CalumTraveler wrote:As someone who's been following the Oculus Rift for a while now, I'd love to see some kind of compatability between the Rift and URU show up in the future!
Same here, brother!
Mystler wrote:Well, URU for Oculus Rift? I want it for Google Glass too!
Sorry, I'm new here, so I don't know if you're joking, or if you're being serious. If you're serious, then you should know that Google Glass is totally useless for all games you know. What it basically offers is "HUD-space Augmented Reality", meaning that objects projected by the tiny projector will not follow any real object you see with your eyes, it's just a separate semi-transparent "layer" with info, like what's the time, what's the weather, arrow pointing in some direction (with huge latency)... that kind of useless stuff (IMO), it'll mostly appeal to fans of apple's i-products I suppose.
While Oculus Rift could in theory be used with all first person games available today, with little effort by the developers. And that's what we'll observe for the next year until the consumer version comes out.
Sirius wrote:It might take a bit more work to get the Rift in Uru in a way it wouldn't suck. Usually in FPS you would look around with the Rift, and aim with the mouse (which means you can't look around 360 degrees with the Oculus). In Uru, it might be a bit less intuitive, considering the way the cursor currently works.
Now that you've mentioned it, yes, the control scheme could use some tweaking for VR. But what you describe is useful mostly for "cockpit"-FPS games (Mech/flight/space/race sims), while in standard FPS games the gun is "glued" to your view point - that's how most devs has chosen to "port" their games for the Rift (for example Doom3 BFG Edition, which in earlier stages of research was using independent view and gun/aiming scheme, which was later abandon in favor of unified view/aim). It's up to the devs of each game to decide which control scheme works best (by experimenting with a lot of different possibilities, that's what this dev kit is for really). There's a fan-made
mod for Half-Life 2, which makes the game work with gun peripheral (which have sensors strapped to it), and the player is able to aim with this gun in his hand, and look with the visor in a different direction. Someday I guess this will be the norm, but we're not there quite yet.
I think URU will benefit from an alternative control mode that's similar to one of the possible control schemes in Myst V, in which the cursor (hand) is always at the center of the screen, and moving the mouse/controller/head would instantly change the view. That would work as "click where you're looking at" in VR, just like the shooter games I described.
Thank you for the input on this one, totally missed it
.
But that is just an improvement, the experience won't "suck" without it, there are workarounds. Like for example leaving the cursor in the center of the screen, then using some software to map a key of your keyboard/controller to toggle "Right Mouse Button pressed" and using mouse emulation to "port" the head-tracking data into mouse movement, and there you have it. Free look (without camera roll, unfortunately) and when you need to interact with something, you just look at it keeping your head still, toggle RMB, press the "interaction" button, then toggle RMB again and continue.
Sirius wrote:Other problems:
- written chat... (unless you know enough your keyboard to type with the headset on).
- 3rd person camera: although Uru has impressive camera movements, I think it could easely make people feel a bit dizzy when the camera flies too fast, or is too high. Plus cameras tend to change FOV quite often, which can be annoying.
Correct, but all kinds of interfaces ruin the VR experience anyway, and the recommendations are to turn off all kinds of HUD whenever possible, for maximum immersion. Plus, with all stereoscopic drivers/middleware, the interface is unusable
(it gets displaced so much, some of it disappears out of the screen
). In other words - forget about chatting, you KI and so on, VR is for immersive exploration.
3rd person view scenes and cutscenes are really a rare occasion so I wouldn't worry about them much (plus, for VR, the recommendation is to completely avoid them) - forcibly locking to 1st person view should solve this completely.
Sirius wrote:Personally I've always thought it would be a lot easier to port Uru to another game engine (do you know Unreal has support for Oculus ?
).
But I can understand Plasma geeks don't want to give up the job they are doing on Plasma !
I'm not sure about that, porting to totally different tech sounds like an enormous endeavor, but who knows... UE and also Unity has support for the Rift. That's why I still hope that this iOS remake of realMyst in Unity from last year would make its way to the PC eventually, hopefully with full Oculus Rift support
.
The intent of my initial post was to get the devs interested, and with the smallest amount of work, to make the game explorable for the early-adopters/DIYers, who got the dev kit, and not to initiate work for complete Oculus Rift support in the game. There's a lot of time for that, until the consumer version arrives.
If someone is still interested in having one BTW, they still can
pre-order a kit.
Now I'd like to add some clarifications. As it currently stands, URU is unplayable with the Rift. Fixing things in points 1. and 2. from my original post will make it
playable. Currently, the games does not support resolutions below 800x600, and 640x800 is not in the list of the available modes. Now for the FOV - in 4:5 modes, it's so low, that when looking at the bookshelf, left-most and right-most books are outside the view area, making the game unplayable.
Here's how it looks - the shot was taken in 1280x1600 mode (per eye, total of 2560x1600), and downscaled to 1280x800 (640x800 per eye), to save bandwidth.
When the SDK is released, adding point 6. will make URU
compatible with the Rift. The rest of the points, and the things we discuss here are only improvements, but the game world will still be explorable without them. And that's what I would like to have as soon as possible - the ability to explore the game world in VR
.
There's another way to approach this problem - making a profile for URU in the open-source
Vireio Perception driver, that takes care of almost all critical aspects of supporting the Rift (info
here and
here). But again, it requires a fan-programmer to do it (and I personally don't have the skills
).