Any update on VR support?

I was just wanting to know if there was any update on VR support for the game? I remember one of the main limiting factors was performance, but now we have GPU's like the RTX 3090 and RX 6900 XT so I was just curious if there was any development being done for it?

 

Im going to have to agree. T3D isnt a limitation either as the last of the code was retired in 0.25. VR would add so much to the game and there are ways of implimenting it that would hardily impact performance.
I think it would add so much imerssion to the game and is 100% a worth while investment.

 

Well I mean any VR implementation will use more GPU power, I mean there is some cool performance stuff you can do, but it's still intensive, but I don't think it should be too much of an issue with newer GPU's, especially because they have Vulkan working pretty consistently now. What was the limitation with T3D? Never heard of there being any kind of limitation with physics?

 

T3D was the game engine Beam ran on. Not the physics engine though. In fact, the physics end of T3D was never used as far as im aware, as they use there own physics engine completely separate of T3D

 

I might be totally wrong but I thought one of the main limitations for VR was the game engine's inability to render multiple viewports which is needed for stereoscopic VR. I noticed in the rendering section of the 0.25 patch notes it says:

• Added new render view system that will allow for multiple viewports in the future (EXPERIMENTAL)

I'm wondering if this could be a step towards VR support?

 

The only two things I can think of that can come from multiple viewport support is

a) Local splitscreen multiplayer
b) VR support​

Exciting times!

 

im sure we will get there one day

 

With multiple viewports being worked on, all they'd need to do it enable the correct camera tracking for an HMD and it should be good to go.

 

Yeah the multiple camera thing has been an issue for a LONG time. We have all heard the spiel over the years... and having done the research about the topic (some post I made somewhere on these forums a LONG time ago... if you want to go digging for it, have fun I guess) that was a fundamental issue with the Torque engine. I only found evidence of one person ever pulling it off in the engine and according to him it was so laggy and obscure that he didn't even bother to post the solution. However, this is why we have been lacking things like proper rear view mirrors up until now... as the easiest way to do that in a game engine (short of ray tracing I guess) is to just have cameras at the mirrors that just display what they see on the mirrors surface.

All that being said, a long Long LONG time ago... like... going back 7+ years... there is a video of the devs experimenting with VR support with an Oculus Dev kit. I had one of them too way back when (granted it was through my college for a project I was working on... it wasn't mine) and with the SDK from Oculus, you could get damn near anything to run on it. It was pretty awesome. Then a short time later, they stopped selling Dev kits and removed access to the SDK's. That pretty much single handedly ended development on that way back when.

If you dig hard enough and deep enough though... there is an official picture floating around... somewhere... of it running on an Oculus Dev kit. So... its definitely not "impossible".

 

VR has gotten wayy easier to code for too in recent years

I'm pretty sure the reason they were able to do VR support wayy back when was because Beamng ran on Unreal Engine rather than what they have now

 

No, it was definitely out of the Unreal Engine by that point. A lot of people don't realize that they really just got the physics engine roughed out in Unreal before making the jump to Torque... they weren't in Unreal for much more than just early concepts and the birthing of the basic ideas that became BeamNG.

Here is the original post I was talking about... not much going on here... but you can see that at the time, it "was" working.

https://www.beamng.com/game/news/blog/oculus-rift-support/

 

There's even a YouTube video, only one hah, found that long ago

 

Yeah, it definitely happened and was in testing... but that was 9 years ago. There original reason (I seem to remember reading somewhere) was part to do with the SDK being removed, and part to do with that, at the time, Beam just didn't run smoothly enough to be a viable VR gaming experience as at the time 90FPS was really a requirement for VR to not make a good majority of people sick. I think that may still be the standard, but perhaps it has shifted a bit over the years...

Regardless, at the time, Beam just DID NOT run good enough on anything available on the market to even achieve 90fps in its normal state, neverminded having to do the extra rendering that VR takes.

Nowadays though, the Beam team over the last decade has refined Beam's physics engine and rendering engine incredibly well not to mention that PC's have become MUCH more powerful in the last 10 years. Now Beam runs smoothly on darn near anything and some people have even managed to run it on cell phones (no I am not joking) so VR could definitely be done now adays.

The real question is are the Beam team done adding new features to the rendering engine that they can safely add in VR features without taking time away from more important features... my guess is they aren't quite where they want to be with that yet.

 

I mean I think most people would be happy with just basic head tracking and stereoscopic rendering, don't really see that messing with dev time