Thoughts on VR project management

[gh0stfase1]

Hi, I’ve been working a mobile VR (Meta Quest 2) project for about 8 months now. I have recently acquired an HTC Vive (PC-VR) for the purpose of gaining experience with, and potentially releasing for, a different device. After getting everything up and going with the Vive and unreal, I realized something I wasn’t considering previously…how does one handle the large differences in capabilities between mobile VR and PC-VR? For instance, a typical configuration for a mobile VR project uses the forward renderer vice deferred. Post-processing is of course frowned upon. You have to be very meticulous with respect to draw calls, triangle counts, material performance, etc. Whereas, if out the gate you were targeting PC-VR solely, you could make use of some of the more advanced features of the engine in order to reach higher visual fidelity.

My gut feeling says you will have to manage two separate projects within unreal. One configured for mobile VR and the other for PC-VR. They can of course share gameplay related code but the handling of the maps, assets and other visuals (like lighting) will have to be completely separate. Does this line up with your experience?

Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts.

[Astrotronic]

Hello,

Fortnite ships on everything from mobile to PC from one project, so there are tools in the engine that can help with scalability.

There was a recent episode of Inside Unreal that talks about these systems.

Setting your editor ‘Preview Platform’ to Android Vulkan will help get a better approximation of what you’d see on the Quest (Settings Cog in Upper Right of Editor Window → Preview Platform)

Lighting will probably be the biggest difference. (No Lumen on Mobile) The way I see it, if you can get it to look good and run on Mobile, it will look good and run excellent on PC.

[gh0stfase1]

That episode is exactly what I’m looking for. Thanks for sharing!