How Would I Go About Creating A Play Area That Wraps Around In VR?

The project I’m working on is going to have a few arcade cabinets in a bar, you pick up the VR headset and put it on to start each mini game.

Two of these are going to involve a flight model, one is going to be a VR version of Asteroids and the other is going to be a space shooter/dogfight game.

For both of these games, especially the Asteroids clone, I’m going to want the play space to wrap around, just like the OG arcade game, where the player or asteroid exits one side of the play space and reappears on the other side.

Is there an easy way of doing this or will I be better off approaching this in a different way? I’m going to want my VR Asteroids game to be as close to the arcade original as possible if it’s not really difficult to do, I haven’t developed a game or done any programming for over 20 years so my skills are more than a little rusty lol :astonished::joy:

How are you planning on representing the game in 3D? As first person cockpit game, or a third person game where the player is stationary and the ship and asteroids move around them?

For the latter, you could have something that checks if each actors position is outside the bounds and move them to the opposite side. Not sure how well it would translate into a 3D space where the player doesn’t have a full view of the play area, and limited situational awareness.

In first person cockpit view. :grin:

I’m also planning on making the mini games compatible with motion sims too. :sunglasses::grin::sunglasses:

Am getting one delivered in September!

I mean it’s not essential that I do this, I just want it to be as close to the original game as possible for nostalgic purposes. :grin:

This is going to be a really interesting project :slight_smile: normally you’d teleport an object from one position on the screen to the other side, but this is not really wrapping where you can see an object partially on both sides of the screen.

I wonder if a real wrapping effect like that could be done in UE using a custom shader. Technically the world can be 3D, the ships and asteroids could then fly around over the surface of a sphere. I haven’t written super advanced shaders but I know it’s possible.

A first person game sounds really tricky to pull off well. You’d have to experiment a lot to see what works and what doesn’t. I think the biggest issue would be spacial awareness, since the player would need some kind of reference point to know where they are and when they teleport to the other side.

That would be an interesting way to do it. Instead of shaders, you could just move the player and asteroids on a set radius from the sphere to get 2D gameplay.

I love the sphere idea! I might ditch the Asteroids idea now and have a VR shooter with a water surface, perhaps?

This is going to be for the Quest 2 though, not sure if an animated water surface will be too much for the Quest 2 hardware to handle.

Certainly something for me to think about.

I’m just doing the bar environment at the moment. Have done the models but not textured them yet.

Sounds cool too!

My idea about the “sphere” was more of an invisible center point that ships and asteroids fly around, so that you can move “around the world” just like screen wrapping does in 2D, but you could of course make that spherical surface visible and add water.

*oh also why I mentioned that shaders could be used to do some kind of wrapping FX, your description reminded me of a shader mod for minecraft (Acid shaders) which somehow manage to wrap a 3D world into a shape as cities seen in the movie inception.

Don’t ask me how they did it though, it is advanced.

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