HoloLens 2 Not Retaining Anchor Placement - unity3d

we're using the HoloLens 2 and Azure world anchors to place the content within a room but when viewing the app content the anchors/room are spun 90% or 180% from where they should be. They are always square on and never diagonal, so it's like the room is being flipped.
We’re confident it's not the code, as we've successfully used it in multiple other locations, it just this one room we can't get it to work in.
To ensure it’s not our code we’ve tried rebuilding the app, as well as ensuring we’re on the latest versions of Unity and MRTK. The HoloLens 2 firmware are also up-to-date and we’ve also tried adding a delay to the code, just in case the network's too fast and it needs some latency to do it’s thing but none of this has helped.
Additionally, the anchors stick in a position for 5-20mins, then will move to a new position - so occasionally they seem to be working but even a broken clock is right twice a day!
There’s no consistency across headsets either and the anchors will be a different position for each one. The app and code is rock solid in all other locations and we've tested placing the content on another wifi network and the same wifi network but another location and all works as it should. We've tried removing all and nearby holograms to refresh the spatial map but this doesn't cure the issue. We've also tried making the room less complex as well as more complex but again this doesn't fix things and if it does it's only temporary.
Our gut feeling is it’s something out of our control, such as wifi points throwing it out of whack, or interference of some kind such as magnetic or radio etc. If it's useful or relevant we also use Photon to facilitate a shared experience across devices.
Any suggestions much appreciated!

Related

Changing control schemes between camera views?

I am a beginner gamedev and trying to figure out how to go about implementing my game's inventory management system. I am developing a third person RPG, with heavy emphasis on inventory and crafting, and so it needs to be done right.
I essentially have a tablet device the player will be able to use to access statistics about themselves and should also be their method of ascertaining crafting recipe. An example scenario is as follows: player obtains three recipe items, Apple, Leaf, and Ash. They want to craft a healing poultice in the field. They remove their backpack, which serves as both inventory and a less powerful crafting station, and the camera moves to focus on the backpack as if it were an inventory screen, allowing the player to arrange their ingredients as necessary and then craft.
My problem is I haven't figured out how to manage the control switch. Ideally the player shouldn't be able to walk around and do normal traversal while crafting. Indeed having WASD usable as menu manipulation controls would be preferable. The game is of the type that realtime usage of inventory is part of the experience, so I dont want a static pause screen. What avenue do I need to pursue in my research for this?
I've looked into Cinemachine and state switching/statemachines but I'm still fairly puzzled by that whole affair. I can switch to a state so far, but only sometimes get out of it. I'm away from my computer at the moment so I don't have an example but this concept has been nagging me for hours.

Sending game state only for entities that are "visible"?

Let's say I have an open world game that supports multiple players.
The game stores their positioning by X and Y in this world.
Also, whoever is playing the game can see a canvas of 11x11, where his player-self is represented on this screen, always centered.
The game world has 1000x1000 squares to walk using keys.
What I know is that:
I could emit events whenever a player walks,
check this event data at the server-side (to see if it is possible and the speed is correct/anti-cheating measures),
update the game state which contains all players and positioning,
re-emit this state from the server so every client would be able to render properly this new player.
The problem is, should I really update someone who isn't even being seen?
When everyone is walking around, moving items, earning levels, etc - those events are being emitted from the client, and that's okay, but thinking about the server-side, it will re-emit that for each update state, and, maybe that will be overloaded?
Also, sending the whole game state, even if it isn't being rendered, opens so many breaches to cheating that this made me think that there is another option.
I'm a beginner at Networking and Game Development, and that is being hard to get into my mind - so I decided to try and put it into a question. This way, maybe with someone reading what I'm thinking about, I might get some clarification. Perhaps I'm just thinking about it the wrong way.
Q: should I really update someone who isn't even being seen?
There is no need.
The normal way MMORPG games do in the server side is to cyclely process network packages and some other calculations like the connection of players like skill cast or something else.
The central of a server may look like below
void run()
{
while (true)
{
processNetwork();
processSkills();
processMoves();
...
}
}
The loop will run several times a second, like 20 frames a second is enough cause players can not feel the little frame, they think they move/play smoothly but the trueth is not.
For your question, player only need to see some little area, when he moves, the server will braodcast his postion to others in the area and the players in his area in the next frame.
And that is just the simpliest model, actual model will be more complicated and we will detach different functions of the game to different server, sucn as chat server, battle server, auction server and others.

I think I abuse of Ressources.load

Ok so I'm a bit confused about Ressources.Load. I actually use it quite a lot and everyone seems to see this feature as pure evilness. In this documentation, it's even written "Don't use it". I searched a lot about this and found this post. It mostly says to use Ressources.Load only for rare assets, otherwise, performance could/will be harmed.
I can see why this could be a "bad" thing to use, but honestly, I don't know how not to use this in my situation.
Lets say I have a game with ~10 different races with couples of units per race. The user chose it's race and start the game. At this point, it seems normal to me to Ressource.Load only the assets related to this specific race, and not the other ones...
Also, let's say you have a combat scene, with many possible environments (ie: winter, forest, desert, etc.). Again, I wouldn't want to load anything else than the one I'm fighting on. So using Ressources.Load seems the perfect tool. No? Am I missing something important about Unity or what?
Thanks a lot
It's true that Unity loads everything it see that is connected to things in the inspector in the scene. You have no way to stop Unity's loading once you are in the scene. (You can unload later, but it already took the toll of loading them all) The performance harmed in Unity's term seems to mean while playing, because if you connect them to the scene it loads everything from start and plays smooth from then but if you do a dynamic load you risk in lagging while playing.
Don't use it.
This strong recommendation is made for several reasons:
Use of the Resources folder makes fine-grained memory management more
difficult.
It's difficult but not impossible. If you are careful on your own, then you can reap the reward that is lower memory consumption.
Improper use of Resources folders will increase application
startup time and the length of builds. As the number of Resources
folders increases, management of the Assets within those folders
becomes very difficult.
It can't be help because offsetting with the load time you can save at scene start, the increased startup time is probably worth it. Most player won't mind the startup time in my opinion.
The Resources system degrades a project's
ability to deliver custom content to specific platforms and eliminates
the possibility of incremental content upgrades. AssetBundle Variants
are Unity's primary tool for adjusting content on a per-device basis.
Then you only put things that works universally in the Resources folder.
A modern alternate way is to compose your game in scene and use LoadSceneMode.Additive to get what you want one by one. It is suitable for big chunks like combat scene, but for lazy loading of something small in concept (but potentially contains large data like textures) like characters I would still use Resources.Load. The only thing that has delayed load build in is AudioClip which you can deselect preload audio data.
I wrote a detailed load process and its memory consumption here if you are interested in reading.
https://gametorrahod.com/unity-texture-memory-loading-unloading-7054819e4ae8

Visual feedback for area learning and motion tracking in Unity

I'm getting pretty bad results with Area Learning, the localization takes very long and I have no idea what's happening. Did I map the area enough? Is there enough landmarks? Is the ADF alright? No clue.
Is there any way to provide a visual feedback while doing the actual motion tracking and area learning? I keep seeing it in Google videos but didn't find any way of doing it in the Unity SDK.
I would like something like this in my video overlay: https://youtu.be/NTZZCtmR3OY?t=10m57s
Btw my results in Unity are FAR worse than this demo, sometimes it takes minutes for the device to localize and only at a certain spot in the room, the next minute the very same spot doesn't work again. Quite frustrating. No idea what app the presenter uses, for instance, my ADF Inspector reliably crashes every time I try to load any ADF. (Using Wasat and recently I've deleted and re-installed everything.)
It is not supposed to be so. It should not be that bad, under the normal day light condition. If it is a small area, should be able to localize using ADF within 3-5 seconds. The video showed the usual case -- always like this.
If your kernel is up to date, and you are using the correct development kit. I would recommend you to reach the tango team customer service directly.
tango-help#google.com
Perhaps it is caused by your device defective. If so, ask for an exchange would solve the problem.

iPhone and Vertex Buffer Objects

I've just started playing around with opengl es on the iphone the past couple of weeks and i'm looking at refactoring some of my code to use Vertex Buffer Objects(VBO). Before I do though I would like to make sure it'll be worth it. The problem is that afaik the only reason you create VBO's is to shift a chunk of data onto the graphics card so that it doesn't need to be retrieved from system ram when it's used. The iPhone however does not have any dedicated ram that I'm aware of so i'm struggling to see why I would benefit at all from using VBO's. I have seen talk around the internet with conflicting opinions and apple certainly want dev's to use it so there's probably still a reason to use them but just wanted to see if anyone on SO had an opinion to add.
I saw no performance improvement on an iPhone 3G. I moved a bunch of stuff to VBOs, but eventually backed it out as it made it more difficult for me to pursue other performance gains. It's not the quick 25% performance increase that I was hoping for.
I've read somewhere that it can make a difference on the newer hardware (3GS), but I don't have references to back that up.
It depends. (sorry).
Rob didn't see an improvement for his setup, but here is an interesting post that did see a large improvement.
The main reason to existence of VBO's is the presence of static data on 3D models. The first bottleneck you encounter is the slowness of copying data to video memory (by using the unavailable glBegin/glEnd block or glVertexPointer, glBufferData and friends).
Let's imagine the old "flying toaster" screensaver. All toasts are static (changing only the position) - why waste resources copying them every frame from CPU's memory to GPU's? Copy it once with buffers and draw it with a single command. And, depending on how you do animations, even the animated toasters can be described in a static fashion.
My first 2D game I started without VBOs. When I changed to VBOs, no difference (like Rob). But, when I refactored to use more static buffers, FPS gone from 20 to 40. Since my goal was to reach 30, I was satisfied. I had some ideas to refactor even more, leaving everything static, but I don't have time now (game is on review, next one to come).