Asynchronous Gameplay - Can the HMD Mirror Window display other stuff instead?

Development Platform & Builds XR Development
1

We’ll be seeing a lot of these types of games on the PSVR system; Asynchronous Gameplay, is where 1 player is in VR, while the other players are viewing/playing from a traditional screen, instead of viewing what the player is seeing, directly on that screen, they see alternative views or info.

So I’ve been trying to figure out how I could do that with UE4 (I’m using 4.11)… But as far as I’ve been able to find in the documentation, the HMD Mirror window can only display the player’s camera. And I’m not a C++ coder, so I can’t really get into the engine to tweak that.

I’d love to be able to make a game where, for example, the VR player is exploring a spooky location, meanwhile their friends are outside VR, watching them on the normal screen, seeing a sort of in-game security camera or something, and they’re selecting prompts to change the various spooky things that are happening to the VR player, or maybe they can assist the VR player somehow. heh

Even if performance wise, displaying alternative cameras isn’t the best idea… I think there should at least be a way to display a 2D interface outside of VR on the screen, something that could display select-able prompts or a mini-map overview in 2D, or just stats or something. It could make for some pretty fun social/party experiences, using VR.

Does anyone know if this is possible? Or if we should suggest it to the UE4 devs? I don’t know as much about UE4 as I’d like, so I might be missing something obvious, that allows us to do this already… heh

2

I am also trying to figure it out. “Logically” you should be able to use the create player node, to create a second local player, but it does not seem to work. Does anyone know what the best way is to suggest this feature?

3

I’m still not really sure where to post this idea, to suggest it to the development guys… :confused: I really hope they can get this feature in soon, it’s kinda important for certain VR games. :confused:

4

I don’t have a solution to offer, but you may want to post this on the Answerhub. Devs tend to respond and offer some great solutions there. You may at least be able to grab someone’s attention that way.

5

Ok, well I just posted it here:

Hopefully it eventually gets noticed. heh

6

I had been looking into this as well and found a few examples of people achieving this in Unity by creating 2 separate executable’s, with one targeting the HMD and one the traditional screen. They were set up to communicate like a network game, only both running locally. I’m not sure it would be possible to do it the same way in UE, but I’ll be trying it unless I can find a better option.