Update: VRTest Game

The VRTest game is starting to enter new territory in VR!

Although we're not giving away too much details on these new features we are going to share a few teaser images from recent testing. The game is still in very early development, so expect there to be a lot of changes to characters as time goes on.

Now onto some areas that can be discussed.

One problem that has plagued the development of this project in Unreal Engine 4 is Roomscale support. I've dealt with this problem before whilst working on my previous project Kenjo and The Room. Although with Room I found myself downloading a free VR plugin for unity due to time restraints and issues with co-workers, although this fixed the problem for that project. In Kenjo as the experience didn't require accurate collisions with the environment, and the updated Oculus Framework already had Collision detection, I found myself not requiring the feature. as this experience was to be my Final Showpiece for the course, the 2020 Covid Situation prevented me from finishing the project fully, as we were never able to do a second motion capture, and the lockdown prevented me being able to share the experience. (It is available on the downloads page of this blog however)

I've found Unreal Engine's VR tools to be a lot more efficient compared to Unity's, however Roomscale is hard to setup for UE4.

At this point in time I am using a solution where the VRPlayer capsule is moved to the location of the Camera using the "AddMovementInput" node, playing around with the variables has allowed me to make progress in getting room scale functioning, although at this point in time it is impossible for me to test this accurately as my work space does not enable me to move around.

This brings me to another point, one thing I am proud about with this project is the Ability to play the game entirely seated, thanks to some controls I've added the User is able to adjust the height of their virtual representation in order to make them feel comfortable in the game.

Cutscenes have been interesting so far, a few sequences in the game require the player to be moving at highspeed in a vehicle, I found using the Player Camera inside the vehicle, rather than attached to the front of it solved the issue of Motion Sickness.

Another feature recently added was inspired by old 1990's video games, however I was unsure if it would work in VR, as so far I have not seen this mechanic in any VR action or adventure games thus far. Due to this I was worried that perhaps this would cause motion sickness, and done some research on the subject and found little information on experimentation, other than a few games that had a simplified version of this mechanic.