Forum Discussion
Making Progress with Torque 3D
Hey Rift Peeps!
I've decided to tackle the barrel distortion shader first with Torque 3D. That way I can immediately see my results of my work in the Rift.
For now, I've not worried about rendering a stereo pair from the engine as that will require some modifications to Torque 3D's graphics pipeline. In its place I take T3D's standard rendering and crop out a center strip (with the cropping shifted left and right to simulate the eye separation based on values from the OVR SDK) and build a stereo-like pair. So far this has been a decent stand-in for true stereo rendering.
I then apply the OVR SDK given barrel distortion shader to my fake stereo-pair image and end up with the following:
T3D-Rift-Test-02.jpg
I'm also not scaling up the input texture (as discussed in section 5.6.3 of the docs) and instead am taking a hit to the resolution of the final image to get the larger FOV. In the image above I'm scaling the distortion shader's Scale constant by 0.8. Down the road I'll add proper support for the larger input texture to Torque 3D (which will also require some graphics pipeline changes).
Even without true stereo rendering the experience in quite compelling. Next up, head tracking!
My ultimate goal would be to combine my Razer Hydra integration with the Rift for a sweet demo. If you're interested, you can read about my T3D Hydra integration here: Torque 3D Now Supports the Razer Hydra Controller.
- Dave
EDIT: Image attachments are pretty limited in size, eh? It would be great if the forum supported auto-scaling of the image with a link to the full size.
I've decided to tackle the barrel distortion shader first with Torque 3D. That way I can immediately see my results of my work in the Rift.
For now, I've not worried about rendering a stereo pair from the engine as that will require some modifications to Torque 3D's graphics pipeline. In its place I take T3D's standard rendering and crop out a center strip (with the cropping shifted left and right to simulate the eye separation based on values from the OVR SDK) and build a stereo-like pair. So far this has been a decent stand-in for true stereo rendering.
I then apply the OVR SDK given barrel distortion shader to my fake stereo-pair image and end up with the following:
T3D-Rift-Test-02.jpg
I'm also not scaling up the input texture (as discussed in section 5.6.3 of the docs) and instead am taking a hit to the resolution of the final image to get the larger FOV. In the image above I'm scaling the distortion shader's Scale constant by 0.8. Down the road I'll add proper support for the larger input texture to Torque 3D (which will also require some graphics pipeline changes).
Even without true stereo rendering the experience in quite compelling. Next up, head tracking!
My ultimate goal would be to combine my Razer Hydra integration with the Rift for a sweet demo. If you're interested, you can read about my T3D Hydra integration here: Torque 3D Now Supports the Razer Hydra Controller.
- Dave
EDIT: Image attachments are pretty limited in size, eh? It would be great if the forum supported auto-scaling of the image with a link to the full size.
43 Replies
- Awesome work, man! You're off to a great start.
I'm sure it will look better with true stereo rendering, but I can understand wanting to get something working as soon as possible.
Can't wait to see more progress on this. - Heya Rift Peeps.
I've been making excellent progress with having Torque 3D work with the Rift. Now that we're able to talk about it, I've posted a blog over at GarageGames:
http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/22225
Enjoy!
- Dave - Haha you did the "Notch pose" :) Good blog! Looking forward to see more.
- Ya, I couldn't resist. Sorry, notch. I'm hoping it becomes a trend! :D
- Dave - Great news! I think the Rift community will love this.
- Hi there, i'm eagerly waiting for this!
Dowloaded and compiled a Torque3d project yesterday, nice world editor, easy engine to start tinkering.
Ogre3D is great, but Torque3D is a game engine, and now open source, a really good place to start experimenting. I hope it builds a good VR community around it (and gets linux support, despite the Indiegogo effort)!
Keep the blog going! - Greetings jmolina!
It is great to have another Torque 3D VR enthusiast around here. We're currently toiling away to get the first pass of the Oculus Rift integration into the development branch this week. I'm working on one of the last tweaks now to have the Torque 3D game window open in full screen directly on the Rift's display.
We're also going to have a great demo available made by the Torque 3D Steering Committee's Ron Kapaun. This demo makes use of Torque 3D's deferred rendering pipeline (technically a light pre-pass renderer) so lights and shadows for everyone. :D
All of this will be included in our 3.0 release here in April (but you can check out the work in the development branch once I merge it in). Our plan is to continue to improve our Rift support through to the 4.0 release this summer. After all, this is all brand new and I'm sure there will be issues, along with new ideas, that will need to be worked on.
- Dave - It's great to see the updates, Dave. :) I recently downloaded Torque3D after seeing your Oculus blog post, and though the engine is currently pretty confusing to me, I love the idea of being able to customize it via source if necessary.
Do you ever hang out on an IRC channel? There's a very helpful Blender channel for idling in while developing, and I thought it would be neat if there was a similar one for Torque3D. - Greetings AgentElrond!
Torque 3D is a huge code base as it is a full featured game engine rather than just a rendering engine. It does take some time to become familiar with it. You can try out these resources to get you started:
Torque 3D Online Documentation which includes our step-by-step FPS tutorial.
Torque 3D Wiki on GitHub with help on compiling and the new input device support (Leap Motion, Razer Hydra).
And for anyone that has moved beyond our FPS tutorial and is looking for some intermediate/advanced help:
Torque 3D Game Development Cookbook which is a shameless plug as I'm the author. :D
We do have an IRC channel that is operated by our community:
Server: irc.maxgaming.net
Channel: #GarageGames
Although I'm not personally on there very often. We used to do an IRC hour each Friday and maybe we need to start that up again following the 3.0 launch in a couple of weeks.
- Dave - An IRC hour either on an afternoon, or during a weekend, would be fun. :P Otherwise I might just use this forum/topic, since you're active here. Is there an email address that would be good to contact you at?
