Enthusiasts vs Developers

This is just ridiculous. We don't get this much developers who really need it, the Oculus VR is basically just handing the Rifts to anyone to increaase adoption rates - examples of many many hardware items show that it's utterly crucial. Otherwise it will end up useless.

Real developer don't even need the Rift. They just use the SDK to create a Rift-compatible rendering in their conventional game that mainly supports conventional means of display, maybe it's hard tweak something without the real thing - it's only needed for testing, and therefore that's hardly relevant until the relese version even comes out. And even then, there's always means for big companies to get their unit faster, up to "the next day" faster.

Maybe some hobbyist developers will end up having Rift delay, but who cares - they don't drive the industry.

The whole topic is moot.

"raidho36" wrote:

Real developer don't even need the Rift. They just use the SDK to create a Rift-compatible rendering in their conventional game that mainly supports conventional means of display, maybe it's hard tweak something without the real thing - it's only needed for testing, and therefore that's hardly relevant until the relese version even comes out. And even then, there's always means for big companies to get their unit faster, up to "the next day" faster.

I think the whole point is to have your game working prior to consumer release, rather than sloppily slapped together when it is too late. You can't garner attention and market your game as Oculus Rift compatible if you haven't even gotten that far.

I'm not sure what technical problems and challenges might arise when someone is testing their game on the Rift (I haven't gotten that far yet myself) but something often finds a way to go wrong. It could even be something on the design level; perhaps the movement doesn't feel good when the game is played on the Rift, but on the standard screen there is no real way of knowing.

Its like developing mobile apps. Even if you can use an emulator on your computer, you never know how it quite looks or runs until you get it on that phone. Often you'll find unprecedented issues when you do.

General rule of thumb is to never release anything without thoroughly making sure it works. Any other approach is surely bound for disaster.

Tell that Hawken development team - they barely test ANYTHING before releasing it to public, and they hardly bother to fix any of it afterwards. It already yielded truckloads of things that make bad impression, ranging from minor annoyance to major dealbreaker. And people are still playing that game, like none of that even matters.

Well, being a total newbie, I think enthusiasts can be important for driving the development process. I was adviced to not buy a development kit because I don't actually develop - but why not? I would like to be a part of seeing the development of the Rift history itself.

Also, diving into what developers are doing has sort of surprised me: I am really baffled that academic circles haven't really picked up on this technology yet, especially bioinformatics.

"lissencephalic" wrote:
Well, being a total newbie, I think enthusiasts can be important for driving the development process. I was adviced to not buy a development kit because I don't actually develop - but why not? I would like to be a part of seeing the development of the Rift history itself.

Right.

Especially for indie folks, public beta testing is invaluable. In my mind, there are no reasonable developers who have a problem with unbridled dev kit ownership.

The people who complain are probably just those cliquey types who want to feel special. They should get over themselves.

"Octomelon" wrote:

"lissencephalic" wrote:
Well, being a total newbie, I think enthusiasts can be important for driving the development process. I was adviced to not buy a development kit because I don't actually develop - but why not? I would like to be a part of seeing the development of the Rift history itself.

Right.

Especially for indie folks, public beta testing is invaluable. In my mind, there are no reasonable developers who have a problem with unbridled dev kit ownership.

The people who complain are probably just those cliquey types who want to feel special. They should get over themselves.

Having device availability is a good thing. What annoys me more, however, is that what should have been a dedicated support path for developers has now become general customer support because everyone is just buying developer kits.

Probably the biggest thing, though, is having a dedicated developer community encourages technical discussion and participation by industry practitioners. There is a lot of reinventing the wheel going on here (especially in the Unity forums) simply because a lot of the participants do not come from a computer-graphics heavy development background. It would be good to boost that, but you're never going to see it in a customer support forum.

Without enthusiasts there would be no developers! :shock: And without developers there would be no enthusiasts!

They are like night and day... can't have one without the other!

"dghost" wrote:
Having device availability is a good thing. What annoys me more, however, is that what should have been a dedicated support path for developers has now become general customer support because everyone is just buying developer kits.

Probably the biggest thing, though, is having a dedicated developer community encourages technical discussion and participation by industry practitioners. There is a lot of reinventing the wheel going on here (especially in the Unity forums) simply because a lot of the participants do not come from a computer-graphics heavy development background. It would be good to boost that, but you're never going to see it in a customer support forum.

Hmm, I never thought about that. Is that a problem on this website in the development sub-forums?

i love devs, why should they not love me? :D

"Octomelon" wrote:
Hmm, I never thought about that. Is that a problem on this website in the development sub-forums?

It's less of an issue in the development forums, and generally there are a lot of knowledgable people hanging around. Plus, several of the Oculus staff will drop in from time to time and I could always email them if I had something serious that needed a 1-to-1 conversation. Oculus's support has been excellent when it's needed to be, so I can't really complain that much.

Still, compared to a lot of other developer programs it's still more consumer/hobbyist oriented. The industry folks hanging around seem to be the exception and not the rule - most have gotten what they need working by now, and since there isn't much in-depth technical discussion there doesn't seem to be a good reason for them to show up frequently.