You make it sound like VR motion sickness is the norm, but it’s really not. Tons of people play VR games every day with smooth locomotion, on “potato VM” game engines, at 72 or 90 Hz without issue.
Even if perf were a widespread issue, building a custom game engine for VR probably shouldn’t be your first choice when there’s so many easier ways to optimize.
It's definitely worth being careful to avoid GC causing frame drops, but I'm pretty sure there are a lot of good-performing VR games written in Unity
And it's getting worse by the day.
The company is bankrupt, and when interest rates go up further all your invested time will go poof in a second.
Own your time, and control your future: when you use Unity you learn very little about how the GPU works, which kinda is the point, but since OpenGL 3 is the final 3D interface with VAO you only need to learn it once for eternity.
Fascinating info, thanks for sharing. I was aware of the two Cryengine games and the omnipresence of Epic’s engines, but I didn’t realize it was that lopsided.
Absolutely agree with the claim that “non-standard locomotion” is best for avoiding VR sickness - games like Gorilla Tag and Echo Arena really have a sort of “presence” factor that goes beyond 99% of VR titles.
Strongly disagree on the claim that VR sickness is a widespread issue - outside of Boomers/GenX who didn’t grow up playing video games. But I digress since I’m sure other posters will be jumping on the claim haha.
Btw, Tea for God is in the App Lab [1] so you shouldn’t need to mess around with ADB or Sidequest. If you enjoy the unique “pseudo infinite space” thing it has going on, you’d probably also enjoy “Eye of the Temple”. It’s currently on Steam[2] and in development for Quest, but it does the infinite spaces thing with an Indiana Jones style twist and is quite enjoyable experiencing the clever ways the dev came up with to trick you into thinking you’re physically exploring a huge space while actually remaining mostly still in reality.
[1] https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/3762343440541585/
[2] https://store.steampowered.com/app/589940/Eye_of_the_Temple/
Probably a temporary thing, but still I need to upload it with adb because that is how you develop for this thing.
Android is horrible now, I remember making something for the HTC Hero back in 2009, that was nice... now you have to install many hundred GB of junk to even get started.
In my experience (I made the first VR MMO: http://aeonalpha.com) high refresh rates in sensor reading (faked by Oculus/Valve, I used 120 FPS on DK1 in 2013, 150 FPS on DK 2 in 2014 and 180 FPS on OG Vive in 2016) combined with locomotion that the brain does not immediately associate with human motion are solutions.
But I will make my 3D action voxel MMO 3rd person just to make sure.
120 FPS at low persistence is the bare minimum if you want to not get ill from any smooth movement = Echo VR is the ONLY game that is playable on Quest 2.
Non-smooth movement games are more of a slideshow/shooting gallery; akin to the early fixed space 3D games on cd-rom if you remember those.
The difference is now we have permanently peaked in hardware, so we need to solve things with software.
I haven't tried "Tea for God" yet, kinda dreading the adb install since computers can get bricked when you do real work on them these days.
Baffling that in 6 years, 1 billion humans (that could bought a headset and built something) only managed to create 3 custom engines for VR: Source 2, Lone Echo and "Tea for God".
Odds are not looking good.