Hello all you Hypernexians! As you may have noticed, today, we just released one of our biggest updates yet! We have our new Client update, API improvements, new CCK, and plenty more! In this post, I’ll be going over everything that has changed, what these changes encompass, how they will change the future of Hypernex, and the future of Hypernex itself. Before I go any further into detail, I would like to take a moment to congratulate our newest contributors this update cycle:
- @Awesome
- Redid the entire User Interface, an endeavor that has taken over 4 months!
- @Obi1
- Slime-Senpai
What’s New?
These updates have introduced many new features across ALL of Hypernex. There’s plenty of new features that clients will notice immediately and many more that they likely won’t. Let’s dive into some of the updates that we’ve introduced.
The Unity Client
Obviously, there is our brand new User Interface. @Awesome designed this User Interface with two goals in mind:
- Look Elegant.
- Retain and Improve Functionality.
For our new UI to accomplish these goals, we needed to have a simpler design, without cutting off too many features. While we believe that what we currently have is not perfect, and will undergo changes in the future for better functionality, we do feel that it is a huge improvement over its predecessor. Below is a demonstration of our new UI being navigated through
We hope that what we have developed reflect our goals in achieving a more functional user interface and a well-rounded user experience.
Next, we introduced a ton of new improvements. Our VLC video players now have 3D audio sources! This is still a huge Work In Progress, and once we complete this integration fully, we plan on contributing our changes upstream, so that all VLC Unity users will have access to this feature. We also improved our FinalIK integration with some important fixes that should improve all avatars while in VR. Again, there’s still plenty of issues to be addressed; however, these changes were very much needed sooner, rather than later.
There’s also many new Sandbox APIs. This update introduces Enabled properties for all components, a new NavMesh API, Animator and Animation API, Renderer API, Mesh APi, and Texture API. Huge thanks to @Virtual for writing these new APIs! Oh, and in case you aren’t already, sign up for a forum account, as some of these APIs were pulled from a previous poll!
And there’s plenty of newer features that cannot all be gone over in this forum post, as it’s already too long! For a full changelog, see our docs post.
Upgraded Content Creation Kit
Our CCK is finally into major version 2! This version brings along a brand new workflow for content creation, making it thousands of times easier to import, convert or create, and upload your content. While the biggest thing a user will notice is the new UI and all the new Features, the CCK’s backend has been completely rewritten to improve workflow and performance. However, let’s not gloss over the cool new features creators have in this new version of the CCK…
In the new CCK, the User Interface was completely redesigned to look much nicer and be easier for first-time users to navigate. Below is a demonstration of the new CCK UI:
Our new CCK also has redesigned every component to be easier to setup and use. It should feel similar to the previous component UIs, as not much configuration-wise has changed.
The new CCK also introduces the Emulator (as a separate package) which can be used to quickly test content in-editor, before publishing. We demonstrated this functionality in our last post, but in-case you didn’t see that, I’ll leave the video below.
Finally, we switched to OpenUPM for package distribution, which will make it much easier to distribute updates; added new locomotion animations, thanks again @Obi1 ; removed support for DynamicBones; and some small internal changes for improvements elsewhere.
Additionally, and this is very important, all content published in previous versions of the CCK (<2.0.0) will COMPLETELY BREAK! Please update your content to the new CCK version for continued support and functionality.
We hope that this new CCK version will help reduce the amount of time spent figuring out how to work the CCK and allow you to get content published even faster than before! 
API Improvements
In this new version, we also released two key features to our API.
First, we added support for Discourse forum integration. In case you didn’t know, this forum is also powered by Discourse! We believe that this integration will help developers easily extend their sub-communities of Hypernex for their own needs and support community strength.
Secondly, we have now released our CDNs! Our CDNs (Content-Delivery Network) will allow for faster file serving, faster uploads, and less hassle on our API server. We had previously measured that file transfer on our API was synchronous, thus causing extreme hold up for all clients whenever one needed a file. This is absolutely unacceptable and is what our CDNs plan to also fix. Now, whenever you request a file from the API, the API automatically redirects you to the closest CDN to you, to which the CDN will return the file. Best of all, the CDN software is completely open-sourced for all developers to use. In fact, developers are encouraged to use it in their solutions!
Finally, we fixed a bunch of common issues with our API that should make the entire Hypernex ecosystem much more stable. Changes include fixing database re-connections, common functions being broken (such as email password reset), and build delivery removal.
Wrapping Up Updates
We’ve seen plenty of updates from other Hypernex sources; however, there would be too many to go over in this post! Please feel free to read all of our Changelogs for more information on updates.
Finally, one big change that some developers may have noticed is our licensing change. Almost all of Hypernex projects are now MIT licensed. This allows for greater developer usage with our services and libraries. We do not plan on changing our license again after this.
What’s Next?
For Hypernex, we want to continue to make improvements; however, we want to rely on proper project management as to ensure that we don’t have long updates like this one again. While it is nice that progress is made, we need to make it at a steady pace, not a giant update then a couple small ones and repeat.
We have also had many people come to us and offer their services. We greatly appreciate it and are more than happy to have contributors! Please feel free to dissect any Hypernex code and help out by making PRs and whatnot.
As for future sneak peaks, we are in talks with some trusted, third-party providers for Age Verification to possibly be implemented into Hypernex, and currently looking into services for rich presence inside of Hypernex. We plan to release more information soon! 
Closing Notes
Once again, thank you to our new and existing contributors. Hypernex would not be where it is today without its contributors. I’d also like to extend a thank you to our development team who tested a lot of the new features you will be working with! And of course, thank you all for your continued support.
Until next time, stay happy! 