Oculus Certified

"xSpektre" wrote:
With retrofitting games in mind, how difficult is it for developers to convert old games to be compatible with the Rift? Would the availability of Stereoscopic 3D be sufficient?

I'm currently working on getting Homeworld working with the Rift, and it's non-trivial for someone who isn't familiar with the codebase to chase down where the insertion point for making sure the scene gets rendered twice from different viewpoints should be. Just having stereoscopic 3D in your game isn't good enough, because you need to have a shader based post-processing step that does the distortion (or you have to be ready to emulate a per-pixel distortion in your game engine in some other fashion, but retrofitting GL or DirectX shader support is probably the easiest way to do that).

"xSpektre" wrote:
The topic of things being "Oculus Certified" and Tom's response got me thinking as to how difficult it would be for even the average coder to get recent games fitted properly for the rift.

There's no such thing as an 'average coder' in my experience. Software development is just too large a field with too many variables to make any sort of reasonable decision or estimate based on the idea that someone is an 'average coder'.

"xSpektre" wrote:
I'd like to know if it's easy/worth the effort for the devs to code Rift support into their Bioshock series natively.

It's easy in that it's not an intractable problem. There might be hiccoughs, but there's certainly enough information in the SDK and examples for any developer familiar with the Bioshock Infinite graphic engine to do it. However, it's almost certainly not worth the effort, because it doesn't add anything to the bottom line. Right now the only benefit you get from supporting the Oculus Rift is making a bunch of other crazy developers happy.