Hi, I have heard more then once that if someone uses a 2D picture for the sky in a game in VR it looks odd because of the added depth preception
so i wondering if its the same thing with Particles, Particles are basically a 2D Sprite
anyone tried any of the oculus or htc vive head sets and can comment about Particle practicality and how it looks?
We use loads of particle effects in EVE: Valkyrie. They are normally fine in VR, but you can run into issues like the sprites rotating along with the headset or looking flat in general.
Just test your effects in VR and you can make them work just fine. I wouldn’t recommend getting super close to them though.
One other thing you will want to check is the shader complexity used for your particle materials (press F5 in game). Make sure that you’re hitting your target framerate! From experience, oculus rift handles lower frame rates better because they have time warp which gracefully handles any judder. The Vive on the other hand, NEEDS to hit 90fps because that is the hardware refresh rate, and anything less than that causes noticeable judder. If you’re making a game to support both HMD’s, develop for the stricter rule set constraints. Generally speaking, VR can start getting a lot of performance problems when you use a lot of transparency (caused by overdraw), but that doesn’t mean you can’t use it. You just have to be very smart and clever about optimizing things and “faking” it.
Also: I’ve never had any issues with the sky in VR. The skybox is generally far enough away that the lack of depth isn’t noticeable.
Thanks siggiG now I’m a bit more clam but ill still have to wait for the headset to arrive in order to mess with particles
Slayemin your right the sky implementation in unreal doesn’t seem like it would have that negative effect, is there a way to test a VR gameplay without the headset just to keep an eye on the frame rate?
Not really. You will have to test the game with VR. The engine renders the scene to two display outputs in VR. The best thing you can do without a VR headset is to run the console command “Stat FPS” and try to keep your frame rate above 90fps and look for sources of major GPU hogging. You can also set the game settings to be optimized for VR to get a performance boost and to see what your world will look like.