Lasertag turns any space into a laser tag arena for you and your friends. It's an experiment in lowering the friction and time-to-fun of colocated multiplayer experiences; it tries to 'just work.' The game scans your space into a signed distance volume as you play using the DepthAPI and automatically connects players using the Colocation Discovery API.

This submission is a work-in-progress update to the game with several goals:

• Make the game easier to use when playing with a dozen players.
• Make the game more robust in large spaces with better bullet collision and accurate occlusion.
• Support single-player with NPCs that respond to the live scanned environment.

These were some ambitious goals for this hackathon, and the performance and robustness of these features is not yet ready for release. However, I think it'd be a shame to not submit what I've accomplished this past month. Some of these features also aren't as user-facing as something like new game modes or weapons, but I want to lay a solid technical foundation down before worrying more about fun features.

Update features

Live scene meshing

• Reads physical environment at runtime via DepthAPI
• Multithreaded surface net mesher
• Created in chunks with time-sliced mesh generation
• Powers other features further down

Issues: need some method for decimation and occlusion culling as triangle counts can choke GPU

To view: In Settings tab ➔ Debugging ➔ enable 'draw scan mesh'

Long-distance visual occlusion

• Created with low-resolution render pass of scene meshes
• Allows you to see far-away objects that DepthAPI occlusion would normally occlude.

Issues: needs some method for chunk mesh decimation and occlusion culling as triangle counts can choke GPU

To view: You can view the depth texture itself in Settings tab ➔ Debugging ➔ enable 'debug mode'

NPCs

• Uses live scene mesh chunks to generate nav-meshes
• Allows zombie NPCs to hunt players down

Issues: Nav-mesh updates cause significant stutters. I either need to decimate idle mesh chunks or implement my own pathfinding system.

To view:

• Host or join a game
• In Settings tab ➔ NPCs (experimental) ➔ enable 'calculate nav-mesh'
• Spawn zombies from Objects tab (cube icon) ➔ green skull icon.

Desktop server app

• Makes the game easier to use with dozens of players
• Start matches and save map layouts

Todo: should show headset & controller battery levels

To view: download the desktop operator from here and use with the release version of the game (not the competition branch)!

Built With

• unity