Epic's low priority on GearVR and VR in general makes me sad

Nick_Whiting · March 13, 2015, 10:49pm

Hey all!

As promised, here’s a post-GDC update.

Rendering Bugs:
Here’s a list of the bugs that are our top priorities on the rendering front to fix, along with their Jira tag numbers. Jira isn’t publicly exposed that the moment, but having the numbers listed by the issue will make it much easier to follow up.

Anim Trails (fixed in 4.7)
Orbit Mesh Particles (UE-5584)
Mobile HDR (UE-11846)
Decals issues (UE-11849)
LPV (UE-9765)
Subsurface profile (UE-11847)
Distance Field Shadowing (UE-11848)

The order there is a combination of how basic the engine feature is, and how much time it will take to fix it. It’s not guaranteed they’ll be fixed in that exact order, but that’s our guess at how easy it will be to fix things up. These will be posted on the public Trello in the coming days, but wanted to give you guys an early preview since you all seemed interested!

Documentation:
J.J. has submitted more thorough docs to the doc team, and they’re being verified and published very soon! We had to wait to get more devices in house, so that the docs team could take the documentation that J.J. had fleshed out, run through it, and then fill in any gaps. That should be coming through shortly!

Templates:
We’ve also got a rough template that we’ve passed off to the docs team as well. We’re hoping to get that up in the learn tab. In the meantime, I’ve uploaded the sample here to get you started:

Here’s the notes from J.J., in raw form:

I’ve shared out a little GearVR sample that aims to show some of the lighting techniques that folks can use to extract as much perf as they can get out of mobile VR. Currently it’s one level with 3 little sample areas surrounding the viewer. Each area has 25 sphere static meshes, with 2 of the areas ticking the spheres to drive the CPU a bit for the sample.

Unlit - this area shows the spheres with unlit materials that pipe the world space normal right through emissive. The intent here is to demonstrate that rather than relying on expensive lighting, people might want to experiment with non-realistic shaders. This is the highest performance area.

Unlit Simple Diffuse - this area is similar to unlit, but instead it pipes the normals through a dot with a constant vector, and some math to simulate a diffuse color and some ambient while still remaining unlit and emissive only. This is probably the fastest way to have ‘real’ lighting on mobile VR. The direction vector could be controlled through blueprints, etc. Animating the direction vector would actually be a good addition to this sample in that it would demonstrate that the lighting is actually dynamic, even though it’s all in the material. Another option for this and the Unlit area would be to have rotating cubes rather than spheres in order to demonstrate that the lighting is dynamic.

Static Lighting - this area demonstrates static lighting via lightmaps. For anything that isn’t dynamic, we want people to use static lighting as much as possible.

I should probably expand the sample with another quadrant to demonstrate lit, rough only materials with no dynamic shadows, but I wanted to keep things simple for now.

Again, this is being updated and improved by the docs team, but wanted to get you guys something to start with.

Also, I want to mention that if you start your project with the Mobile settings, and Scalable, and then turn off MobileHDR, you’ll be at a good base level to start with, even without the template, so give that a shot if you’re having trouble!

Exynos Note 4 Support:
J.J. would be the expert on that, and he’s out of the office for a few days, but I do not believe that the Exynos Note 4 is officially supported by Gear VR. From what I’m reading, it seems you have to flash the Exynos Note 4 with a modfied firmware to even get the Gear VR stuff to install. We’ve only tested on officially supported Note 4’s (https://support.oculus.com/hc/en-us/articles/204113096-Samsung-Gear-VR-Innovator-Edition-Samsung-Galaxy-Note-4-Compatibility)