Only missed it by a few weeks.
An Oculus Rift DevKit arrived near the end of May. I was hoping to have some footage of its use in Ground Branch, but alas, I don’t have the UE3 Oculus Rift SDK (yet). Rather frustrating, as it is fairly awesome, despite being low-res.
…
The Oculus Rift development kits have begun shipping to developers and despite the relatively low resolution and missing head translation, much praise is being heaped upon them.
Will Ground Branch be supporting it?
The short answer is, yes.
The long answer is, $#&@ yes.
The Rift brings a lot to the tactical FPS genre, not to mention gaming and non-gaming alike. The only issue the Rift has is that there are no decent interfaces to go with it – we’re stuck using a mouse/keyboard combo or gamepad.
The problem with any new device is getting past the super-human accuracy we are given when we use a mouse. Any non-mouse implementation will either need to match a mouses accuracy or provide a substantial benefit above and beyond this limitation.
You can see an interesting way of using a Razer Hyrda in the following video:
I could see an implementation similar to this that replaces aiming, sprinting, reloading and the like with simple realistic hand movements.
Reload?
Hand to magazine, hold trigger.
Sprint?
Both hands down.
Melee?
Swing weapon out.
Not only more immersive, but faster and with more control then a button press.
Will that be enough to make up for the lack of accuracy?
I don’t know.
I really don’t want to see “no mouse/keyboard” servers, but wouldn’t be surprised if it happens.
Thoughts?
Took care of a several issues related to the true first person viewpoint and thought I’d share a quick in-game vid of it in action. I’m not sure why, but the volume of my voices alternates a bit in the uploaded version. I’ll try to figure out why before the next vid.
…
Due to a dose of Real Life™, I did not have it in me to do updates or socialise much in the past few weeks. Thankfully, things have a progressed and much of the stress is gone.
On the bright side, one way I deal with stress is to distract myself by coding… a lot. I’ve done everything from updating more loadout and UI related code (booo!) to gametypes and AI (woohoo!).
…
New UE3 build this week, which delayed work in other areas a bit, but no matter.
After finishing an update of this kind, I like to check things by making a quick map in the editor, chucking in random stuff and running it with multiple players. I was already in the process (before the update) of more tests involving loadouts, so I thought I’d combine the two.
Basic bot code has been sitting there for ages. I just created a nav mesh, told them to use a loadout and let em’ rip. Considering the level of asset optimisation (none) and the age of the machine (2008), I’m happy with the results.
Also been testing and updating firearm related code.
With any luck, we’ll be shooting at each other soon, which will be nice.
You know, read out of context, that could sound weird…
-Kris
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