VR support?

[Pikzel]

I think that a very cool idea would be to bring VR to Unturned II, however I do realise that it wouldn’t be easy. It should be a $5-$15 DLC for the base game as VR compatibility and good immersive features (such as physically moving your knife) would take a long time and a lot of skill to make. If VR support is ever added, I wouldn’t expect it to be ready within 2 years or more of release.

Features would include:

• VR map editor (I know this was already a thing but it should come back).
• As much physical movement as possible, such as reloading with your hands or swinging the controllers to swing a baseball bat.
• A very cool feature of the official Minecraft VR is that with the press of a button you can be pulled out of the game into a virtual lounge looking at a virtual TV. This is great for if the intensity of being in the game is to much and you need a more chill way to play without switching back to your monitor.

Anyway tell me what you think.

[DeusExMachina]

The idea is neat, but VR should not be a thing on launch. That would delay the game even further. Not only would the game need to be optimized for VR (as in, allow stereoscopic vision and interaction) but that would also mean the performance would have to be top notch.

[Sir-sanctimonious-III]

VR is a complicated and highly resource-intensive feature. While I certainly believe that a large studio could manage it, I feel that the effort and time required to pull this off would simply not be worth it. If you mean actually needing to swing controllers to hit, we’re talking Htc Vive or something with similar capabilities. I just don’t think that it’s feasible for a single developer to do when he’s already working on a non-VR game. Would it be cool? Yes. Would I rather have an incomplete game with low-quality VR instead of a no VR game that’s actually fun to play? No.
Either way, Unturned is supposed to be an affordable game. It’s not good for that kind of reputation when you make a feature that less than 2% of people actually use. (Only 0.8% of all steam users last year had VR headsets attached to their PCs, though some may have had their sets disconnected at the time of the survey.)

[KingFrog]

Depends on how it is implemented. The watching it like on a couch is more fair, but not as kool, and normal vr is u unfair because you can through walls an’ shid.

[Pikzel]

Yeah, I did say I wouldn’t expect it for years even if it happened.

[MoltonMontro]

@Sir-sanctimonious-III

I just don’t think that it’s feasible for a single developer to do when he’s already working on a non-VR game.

For something beyond an Editor port like U3 temporarily had, most studios just outsource if they don’t have a dedicated VR team.

U4 having VR support that was developed in-house is unrealistic. SDG working with a team like Escalation Studios is far more probable.

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Given the above information, I’m only able to view @Pikzel’s post under the idea that Nelson is outsourcing. I don’t have a problem with Unturned having VR support, but the Unturned II Dev Kit having VR support sounds a bit silly.

@Pikzel

VR map editor (I know this was already a thing but it should come back).

It’s more than just a map editor, and I feel like there’s just so many tools that wouldn’t be easily available to you unless the amount of effort put into the U4 Dev Kit is the same as put into the game itself. I don’t think that’s an efficient use of resources, so just focusing on VR support for the game itself would be the main thing, although it’s interesting to think about how U4’s modability would tie into that.

@Pikzel

A very cool feature of the official Minecraft VR is that with the press of a button you can be pulled out of the game into a virtual lounge looking at a virtual TV.

Seems a bit counter-intuitive, but the virtual living room also seems straightforward enough that I don’t have any actual issues with it.

@Pikzel

As much physical movement as possible, such as reloading with your hands or swinging the controllers to swing a baseball bat.

Melee weapons’ hit registration being based on volume sweeps instead of hitscan should make VR support more technically straightforward, although in order to to keep it balanced the damage calculations for VR users would need to keep in mind the amount of force being applied.

Reloading is a similar idea. It should be technically straightforward because of how attachments are separate entities from the gun itself. Mechanically there’d only need to be a VR-specific way to reload (which really just comes down to the game recognizing the action you’re attempting to do). Any reloading-based ability stats would be a bit more difficult to replicate though (i.e., larger mags normally taking longer to reload).

VR support could just come down to the most technically simple implementation, which is just a camera for your head and a way for your handheld VR hardware to work with the game. Mechanically there’s quite a bit of work with stuff like the user interface and maintaining game balance.

The easiest thing would be to make a singleplayer-only port that is developed in partnership with another development studio. Being singleplayer-only, you avoid a lot of the balance concerns by not introducing the player to people that could be more mechanically limited due to using a keyboard/mouse.

Then, the port is either available as a separate game download, or it’s DLC (like you have suggested).

[KingFrog]

Wtfrick is my grammer rb

[anon24515308]

Freelooking is already possible by holding Alt in Unturned II. A VR headset would just let you do that without holding alt, and I don’t see how this would give you wall hacks.

[MoltonMontro]

@anon24515308

I don’t see how this would give you wall hacks.

VR tracking can consider the position and orientation of the human too, so if the human just moves closer to a wall then the camera could phase through it.

Similarly, human hands could lead to character hands phasing through objects too. In PayDay, this allows for people to just reach through ceilings/walls and still do interactions.

I’m sure there’s probably ways to set up collision so humans can’t make their player characters do that, but that’s what KingFrog is referring to. He’s assuming the VR support isn’t super rudimentary and isn’t just free-look but all the time. If the VR support was just an adaptation on free-looking, then it shouldn’t have the phasing/clipping issues.

[Sir-sanctimonious-III]

@MoltonMontro

For something beyond an Editor port like U3 temporarily had, most studios just outsource if they don’t have a dedicated VR team.

U4 having VR support that was developed in-house is unrealistic. SDG working with a team like Escalation Studios is far more probable.

Agreed, I just don’t think that Nelson should even consider outsourcing until 4.0 is in an official release stage. Either way, part of Unturned’s charm is that it’s a nice survival game made by a single developer, so I feel like outsourcing it and trying to make a VR version would change the feel and community of the game drastically.