Wolvic 1.2 Released

We’re pleased to release Wolvic 1.2 today, which delivers a good bunch of new features as well as several bug fixes. The new features improve the user experience at many different levels, from having more pleasant fullscreen video experiences to better rendering of WebXR sessions on Huawei devices by using antialiasing.

Fullscreen video experiences are much better now that we’ve tweaked the dimming of the 3D environment. By default, the background is faded to 5% opacity. This allows the user to focus on the contents of the fullscreen video and not get distracted by the surrounding 3D environment. A nice fade in animation restores the background opacity to 100% after exiting fullscreen.

The bookmarks dialog got favicon support to help you find the bookmark you’re looking for at a glance. It’s something that it’s pretty common in desktop browsers, and now also available in Wolvic.

Huawei Upgrades

Huawei devices got several new exciting features. First of all antialiasing (MSAA) is now enabled by default for devices running Harmony 3.0. The new version of the OS brought several improvements in the graphics stack that allow us to enable MSAA by default without significantly reducing the FPS count, leading to a greatly improved rendering quality.

Secondly, the WebXR interstitial image that we show when entering an XR experience for the first time got new images for the controllers, and shows the user how to exit the session. This was done for both 3DoF and 6DoF controllers.

We’ve also reached an important milestone in packaging the application, because thanks to the recent 3.5.0.79 release of the Huawei VR SDK, we are able to release a single package for Huawei devices that support both 3DoF (degree-of-freedom) and 6DoF controllers. So there is no longer a need to install a controller-specific version to enjoy Wolvic with the controllers that please you the most!

Last but not least, Wolvic no longer closes when exiting the security zone in Huawei devices. The issue was a combination of an incorrect handling of the OpenXR session plus bugs in the graphics stack on Harmony 2.0. From now on you can safely exit the security zone and return to it. Wolvic will keep the state of every running session as if nothing had happened. Note that this also fixes problems seen in other situations, such as when a system dialog was shown to the user. Wolvic won’t close in those cases either.

Notes

General

Huawei VR Glass

If you’ve found a new problem or other issue, please let us know on GitHub.