after entry. Making this value higher will lessen that effect while also making it more likely for balls to fly off the table. Tweak this at your own discretion. (As an aside: you probably shouldn't make it higher than 1, and definitely shouldn't make it higher than 2)

WHAT ELSE Y'ALL GOT IN STOCK?

Glad you asked!

• Several changes have been made to reduce build file size for your world by default! These include reducing the metallic map's default quality/resolution (no noticeable difference, also lowers VRAM usage!), removing UV, normal, and tangent data from collision meshes and other meshes where they wouldn't make sense, and setting the Japanese font to be atlas population static, meaning the 4MB font file should no longer be included in builds 😅
• Significantly decreased the far-clip of the desktop camera. Things should look exactly the same under 99.9% of circumstances (unless your table is on glass above something). I also turned off occlusion culling as it was causing flickering and other weird behavior in some worlds with certain occlusion setups.
• Both pool tables now have dedicated UV2s for better light baking; Unity-generated UVs BEGONE.
• Cleaned up the UdonChips implementation a bit and fixed the payback dupe bug. Thanks to Coffeepot for reporting it! (It's also cheaper now by default)
• Fixed the victory text on M.O.O.N's UI being too low in the table to be visible.
• Work was done to make the ghostball shader support GPU instancing. (This shouldn't help with performance much unless you have many pool tables in your world, in which case you can enable GPU instancing in the material!)
• Some misc. file cleanup.
• HOTFIX: Player 1's cue is now on the breaker's side (which in hindsight- makes more sense UX-wise) and the cues are more optimally placed on the metal tables.

Finally, I would like to thank Ivylistar one more time for their incredible work on this new table! We've got some neat new goodies coming down the line, like haptic support for cue impacts, more UI options, and more themed table variants! Don't forget to write an issue if you have any feedback or find any bugs! 😺

Table is responsible for much of the work this release. Otherwise, the cue code was cleaned up somewhat, which should hopefully stop the wonky cue rotation bug when the game ends.

By default, the two cues have been placed on top of the table rather than floating off to the side. You can move the cues to wherever you like for their default location: make sure that the cue orbs and the mesh itself are both moved, though!

Table's changes:

1. Some compression and minor prefab fixes.
2. The main font of both table UIs has been moved to Calistoga.
3. Fix the realtime GI bug that caused a small amount of havoc.

The UI has generally been cleaned up. Let us know what you think!

This one is a big ol' chungus:

0. Upgraded to Unity 2019.
1. Logger will now not print logs to console unless told to.
2. Various fixes and improvements to the two main prefabs.
3. Cue performance optimizations to reduce CPU load when
their table is inactive.
4. Timer feature improved, UI added.
5. PoolStateManager no-longer pointlessly calculates
deltaTime when Time.deltaTime exists.
6. Fixed crash when playing the two 4 ball variants with
the Logger removed from the table (thanks BeastChild!)
7. Assorted code improvements.
8. Fix code errors during building & publishing to VRChat.
9. Stop local events being RPCable (Thanks for reminding me, Castle!)
10. Fix the unsafe 'Reset()' in PoolStateManager that caused odd errors.
11. Make the cue offhand grip lock on trigger down. (thanks Ruuubick/Vowgan!)
12. Remove an errant CyanEmu include in PoolStateManager (thanks Orels1!)
13. Fix the lossyScale warning that, whilst amusing, was a false positive
most of the time.
14. Improve the UdonChips integration so that if you get kicked out of
the game before it starts, you get a refund. Don't say we at VRCBCE are
not generous!
15. Added a new skin for the pool table, as the main one is a smidge plain.
Now you can have a pool table that features the letters VRCBCE!
16. New JPN Readme and updates to the ENG one.
17. Made the Logger script not break random projects.
18. Improve the score UI.

This release contains updates from @Metamaniac, @Legoman99573 and @esnya. Thank you to all three!

This release of VRCBCE contains the following changes:

1. Desktop zooming is now inverted from what it was in 1.2.0, which feels much better (Legoman).
2. The table has received a number of performance fixes. For example, the desktop E icon doesn't have pointless mipmaps anymore! (Metamaniac/Table 🥰)
3. UDONCHIPS INTEGRATION! Thanks Esnya for the code! See the readme for more information.

Note that this update requires the latest VRC SDK and the latest UdonSharp thanks to Merlin and co adding properties support, which Esnya has used for UdonChips integration.

A NOTE ON UNITY 2019:

VRCBCE should work out-of-the-box on Unity 2019, but I've not actually checked yet. IF YOU ARE TESTING UNITY 2019 AND SEE AN ISSUE WITH THE TABLE, PLEASE LET US KNOW VIA THE ISSUES PAGE.

1.2.0! Given the changes in this release with regards to prefab structure and new features, this release has been upgraded from 1.1.8 to a full 1.2.0 release.

1. Performance improvments provided by Varneon.
2. Desktop view overhaul. Desktop now uses a normal camera, without any render texture or shader weirdness. This does mean that the camera can be too large or small to cover the table. Use your scroll wheel to zoom in and out!
3. A removal of the Layer 23 requirement! This should fix 95% of support issues.
4. Prefab restructure for maintenance: making it easier to maintain the core table code with multiple menus.

This release is a breaking change and we advocate a FRESH install. If any issues with 1.1.7 emerge, a 1.1.8 fix will be released.

Preview of 1.1.8.

!! POTENTIAL BREAKING CHANGES DUE TO PREFAB MODIFICATION !!

1. Performance improvments provided by Varneon.
2. Desktop view overhaul to get rid of the Layer 23 requirement
and make it far easier to maintain.
3. Prefab restructure for maintenance: making it easier to
maintain the core table code with multiple menus.

This patch revises the ForceReset on the main pool table to use less generally janky code.

The conditions for resetting the game are one of the following:

1. You are a player
2. You are not a player but one of the players is no-longer in the world
3. The game is not in progress so it doesn't matter.

In addition, OnPlayerLeft now calls a Reset outright when you're the owner of the table and the person who has left is one of the players (previously the only way the table would reset is if you were the owner and one of the players).

Furthermore, resetting the table and ending the game are now unRPCable, meaning hostile clients cannot end your game of pool (they can still totally ruin it in other ways - this will be fixed in 1.2.0).

Credits to Blue and SpookyGhostBoo for prompting work on this:

Some jitter was introduced into the cues with 1.1.4. This has now been fixed.