SteamVR/Environments/Adding a Welcome Panel

Introduction

You have your lavishly constructed SteamVR Home location constructed, but how about adding some informational panels to it? This tutorial will explain a more advanced welcome panel, complete with globe to show where in the world your visitors have found themselves.

Entities

We don't want to crowd the environment with all sorts of permanently visible information panels, so we'll place a teleport point and use entity logic to show and hide the information as appropriate.

First, place a 'vr_teleport_marker in the world. Since this will be shown when a visitor first arrives in the world, I've placed it at the feet of the info_player_start entity and set the 'Starts As Current' flag - the latter makes it automatically fire its OnTeleportTo outputs on startup. (More on that later!) To make the teleport point appear with a helpfully descriptive informational 'i' icon, I've set the 'Info' flag as well. That's all on this entity for now.

Next, place a point_clientui_world_panel in the world. This will act as the actual information panel - arrange this so that it's facing the teleport point and up a bit - the light grey side is the 'front', the dark grey side is the 'back'. It can be helpful to set a larger width now, so you can be sure it's oriented the correct way and isn't on its side.

I've given mine the name 'welcome_panel', and set the Layout XML (a file akin to a small web page) to 'file://{resources}/layout/custon_destination/welcome_panel.xml'. Width I've set to 48, height to 32, and since we won't be directly interacting with this panel via buttons or similar I've set the Ignore Input flag.