Re-using Oculus World Demo? (Replacing Tuscany)

What's the win in using the code in the demo as opposed to using Unity or some other end-to-end toolkit?

The win in using the demo is that it does not cost any money, it is already set up to work with the Rift, and its license lets me use it in the ways I want to.

Unity sounds nice and all, but after the free trial they expect me to pay $1500. Not being a professional who expects to sell software or a student eligible for a cheaper license, I am looking for alternatives.

Maybe Unity or some other popular 3D modeling software is the answer to my question?

The Tuscany scene resources are all stored in XML. I wouldn't be hard to either produce a converter that put resources produced from another source into that format, or to convert the example code to be able to read another format. For instance, I've excluded the example resource files from the community SDK because of size issues, but I'm considering converting them to OpenCTM format and restoring them, once I update the example code to be able to load OpenCTM.

I guess my original question should have been, why do you want to re-use the Tuscany 3D mesh XML format instead of using a more common 3D mesh format? It seems like it would be easier to grab some library that can read lightwave or mayay meshes and use it than to write something that will convert to the XML. (Of course the XML may be some format that's in common use. I'm not actually a big user of 3D mesh generating software).

I'm trying to hack a blender exporter to write the scene in the tuscany demo .xml format, so I see the logic behind the request.

I was actually thinking it would be nicer to be able to swap the tuscany assets from the unity demo but I can't figure out how. I installed unity (free version) but I can't see a way to connect it with the assets from that demo in the download section. Anyone can help me out?

Hello,

I am pretty new to 3d dev and would like to reuse the tuscany source also.

Do you know how the Tuscany demo was developped? I mean was it modeled in Unity and then exported as xml somehow?

Just trying to figure out a good workflow for content generation where I get the most bang for the smallest effort :)

"bigfield" wrote:
Just trying to figure out a good workflow for content generation where I get the most bang for the smallest effort :)

That route is likely going to mean using Unity Pro or Unreal engine, as that involves the minimum amount of coding. Both have good libraries of objects that you can import into scenes to start setting something up.

The tuscany demo itself was created by Fenix Fire: http://fenixfire.com/fenix-fire-creates-tuscany-world-demo-for-oculus-rift/

Thanks,
I'm going to give Unity a go.