Where does a beginner start

The two main engines for use in VR are Unity and Unreal. Both have pros and cons and may be better for different things. Personally, I find Unity a little easier to work with, but I've also been programming for a while. Unreal has a visual coding system, which may be a little more forgiving if you're not a coder. Unreal also has slightly better graphics (by default) but may require a beefier rig than Unity.

I would recommend going through some tutorials for those engines, and seeing if anything makes sense. Don't worry about the VR aspect at first. It's not hard to enable VR support once you understand how to create a normal game.

Hope that helps.

Thank you for the reply. You are right -- i should explore the standard game creation in those engines and then, if successful, work up from there to VR.

Now.. i feel making the wrong engine choice in the beginning would be unforgiving, or are they similar? Thanks for the suggestions. Im going to give Unreal engine a try.

Both engines are great tools and have free versions to start with. If you are just experimenting, either are fine. It's usually only with larger projects where the choice could make a bigger difference.

"Beowuulf" wrote:
Where does a beginner start

At the beginning.

I jumped into Unreal not knowing a damned thing and had a pretty good understanding of the engine in less than a week. In my first day of watching the included tutorials I built a pretty cool environment. Literally with a push of a button it becomes a VR environment directly viewed with the Rift.

Unity may offer something similar, I don't know, I haven't tried Unity yet.

youtube tutorials.

Pick Unity or Unreal and start at the beginning, as vizionvr has said.

Just create some environments for Windows, a character, have them moving around and work up from there.

I would still start with basic coding before jumping into Unity and Unreal. But you can take shortcuts and do some code scripting and tool editing for sure (basically what game designers do, they usually don't know a lot about coding, if anything), and come up with some demos fairly easily.

So, C++, C#, Visual Studio (free version), learn coding slowly (from 'Hello World' to say, a game like Tetris), some basic OpenGL to understand 3D computer graphics paradigms, then work with Unity or Unreal Engine.

I suggest you sign up to game developer websites if you want to learn about computer games programming, like gamedev.net. They cater for all levels, so don't be shy.

Handy thread. I will follow the advice.

"Beowuulf" wrote:
Hello ladies and gents of the Oculus forum.

For months now ive aspired to be an Oculus rift developer, i want to create rift games. The problem aside from owning a rift if my knowledge on the world. How do you get into developing games? What languages are most important to learn? I am willing to read textbooks for hours until im ready to buy a DK2, however, i don't know where to start.

What advice would you give to a beginning developer?

Check http://VRFavs.com first to see where rabbit hole gets you