Programming for the Oculus Rift

Virtual Reality has always been a dream of mine since I started playing video games. Imagine not just playing a game but living it. I couldn't hope for anything better. In today's world, that dream is starting to become a reality. The Oculus Rift might not be true virtual reality, but it certainly is a step in the right direction. It is a virtual reality headset, immersing the player in their game world and giving them control over the rotation of their frame of view by turning their head. It's the first piece of the VR puzzle, and this past month I was given a chance to develop a small game demo for one.

Now first time setup for an Oculus Rift is not an easy process, like any other new peripheral. This was made more difficult due to the age of the graphics card I use in my desktop, but once that hurdle was passed the rest fell into place easily. Once the Oculus was connected and working with the desktop I tested it in a few compatible games and demos. This confirmed that the device was in fact working and gave me a better idea of what sort of game would work best with the Oculus.

The first proto-type was going to be a simple First Person Role Playing Game (RPG). The player was easy and setup fairly quickly, but when I tried to add vehicles everything started to go wrong. The Unity plugin for the Oculus Rift does not deal with multiple camera sources very well. Trying to rename the cameras so they were easy to find just ended up with those cameras being ignored and new ones being created under the default name. Linking the camera's directly to a public variable instead of trying to find them dynamically didn't work much better. Now at this point I could have just scrapped the vehicles and gone forward with the RPG, but they were and important part of my game's design. I had also been recently inspired by Elite: Dangerous to try a Space Simulator, so I decided to save all the usable code and changed up the prototype.

My second and final prototype is a simple Space Sim Demo. 6 Stars and one planet make up this small star system. The player can fly around all of them looking for 7 spaceships. these ships can be destroyed with your laser. It takes 5 shots to kill a ship and currently they just circle around their spawn point. I considered making both an aggressive and passive AI, but I didn't have time to tune the them so they were left out for now. The aggressive AI was too good at killing the player and the passive AI wasn't compelling to chase down.

In the end, I ended up with a nice little prototype that can easily be expanded to include more planets, more star types, and better AI. I also learned how to setup a game for use with the Oculus Rift, which was my main goal going into this. If I ever need to make a game for the Oculus again in the future I will be prepared to do so.