Yup! There’s a specific Gear VR quickstart guide, which I’ve got a few emails out to track down why it hasn’t made it to the docs yet. There was a lot of shifting of the deployment at the end of 4.7, so it underwent a lot of revision in the last few weeks, but I’ll make sure it gets up ASAP.
Let’s fix that then! Next week is super-busy for us, because of GDC, but the following week, I’ll personally go through and update the list of known rendering features that are currently broken in stereo (e.g. LPV, certain particle emitters, DFS, etc), and make that list public for you guys on the trello, and tie them to Jira tasks in our bug list, so you guys can stay up to date.
Regarding the priority of some of those, I don’t want to appear as if we’re casually disregarding those features. We don’t have a very large team, and in the past few months, there’s been a lot of exciting things happening in VR, which we can talk about soon. Up to this point, the priority has been getting coverage on platforms, and trying to stay ahead of the game on that. We’ve tackled some high-value targets that have been often requested (Gear VR, Leap Motion, and a few others we’ll talk about soon), but with each of those, one of our primary considerations was efficient use of resources to get maximum benefit.
The reason we haven’t put a lot of focus on some of the other rendering features working is because in many cases, but not all, in addition to getting them functionally working, we need to adapt them to VR in a very efficient manner. For features that take a lot of rendering time, those are lower value targets to us, because when we’re going for 75 and 90+ Hz on PC, and 60 on mobile, it’s an exceedingly large chunk of the frame budget. For example, in Showdown, we didn’t use dynamic shadows at all, because the frame budget wasn’t there. The distance field shadows are great, but they’re also not super-cheap in terms of rendering. That’s not to say we’re not going to get them working, but when the choice is between that, or broader platform support, our priority thus far has been towards platform support.
So, all that said, I hope that at least shines some light on why we have the goals that we do, but we’ll work on getting more transparent about the status of the rendering features that we do. Our approach to VR is anything but casual, as you’ll see at GDC this year, but I can certainly appreciate how our lack of updates can make it appear so! Thanks for the feedback, and let me make it better for you!