#4309630 - 11/07/16 01:50 AM
Re: VR Support
[Re: Stickshaker]
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Joined: Jun 2009
Posts: 624
FlyingMonkey
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Posts: 624
Down under in Adelaide
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I've looked into that a couple of times, starting back when I had an Oculus DK2 (now moved to Vive). I suggested Rise of Flight to Dan Church from FlyInside, but I think it will always be too small a niche for him. I also had one of the devs from Vireio look into adding Rise of Flight support, but I think he had a hard time dealing with the FOV and other settings - in any case it was never developed.
Now, with no plan to actively develop for Rise of Flight or its successor in the next 5+ years, I'd also love to get some sort of good (ie FlyInside level) VR support for RoF. Being a coder myself (but not for gaming) at work, I've slowly considered whether I might try developing that myself or not - the answer is probably that I won't be able to find the time though, but I'll at least give it at look.
The other option for WW1 in VR would be WOFF UE - I suspect the tricks that Dan Church applied to FSX might port quite well to CFS3 - but then again this is possibly even smaller a niche. I've certainly mentioned it on FlyInside forums before, but with xplane support being worked on currently I wouldn't expect to hear anything about that in the next few months.
A shame really, there's no doubt that WW1 flying is a perfect match for current gen VR, and it would be a dream for me.
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#4312514 - 11/16/16 02:54 AM
Re: VR Support
[Re: Stickshaker]
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Joined: Jun 2009
Posts: 624
FlyingMonkey
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Down under in Adelaide
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I just did that 2 days ago Dutch. It's not impossible at all to get a DX8 game supported by VR - some other developers have implemented support for games new and old, and I hope I'll get some tricks and tips from them (especially the ones who did freeware implementations) to get started. If I understood rightly WOFF UE already uses some sort of wrapper to get DX9 shaders working (something new to UE I think). My plan is to do the initial research in December and that's when I'll probably figure out whether I'll go on with RoF or WOFF UE (I've got the feeling that the latter might be easier but we'll see), but beyond that it might take a long while before I've got anything to show (assuming I don't get stuck) because I don't have loads of spare time - still, this is something I'm highly motivated to work on because otherwise we might wait a very long time before we see any ww1 action in VR.
Last edited by FlyingMonkey; 11/16/16 02:55 AM.
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#4334928 - 02/06/17 04:44 AM
Re: VR Support
[Re: Stickshaker]
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Joined: Jun 2009
Posts: 624
FlyingMonkey
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Posts: 624
Down under in Adelaide
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Very slow progress so far, but after some initial exploration I've decided to try working on WOFF first. I've done some initial research on how to do it and thanks to discussions with someone who implemented a similar system for Morrowind, I know what I need to do - I'm just very short on time currently, so I haven't gone further than reading (and I'm not done with that yet). I'm very confident that VR can be done in the case of WOFF. People like Ankor have already succeeded in implementing a directX wrapper than can manipulate the viewpoint and that's the basic thing I need to do (duplicate viewports, shift them a bit and then connect them to headtracking). Now if it was someone else than me with more time and experience, I'd be confident that it could be done in a relatively short time, but if it's just me it's going to take a long time - we're talking months. So by all mean if anyone else wants to tackle it, feel free to do so, don't count on my work to go anywhere in the short term.
As regards ROF, I've got a bad feeling about it because of existing bugs that make trackIR stutter unless smoothing and inertia in the camera settings are set to max. This might also explain why the crude Vive support implemented in IL2 BOS felt stuttery and laggy even on high end hardware. So basically I'm a bit wary of spending a lot of time coding something that might totally fail.
We'll see how things go, but one thing is sure: our fist baby is due early May, so I'll do what I can before that, but then I'll disappear for a while until I can find spare time again - who knows how long that might take
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#4335292 - 02/07/17 01:49 PM
Re: VR Support
[Re: Stickshaker]
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Joined: Sep 2012
Posts: 418
AnKor
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Russia
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FlyingMonkey, I have recently figured out how to control cockpit view in CFS3/WOFF and added mouse look function there. So if there's VR API that can provide head-tracking data it shouldn't be a problem to support it. As for viewport duplication it is a bit more complicated, but since my wrapper works by recording all DX8 draw calls in a frame, processing them, and then replaying using DX9, it should be possible to replay them twice with a viewpoint offset. However I have no VR hardware, don't know what issues to expect, and most importantly don't have time to work on this
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#4335409 - 02/08/17 01:44 AM
Re: VR Support
[Re: Stickshaker]
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Joined: Jun 2009
Posts: 624
FlyingMonkey
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Down under in Adelaide
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Hi AnKor, that's timely, I was planning to send you a message on that topic.
To keep it short, the best VR API to connect to at this stage would be openVR/steamVR which works both for the Vive and Oculus Rift. I own an HTC Vive (but can also do basic testing for the Rift using my old Rift DK2). Now the added pain is that openVR requires DX11 or 12, so it's not straightforward - but there are ways around that and it's possible to make the connection between openVR and a DX9 wrapper - that's what the dev working on the Morrowind VR solution was doing.
What other devs have done when they implement VR on an old game is exactly what you were mentionning: they intercept all old DX calls, apply the head tracking data to the view port, duplicate and shift it, and then they either go on and do all the work themselves, ie apply the correct transformation to the frame to be directly drawn in the VR headset (in which case I think you can still manage to do that in DX9 - I think Euro Truck Simulator 2 devs used do that in fact, although maybe not anymore. FlyInside used to do that in its early days too) or they pass that to the relevant API to do that for them (e.g. use openVR for that, but then they're translating everything to DX11 or later).
Depending on the cases, implementing VR can be straightforward, with the main issues being that the latency needs to be kept low and stuttering needs to be kept very rare. Now often the main complication comes from integrating the UI in VR, but in the case of WOFF it should be easy since the only UI that can potentially come in the way is the map. I'd aim to start with no UI work (and therefore a map no necessarily easy to use, but that's fine as a compromise to start with). My initial plan was to develop my own code to hook on your wrapper (again following what the Morrowrift developper had opted to do) and that might still be a viable way to do it so that it doesn't take any of your time at all. But I've the got the same issue as you though - I really don't have much time, so we're talking about things that will move very slowly. Having said that I'm quite persistent when I start something and certainly don't like leaving things unfinished, so I'll keep working on that throughout this year when I can.
EDIT: oops, made it sounds worse than it is though: when relying on the openVR API there is not need to do the duplication of the viewport in fact. You pass the current viewport as determined per head tracking, and then openVR has a function to duplicate and shift that according to the user settings (ie their interpupillary distance), so that whole part is done by openVR anyway.
Last edited by FlyingMonkey; 02/08/17 02:01 AM.
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Exodus
by RedOneAlpha. 04/18/24 05:46 PM
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