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Regardless of everyones opinions and predictions about VR, I dont think game engines can afford to ignore it at stage.
Yes but that does not mean that they have to develop almost only VR relevant features for the engine. They could maintain a healthy mix out of backbone-fundamental features like gameplay,ai,physics,level editor,landscapes and vegetation -features on the one side and VR on the other side.At point even unity has way more features when it comes to level editor and general workflow!!
But they clearly don’t do that. Their focus lies almost exclusively on creating VR content at the moment.And that’s very dangerous for numerous reasons like:
-tech is not here yet to play **graphical intense **games in 4k or even higher at 90 frames per second, not even on a gtx 1080 ti.
And a gtx 1080 ti costs,depended on the taxes of your country,between 699-800 dollar alone, not included the actual VR headset and controllers,cameras and other setup stuff for that.Beside of that not many people have so much space in their home,that they can work an entire room into roomscale vr with cameras on every wall and a giant free space in the middle.Even if they manage to substitute the external cameras with internal ones,which lie in the headset, the headset is still very heavy for wearing it more then 30 min and you are sweating a lot in it. There is tech on the horizon like meta lenses:
and flexible displays , which could make the VR headset significant smaller and lighter,but they would also need way more powerful and at the same time smaller accumulators/battery’s.Or energy transmission through air via magnetic induction. And both of techs don’t even have working prototypes. Not many people want to sit around with a 300+ gram headset on their heads,for a longer time, no matter how “imersive” it is.
If the tech is not much larger and heavier than sunglasses and is virtual reality and augmented reality at the same time (ar turns to vr if it “augments” the whole screen), than its mass market ready, but before that it stays very niche. There are many surveys about that,where they asked a large amount of different consumers.
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As for hardware, I have i3 + 1060 and everything I’ve tried so far runs smoothly. That’s not a high-end gear. Oculus just recently dropped the bar to 1050Ti. So no, hardware is slightly pricier than reasonable, but not within the reach of many. The, like I already said, is with lack of software and lack of PR.
The only game which looks halfway decent,but not great, is Robo Recall. And that’s a rail shooter like house of the dead, where you can’t move around freely and have to teleport from point to point which is annoying as f. If they would have made robo recall that you can move around freely on the map than i doubt that they would get solid 90 frames out of it. And even robo recall looks not that good compared to battlefield 1 or star wars battlefront or metro last light. Tech needs 4 or 5 more years till a gtx 1470/1570 can run graphical intense games at 90 frames per second to a prizepoint that also normal customers are able to buy into it.Until then it will stay very niche if you cant outsource the calculations in the cloud like nvidia streaming service does.Which would reduce the size of the headsets drasticaly,because the tech to calculate the vr world would be on servers outside the headset and you would not need an expensive pc to run it anymore. But the time untill a large amount of user has a internet connection with more than 2 Gigabytes per second is even further in the future.
When unity looks graphical as good as ue 4 does, than ue4 is done, because the level editor and the general workflow is already now better in unity. I personaly hope for one of two things to happen:
1.unity puts more resources into the graphic sector and catches up to unreal, so that i finaly can use unity.
2.epic changes its course and invests more in building core-backbone features instead of stuff like vr editor.
But sadly i think condition 1 will happen faster.
Sometimes i also cant stop wondering if epics behavior has something to do with that:
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article…-in-epic-games