I cannot figure out how to have two player controllers/pawns, one VR and one non-VR on the same computer.
The end result I’m aiming for is to have a player in VR, and a player sitting on the desktop with: (1) a different, and separately controllable camera view, and (2) interactive UMG elements.
My first attempt at this was simply to get a different camera view in the VR spectator viewport (using the Spectator Texture with Render Targets) and apply UMG to it. If it were possible to add UMG to this window, then this would be perfect. But my question about this is sitting unanswered, so I’m starting to think this isn’t possible (perhaps adding UMG to the Spectator window isn’t something Epic imagined anyone would do).
So an alternative would be to have two player controllers / pawns and have them as multiplayer on the same PC. This seems unnecessarily clunky, and also has the seeming problem that there will be two windows, one for each pawn. Nonetheless, I would like to see if I can make it work. However, no matter how I introduce the pawns, it doesn’t seem to work. I cannot get the VR pawn to lock to HMD while the non-VR pawn has its own separate camera, for one thing.
Seems like there’s a few people trying to figure this out, eg.
I’m afraid it isn’t possible. From the Spectator Screen Modes documentation; [TABLE]
8
ViewPort
Currently, this is an unsupported mode; however, ViewPort mode will be supported in a future release. This mode will render a split screen output (think of split screen multiplayer games), where one user has the HMD, while the other user is the spectator.
Just like YuriNK said, not possible to do on one machine alone. However it is quite easy to achieve with two machines running the same app with one player being VRPawn while the other using keyboard.
Its totally possible in one computer currently, you just have to render the second players view to the mirror window texture. Its just less useful than that eventual viewport mode because that will support directly attaching widgets to the second players view and have correct screen to world transforms.
Well, it might be a bit unorthodox, but i fixed this with creating a lan session, one verison with the steam VR Plugin active (if you export the NonVR and VR Version both with Steam VR active, one kicks out the other in VR), than let the non VR Version join the session and spawn both pawns as needed. Communication from the non VR and VR Version via normal replication.
Im not totally done with my project tho, so there might be some aspects i didnt cover up unitll now.