HistoryXR

Virtual Fort Snelling beta

commanders house


About

The goal of this project is to allow users to see the site of Fort Snelling at Bdote as it looked in many different periods. This historic site has been Dakota homeland for thousands of years, and was an active-use settler colonial military site for 125 years. Visitors to the site today see a reconstructed 1820s frontier fort, but we hope this app will allow you to see the site very differently.

This 3D landscape model is being created using digital elevation models, historic maps and photographs, archaeological remains, oral histories, and archived documents.


People


Status

This project is under construction. Beta releases are available below for a variety of platforms. Please understand that this is a work-in-progress. There might be bugs, and content/features are subject to change.


Downloads

macOS Beta Releases

Windows Beta Releases


Feedback

Found a bug? Want to share some feedback? Please let us know via email!

Contact Us


Version History

Here’s what’s new.

November 23rd, 2021

Features

  • Added clouds to the sky.
  • Added manually-placed trees to certain parts of the diamond area for certain time periods.
  • Added anti-aliasing options to the Graphics menu.

Fixes

  • Updated the tree coverage to better reflect the post-glacial period of the last few thousands years.
  • Prevented users from being able to walk off the edge of the map.
  • Fixed a scrolling-sensitivity issue on Windows.

November 19th, 2021

Features

  • Added finer control over the application performance via the Graphics menu page.
    • Now you can toggle on/off grass, plants, trees, water reflections, and particle effects.
  • Added a steamboat model, and railroad bridge models.
  • Added native wildflowers to the landscape.

Fixes

  • Improved the rendering of the tooltips.

Known Bugs

  • The tree coverage currently only covers the pre-glacial period.

Upcoming

  • Add clouds to the sky.
  • Add props (wagons, barrels, etc) and more smoke particle systems to the chimneys.
  • Improve the vegetation coverage / make it responsive over time.

November 12th, 2021

Features

  • Improved the camera controls.
    • Now you can move with WASD/Arrow Keys
  • Added rivers.
  • Added an option to enable/disable reflections in the river surfaces.
    • Enabled looks much better, but comes at a performance cost.
  • Added preliminary vegetation.
  • Added in-world tooltips that one can click on to launch certain pages.

Fixes

  • Fixed color inconsistancy in the UI.

Upcoming

  • Improve the vegetation coverage / make it responsive over time.
  • Road 3D models
  • Refine tooltip UI / interaction.

November 8th, 2021

Features

  • Reworked the internal data model to allow for community contributions via Github.
  • Reworked the timeline UI.
  • Reworked the internal rendering setup to prepare for vegetation.

Fixes

  • Upgraded to Unity 2020.3 LTS and the Universal Render Pipeline
    • Improved overall stability and performance.

Known Bugs

  • Some text and icons are blurry on non-retina screens.
  • Scrolling is not sensitive enough on Windows platforms.
  • Minor color inconsistencies in the UI.

Upcoming

  • Vegetation (trees, grass, etc) 3D models
  • Road 3D models
  • Tour tooltips in-world (in addition to in-UI).

v1.2

March 31st, 2021

Features

  • Small screen support
    • The interface now automatically resizes from devices as small phones to as large as desktops.
    • This is in preparation for a mobile release.
  • Birds eye view
    • You can now view the fort from a “birds eye” view in addition to a “first person” view.
    • Look for the toggle in the pause menu.
      • Left click + drag to move in birds eye view.
      • Right click + drag to pivot the camera in birds eye view.
      • Scroll with the mouse wheel to zoom in birds eye view.
  • Timeline scrolling
    • Now you can just scroll through the timeline to change the year, rather than having to click on individual years.
  • Virtual MISLS link
    • The menu page for “building 103” now links to the Virtual MISLS app through our HistoryXR website.

Fixes

  • Upgraded to Unity 2019.4 LTS
    • Improved overall stability.

Known Bugs

  • Some icons are blurry on non-retina screens.
  • Some buttons are too small on non-retina screens.
  • Touchpad scrolling is sometimes jittery on macOS platforms.
  • In birds eye view, building block the player from moving. They shouldn’t.

v1.1

November 29, 2020

Features

  • Added click-and-draggable scrollbars to menus.

Fixes

  • Adjusted menu scrolling sensitivity on desktop platforms.

v1.0

November 21, 2020

  • Initial release.