Contents

• 1 Add scene settings component

• 2 Primary description

• 3 Localisation

• 4 Images And Icons

• 5 Dual Currencies

• 6 Content Maturity

• 7 Creator Information

Add scene settings component

In the top menu in Unity go to Space / Scene Settings.

This will add a Virtual Goods component to your scene. You will see a set of fields in the Inspector.

You can return to this component any time via Sinespace / Scene Settings.

In the Inspector set the Content Type to Region.

Primary description

Add the name, description and brand identity of your region as you want it to appear in the explore and discovery panels of the Space platform.

Localisation

You can add slots for as many different languages as you want to.

Images And Icons

If you are uploading items that will be sold as virtual goods to other Space users, add the store icons and imagery here. It is not necessary if you make the region not for sale.

Tick the "Not for sale" checkbox will not put the region in the shop and you can set an amount of the maximum one player could own. 0 by default sets the amount unlimited.

Otherwise, leave it unchecked and you can set the price of the region. You can also make it enalbe for promotion, so you can offer a discount easily instead of modify the price then reupload.

Dual Currencies

If your region is going to be for sale, allowing other users to buy it as a template they can then customise as a private region for themselves, set it for sale and set your gold and silver prices.

For more infomation on gold and silver currencies;

Currencies - Gold and Silver

Content Maturity

Choose an appropriate content maturity level;

Creator Information

The creator information should show the details of the legal entity holding the account; whether that is an individual or a company.

Note: It is highly recommended to create a new region by Quickstart function. You can access the Region creation quickstart by accessing the menu sinespace -> About Editor Pack, then create a region. All the basic settings are include when you create a region by quickstart.

Contents

• 1 Overview

  • 1.1 Restrictions & Features

  • 1.2 Region Mode

    • 1.2.1 Single scene

    • 1.2.2 Multi bundle

      • 1.2.2.1 Requiring elements before scene is entered

    • 1.2.3 Additive scenes

    • 1.2.4 Single Scene Streamed

  • 1.3 Suggested memory

• 2 Loading Screen & Explore Window

• 3 Platform Settings

• 4 Tools and Reports

Overview

Click the Scene Export Settings in the hierarchy, and in inspector, find the Scene Save Settings(Script) component.

You can set a splash image and an icon for the loading or preview screen, and also some other settings which affect the base environment of the region.

Restrictions & Features

Here is some basic function settings which you can disable, like fly, run, and value like edge of bottom ,limit of vehicle speed. You can leave it as default if you don't have specific demands.

Region Mode

The Region Mode defines how your region content is received by your visitors; all at once before they log in, or progressively after they arrive.

Please note that except Single scene option, all the other options are still experimental, they may have strict limits to make them working.

Single scene

Single scene delivers the entire region to the user as a single file which downloads before their avatar spawns. For regions with download sizes up to 100 mb, Single scene is likely to be an acceptable download time for your visitors. Recommended sizes are around 30-50mb.

Multi bundle

Multi bundle is a form of dynamic loading control (content streaming). It splits your scene into smaller components that are streamed to the visitor progressively.

The multi bundle algorithm examines every root object in your scene and compares each with every other root object. It then bundles objects where there is more than 40 kbytes of overlap in shared data between them. These will be delivered to the client together.

How you group into root objects has a big factor on how we create bundles; for instance grouping all vegetation or grouping one particular building where users will arrive is a good practice.

Too many bundles (i.e. hundreds) will cause brief stuttering for the user while they are unpacking after loading. A reasonable target is 20 – 30 bundles. You can control this through the number of root objects in your scene when uploading.

Note on inter-object links: Inter-object links between objects loaded at different times may break in this export mode - if objects are linked together (e.g. proximity components) make sure they have the same root object

Requiring elements before scene is entered

When you are using Multi bundle mode you need to select one item in your scene, usually the terrain, and add a component to it called Manual Loading Control or Dynamic Loading Control. Then tick Required Download. This will ensure that the item is sent to the user before their avatar spawns. Without this there is a risk users will arrive and drop through space before your scene loads above their heads.

Additive scenes

Additive scenes is a Unity utility that allows you to organise a single region into multiple scenes. You can manually split content, creating a root scene containing occlusion, lightmap and navigation data, with additional scenes loading the content progressively. You will need Unity 5 multi scene tools to manually set this up. You should have your 'Scene Save Settings' in your root scene when packaging for upload - additionally the currently active scene at time of upload, is treated as the root scene.

For more information, see;

http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/MultiSceneEditing.html

Note: currently the Additive scenes only support 3 scenes at most.

Single Scene Streamed

Currently still under testing. Closed to public by server side.

Suggested memory

If your guest's device has less memory (RAM) than this, they will be given a performance warning when entering the region. This mostly affects clients logging in via WebGL or Mobile.

Loading Screen & Explore Window

The world map allows users to search and browse regions. The Preview Image you supply will be used as a background to preview your region in the World Map. It will also be used as the background while the region itself is loading.

• Preview image

The image you provide should be a .jpeg file. A 2:1 aspect ratio is recommended. Because the image is stretched to fit different screens it will distort slightly for some users.

• Loading logo

The Loading Logo Image appears on top of the Preview Image and is not stretched, allowing you to present your brand logo or a region specific title without distortion.

The image you supply should be a .png file with 512x256 dimensions. When you import the .png file, ensure the Alpha is Transparency box is ticked;

Platform Settings

The platform settings are some performance related controls for different platforms. If you want to make your region has a better support of some low spec platform, like mobile and webGL, you may need to limit some options to improve the performance.

Check here for more info about platform settings: Regions/Platform Settings

Tools and Reports

The reports show some statistic info and script used in this region, and the tools offer some little functions to optimize or control the files needed to upload.

For more informations about these tools and reports, check this page: Regions/Submission

Attention: This is now listed under the Scene Settings in Unity

Supported platforms

The platform settings allow you to fine tune your region for each platform you want to publish to.

Space currently supports;

• Standalone - Desktop application, PC or Mac

• Mobile / tablet - Android or iOS

• WebGL - Chrome, Explorer, Firefox and Edge

• Console - Sine Wave Entertainment is an accredited developer for Xbox and Playstation. The company is planning to release on these platforms later in 2017 after building a user interface for game controllers.

Settings

The default settings are designed to work for most regions.

Scene adjustment

• Remove lightmaps / light probes / reflection probes

Removing lightmaps and probes can significantly reduce download speed but will also impact on the runtime performance.

More information;

Lightmaps Light probes Reflection probes

• Static bake meshes / colliders

Ticking these boxes will prebake data before export. This improves loading performance but the region download will be bigger.

More information;

Static bake meshes Static bake colliders

• Strip occlusion / navigation data

Occlusion data holds information about what areas are visible from other areas; it allows the viewer to make intelligent decisions about optimising a scene, however it can add several mb of size to both runtime memory use; and download size. Keeping it improves performance but can result in higher memory use in big scenes.

Navigation data is used for showing waypoints, and moving NPCs around in a scene; it uses a little bit of extra memory, and can be stripped out if you are under severe memory pressure.

Texture size reduction

• Max texture resolution

All textures will be reduced to a maximum of the defined size for each build.

• Texture reduction levels

Reduces textures all by a multiple of the original, in line with Max texture reduction above.

So; if your scene contains large textures at 1024x1024 and you set the max texture reduction to 512 those large textures will be reduced by a factor of 4.

If you then set Texture reduction levels to 1, smaller textures in your scene will also be reduced by a factor of 4; so a 512x512 texture, which otherwise would have been unchanged by the Max texture reduction, would also be reduced by 4, to 256x256.

If you set the Texture reduction level to 2 it will multiply the Max texture reduction scale by 2; so in the case above reducing the smaller 512x512 texture by a factor of 8, to 64x64.

• Normal reduction levels

This will apply a further multiplicative reduction on normal maps on top of the reduction already applied by the Texture reduction level above.

Texture compression

• Allow crunch / Crunch level

Allows JPEG compression to be added to all textures in addition to DXT compression. This will degrade the quality of your images as the compression is lossy; but significantly reduces download filesize. It does not improve runtime memory size except during loading. Crunch level runs from 0 (very lossy) to 100 (lossless).

• Compress textures

This applies a further quality reduction, comparable to the quality slider in Photoshop when saving a jpeg file.

• True color As 16

Interprets images stored as 'True Color' to 16-bit colors. This applies compression to the colors, without introducing the blurriness / artefacts that DXT compression can introduce; at the expense of being slightly larger. With this ticked, any image with 'True Color' compression, will be packed at 16 instead of 32-bit on this platform.

Audio settings

• Force audio to mono

Converts stereo files to mono for that platform.

• Audio bitrate

This is a percentage field. So whatever the bitrate of your original files, you can reduce by X% for each of the different platforms you publish to. For instance a set of 128 bitrate original files, left at 100% in the Standalone build can be reduced to 64 in Mobile and WebGL builds by setting this field to 50.

Submitting your region uploads it to http://preview.sine.space/ - a preview server where content can be reviewed online before going to the live servers.

Contents

• 1 Report

• 2 Apply compression settings

• 3 Sort into layers

• 4 Automatic submission

Report

A summary of the objects and scripts in your scene which will notify you of potential issues.

• Info

This shows how many objects, root objects and colliders your scene has. It will flag potential performance issues.

• Script List

Space currently has a white list of approximately 120 scripts you can deploy in your regions. The script list shows all the scripts in your project, flagging the ones not currently white listed, which will be stripped out when submitted.

You can submit scripts to your account manager for inclusion in the white list. When the platform's SDK is released (scheduled for September 2016) the white list will be maintained in parallel.

Apply compression settings

Click this button to apply the Region - Platform Settings to the assets in your scene.

Once the automated compression has run you can manually adjust individual files before publishing. You might, for instance, apply 512 as a maximum image size for the WebGL version of your region but then revert one or more specific important textures back to a higher resolution.

Sort into layers

Click this button to automatically assign every asset in the scene to one of four draw distance layers, according to their size; larger objects are set to be visible at greater distances.

The draw distance for each user is determined by the quality settings they select inworld;

(Performance setting range: Fastest < Fast < Simple < Good < Beautiful < Fantastic < Ultra)

Default = 20 to 75m

Important = 80 to 320m

VImportant = 240m to 900m

NotImport = Max 30m (60m in Beautiful~Ultra)

NotImportLandmark = Max 60m (120m in Beautiful~Ultra)

If you do not apply Sort into layers button everything will be left in default layer.

After applying you can manually review and modify;

Automatic submission

Once your scene is ready to submit, click Automatic submission. This will create a zip file containing the region and will send it to the Space servers.

Here the assets will be unpacked and compiled for each of the different platforms you have specified. You will receive three automated emails; confirming the content has been received, has started processing and has been released for you to log in and review.

Contents

• 1 Preview and Live Servers

• 2 Region Info Panel

• 3 Region Access

• 4 Approve Users for Region Access

• 5 Members

• 6 Multiple Region Management

Preview and Live Servers

When you upload a region, the region will go through the upload process. You can check on it's progress on Curator. When it's uploaded, it will be on our preview server.

Regardless of your subscription level, you can upload as many regions as you want to the preview server.

Once on the preview server you can preview your region. If you are happy with it, you can 'Send it to Review' via curator and it will be reviewed by our review team. This review is to ensure the maturity ratings are appropriate and that nothing in the scene could crash the servers or severely impair performance for other users.

If you have a Level 5 subscription you can bypass this manual review and push directly to the live servers yourself.

Your subscription level determines the number of regions you can release concurrently on the live server.

Region Info Panel

When you are logged in to any region you can click the minimap in the top right corner to open the Region info panel for that region.

Region Access

If you are the region owner you can then modify the access permissions;

You can set the region to be public, limited to your friends or limited to specific individuals who you approve.

Approve Users for Region Access

Any user can request access to one of your private regions;

You can approve or reject their application.

Members

In the members panel you can see who currently has access to the region and you can modify their permissions on an individual basis.

Multiple Region Management

Your subscription level sets the number of concurrent regions you can deploy on the live servers.

You can upload as many regions as you want to, and then enable or disable each region to set which ones are live at any time;

Sine.Spaces uses Deferred rendering. So you can use as many lights as you wish.

Space also implements dynamic environmental lighting and effects, using a custom skybox shader and day/night cycles.

Below is the Unity5 documentation for scene lighting. It's a bit long but worth the read.

[Lighting a Scene]

Here is a video on the basics of light.

[Basic Lights]

Baking Your Lighting

Baking your lighting will help with overall performance. 1. Make sure any objects that are not moving are set to static, you will find the tickbox upper right corner of the inspector when you select an object. 2. If the object moves in any way leave it unchecked. 3. Go to Window > Lighting Be sure the following are checked:

  Precomputed Realtime GI

  Baked GI Setting

  Select the Baked option under Ambient GI drop-down box.

  Set your Baked Resolution between 8 - 15, the larger the scene the lower the number here.

To have lights show on moving objects and avatars you will need to use Light Probes. 1. Create and empty game objects. 2. Add the Probe Drop Plane component. 3. Move this grid with globes to the top of your scene, the object is to scale it so it covers the overall area of your scene. So over buildings, larger objects. 4. Adjust the Density Setting in the Drop Plane so the globes are evenly covering your scene. If its darker add a bit more then if a scene is well lit. 5. Click Update and the drop plane will expand. Note: If you have additional dark corners, you may wish to add more manually using an empty game object attach the component Light Probe Group moving one probe into the dark area and one nearby in the lit area to reflect off each other. When you have everything set up click 'Build' this can take quite awhile a suggestion is run it overnight.

The NavMesh function in Unity can help you define your region where is walkable and where is not, so if you have an auto-walk function for player or NPC, it can automatically calculate the routes.

If you are interested in how to fully use the NavMesh function, please check official tutorial of Unity.

Here, we will only introduce some basic methods.

As an example, I created a region with some simple objects as obstacles.

Create a NavMesh Map

First, Click the menu Window -> Navigation to call out the Navigation window(In Unity 2018, it's in Window -> AI -> Navigation). There are four tabs in Navigation Window: Agents, Areas, Bake and Objects.

The Agents tab is a place to record profiles for different parameters, when you attach Nav Mesh Agent component to a character, you can choose the agent profile you set in the agents tab.

The Areas tab is for define the layers of navigation. There is already 3 built-in layer: Walkable, Not Walkable and Jump. You can always add new layer if you need. The Cost defines whether the layer is hard to walk or not -- more cost, much harder. Normally, the Auto-walk will always choose a path with lower cost.

The Object tab is to set the navigation parameter for the objects in the scene. The 3 filters, All, Mesh Renderers, Terrains can help you to find the objects, and if we need to set an object walkable or not, pick the checkbox Navigation Static, then choose its layer. If you want set it jumpable, for example: jump across a gap between two platform, of jump down from somewhere high, you should also pick the Generate OffMeshLinks checkbox then choose the Jump layer for Navigation Area.

The Bake tab includes all detail settings here. The Agent Radius defines the width of character and how narrow the path it could pass. Agent Height stands for the height of character, so if there is a height limitation area, the character shall not pass. Max Slope defines the maximum angle the character can move on, and objects lower than the step height will not be considered as an obstacle. Drop Height is the maximum height which the character can jump off, and jump distance is a horizontal distance which the character can jump across.

When all the settings are done, you can click the Bake button to generate the NavMesh Map. When it's complete, the Scene window will display the Navmesh map.

The NavMesh jumpable with off-Mesh links will have an arrow and circle like this:

Create a NPC moves in control of NavMesh

You will need a lua script to set an object moving through the NavMesh. Here, I'll show you a simple example.

First, create a capsule as the character we want to move in the baked scene, then add the component "Nav Mesh Agent" to it.

Choose the profile you set in the Navigation window, and set other parameters as you want or just leave it as default -- if you wonder each parameter is for, check the link of tutorial above.

Create an empty object and move it to the destination you want to set for the move. Change the object's name to something easy to find in script, like here, I name it as "dist".

Now add the lua script to the capsule. Add the "Scripting Runtime" component to it, then write the code like the image below:

The line "Space.log(agent);" isn't necessary, it's only a log to make sure the script is working.

You can add an clickable activator to active this script when click the capsule, or it will start moving automatically.

Here is a GIF which shows you the result of NavMesh move.

Occlusion Culling is a Unity function which can disable rendering of objects when they are not currently seen by the camera if they are occluded by other objects, which can save time from rendering.

You can get the details of advanced operation from the Documentation.

Here we only use a simple example to show you how to use this function in Sinespace.

This is the overview of a new created region. You can see there is a big cuboid and a small cube, where the small cube is occluded by the big cuboid from the view of camera, and the big cuboid is combined by 3 big cubes.

Now in menu, click Window -> Occlusion Culling to open the Occlusion window(In Unity 2018, it's Window -> Rendering -> Occlusion Culling).

There are 3 tabs in this window, object, bake and visualization.

In Object tab, you can set objects Occluder static and Occludee static. Occluder static means this object can occlude other smaller objects which has occludee static parameter checked.

You can also use the option "static" in the right-top of the Inspector window. Set the objects Occluder static and Occludee static here:

It's same as the operation above. Choose the method which you prefer.

When you finished setting the objects occluder or occludee, you can bake the scene to calculate the occlusion data.

The default settings here normally is enough for most situations. If you want to adjust them, check the Unity documentation(link mentioned above) for the details of each parameter.

The occlusion volume will show after bake.

Then you can test the result in Visualization tab, if every thing is correct, when you focus on the camera, the small cube behind the big one will be invisible.

A region with occlusion culling is complete. Remember delete the camera for test before uploading your region.

Does it really work in Sinespace?

Yes, the occlusion culling in your region will be the same as the result you tested in Unity. It may be hard for normal user to find it out, so here I present some images from the developper:

The image above is the game view of the client. And switch to the scene view(image below), you can see the small cube is invisible in visualization mode, proving the occulision culling does work with Sinespace.

If we move around, to the side of one big cube, where we can see the small one, like in the image below:

As you can see, the small cube can be seen now, but 2 other big cubes are invisible because of occluded by the one close to the Avatar.

As a conclusion, if you want to make your region more friendly to low-end PC or webGL, mobile platform, use occlusion culling to your region -- just set the static objects occluder and occludee, bake it with default settings, that's all.

You can use PostZone(Post Processing)Component to add/change postFX in your region. PostZone can be applied to a part of the region or the entire region.

Adding PostZone

To create a PostZone, create an empty object in your scene, then click on add component, search and select PostZone.

If you want part of a region to have different postFX, then add a box collider to the EmptyObject with PostZone and size according to the area needed.

For example you can have different postFX for interior and exterior areas of a region by adding different postZone and sizing the collider to the size of the area.

PostZone Technical Details

You can learn more technical Details on Post Processing here.

While making regions for Web GL, there are a few things you need to bear in mind. Web GL is specifically made for running applications in browsers, so it has a lower standard for graphics than the actual sinespace client. This means the regions you create will need to stick to a few rules to make sure it runs smoothly in the browser.

1. Regions need to be a light build. Anything up to 30MB is fine to run in a web browser.

2. Test the region to make sure it can hold 10-12 avatars without crashing.

3. Try to make objects plain, or add low resolution textures. Maximum resolution for normal textures needs to be 512x512. For billboards, this can go up to 1024x1024.

4. Use the Unity Legacy shader instead of Unity Standard shader.

5. Use baked lighting if you want to add shadows. These shadows will be static shadows, but this will stop lag in the region.

6. Special effects and animations can be used in the region, but keep the count to 4-5 of them.