I’ve been working on and off on a big hobby project of mine meant for VR for a number of years (desktop VR, if it matters). By far, the biggest hurdle I’ve come up against is how to test and “iterate” effectively. This is vague so I’ll give an example:
I have a lever that needs pullin’, so of course I need to come up with a system that works with the VR controllers to allow the player to grab and pull. Any time I alter the blueprints involved in this, I of course want to test and see if it works. The only way I know is to get my headset up and running and test using VR preview. This is often fraught with hurdles – my headset may have become disconnected so I need to re-launch Unreal. Or I’ll launch VR Preview and get a GPU crash. Or I’ll get into VR Preview and the framerate is randomly atrocious. Or I’ll test, and quit out of VR Preview and UE will crash. On and on.
The way I’m doing it is terrible, especially if I want to go back and forth a bunch of times to tweak a value until it feels right. I want to change a value, test, tweak the value, test that, tweak it more, test that, until it’s good. This is completely frustrating and next to impossible with my “workflow” if you can call it that.
Does anyone have suggestions for a better way? I’m desperate for any suggestions. And to reiterate – the “lever” example I gave is just an example. I’m asking about the broader workflow for testing and iterating.
One thing I’ve started doing is switching the Game Mode over to the Third Person Template temporarily which allows me to test things like if doors will open when you walk up to them and stuff, which has been helpful to an extent, but not at all when it comes to interacting using the motion controllers, for example.