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raph81
Up and Coming
May 3, 2014

Best engine to create Rift experiences?

Hi all,

I'm looking for some guidance here.

I bought the Rift to play games like many on this forum, and found the experience so compelling that I decided to learn to create my own content.

Now the thing is, I had zero experience with programming or 3D modelling a few month ago. Not really knowing where to start, I started looking at various tutorials and online courses and picked up some 3D modelling/animation skills over time. Now I am at the point where I have a decent grasp on how to make meshes and animate them, create materials, textures, environments etc.

I am looking forward to the next step, which would be to transpose those environments I create into a game engine so that I can make it a playable experience. I am not completely naive, I know I am not going to create a real game - I just want to be able to walk around the environment I create in VR mode and add a few simple interaction with it - opening doors... rotating stuff... I don't know.

Obviously I am not going to learn C++. I don't have the time or skill for this. I was checking UE4 and they have this visual scripting system called blueprint which seems to be sufficient to achieve what I want. I wouldn't call it simple for a total beginner like me but it seems to be something I can learn quickly. They also have built-in Oculus support so it seems that developping a demo in UE4 is as simple as create, pack, play and it auto-detects your Rift.

So the question is, is there a catch? Am I right in assuming this is as simple as it looks and I will be able to create demos with UE4 in the fashion I described above? Or should I be looking elsewhere? (Unity?)

Any other tool/technique/resources I should look at?

Any advice I can get from real developpers is much welcome! Thanks in advance.

    19 replies

    Show previous replies
    raph81Author
    Up and Coming
    May 6, 2014
    I took a leap of faith and suscribed, and so far I am having a total blast. Thank you all for your advices!
    Jason187781
    Up and Coming
    May 6, 2014
    I can't wait for official Cry Engine support. I have spent years learning on Cryengine, Feeling a bit let down they haven't got their act together with the Rift :(

    At the moment I am modding Crysis 2 with Tridef on the rift but it aint perfect..

    Unity and Unreal are definitely looking tempting, but I dispair in having to learn a whole new engine from scratch again!
    Sharpfish
    Up and Coming
    May 7, 2014
    I've been with unreal since the first game (as a mapper back in 98) and dabbled with UDK and now into UE4. I also code C++ and made my own extremely basic 3D engine (D3D) back in DX8 times, then attached the irrlicht engine to my game engine in the mid 2000s - I since got up to date by subbing to UE4 and it's a beautiful piece of work, so powerful and intuitive.

    I do worry that perhaps it's a bit more GPU hungry than other engines, esp for VR, but won't know if that's true until I get the DK2 and run my own demos.

    I'm also a fan of Cryengine, the Crysis (1) sandbox was amazing for it's time, and ahead of the game for sure (I even see some pros over the much newer UE4 in certain areas, like ease of outdoor, weather, natural lighting - and this is just on Cryengine 2!). I will definitely be checking out any future Cryengine versions + OR support but UE4 is slick and well supported right now.
    EX DK2/VIVE/PSVR/CV1/Q2/PSVR2 | Currently Quest Pro (PCVR) | VR developer RTX 3080 FE / 12900k / Windows 11 Pro
    shanecolbert
    Up and Coming
    May 8, 2014
    what does that have to do with anything?
    Spam is not exactly a new idea o_0.
    On topic, UE4 is amazing, and definitely my suggestion.
    The blending of C++ with the visual scripting in Blueprint is great.
    Building base objects in C++ for complex logic, then extending or exposing methods to be called within Blueprint scripts...it just feels very flexible, and powerful.
    I also agree that knowing how to program will be a perquisite for game development.
    cybereality
    Inspiring
    May 8, 2014
    The best engine is the one you feel comfortable with and meets the requirements for your project's needs. Currently the top choices for developing on the Oculus Rift are Unity and Unreal.

    While Unreal is a whole lot cheaper now, I still think Unity has advantages that may make it worth the money. For example, Unity scales a lot better to low-end hardware and also has ease of use and accessibility to novice programmers (i.e using Javascript). C++ is not for the feint of heart, and I would not recommend starting with C++ unless you are already an intermediate to advanced programmer in other languages.

    However, the graphics on Unreal 4 are industry leading. If you have a good PC and plan to only support high-end GPUs, then Unreal could make your game look a lot better than what's included with Unity 4. You also have the source-code with Unreal, which can really help if you need to do weird custom things to the engine.

    If you are more accomplished with C++, you can look into other engines and doing the Oculus integration work yourself. I've had some experience with OGRE, and did a simple Oculus integration with the old SDK. The nice part about that is you have more control over the rendering (OGRE is basically an abstract layer over DirectX/OpenGL). So things like increasing the backbuffer target size was pretty simple, while in Unity it was problematic and required hacks (which will be the case when you use a closed-source engine).

    Hope that helps.
    AMD Ryzen 7 1800X | MSI X370 Titanium | G.Skill 16GB DDR4 3200 | EVGA SuperNOVA 1000 | Corsair Hydro H110i Gigabyte RX Vega 64 x2 | Samsung 960 Evo M.2 500GB | Seagate FireCuda SSHD 2TB | Phanteks ENTHOO EVOLV
    Pr0lific
    New Participant
    May 8, 2014
    I just discovered that there is a Unity3D free version!! Not sure why everybody is saying to try UE4 because it's cheaper.. The truth is, there is a free version available to try out right now - I'm downloading it at this very moment. So exciting!!!
    cybereality
    Inspiring
    May 8, 2014
    The free version of Unity does not support the Rift unfortunately.
    AMD Ryzen 7 1800X | MSI X370 Titanium | G.Skill 16GB DDR4 3200 | EVGA SuperNOVA 1000 | Corsair Hydro H110i Gigabyte RX Vega 64 x2 | Samsung 960 Evo M.2 500GB | Seagate FireCuda SSHD 2TB | Phanteks ENTHOO EVOLV
    owenwp
    Up and Coming
    May 12, 2014
    Keep in mind you do not necessarily have to do any programming at all in Unreal 4, even if you want things like networking that are difficult to implement in Unity. It is also a good way to dip your feet into C++ if you want to learn, because you can write little isolated bits of code that can be called from a blueprint easily.

    And while Unity can run on really low spec hardware, it does not scale up well at all. So large scenes will perform very poorly even when there is not a lot happening on screen, and there is not much you can do about it even if you are an expert. Plus Unreal has an actual level editor, so you don't need Maya or Max to create an environment.

    If you know Unity you may as well stick with it, but if you are just starting out Unreal is a better engine to learn.
    aabel
    Up and Coming
    May 12, 2014
    If I wasn't attached Unity already I would use UE4. Even though I am attached to Unity I am going to transition to UE4 anyway, just not right away. Epic actually makes games, they use their product in a real production environment. Unity does not, the are basically chefs that don't taste their own cooking.

    UE4 may wind up being more expensive if you get a successful game, however it's a better set of tools all around and I personally don't have a problem paying more when I get more in return.

    Regarding art assets, both Unity and UE4 use a FBX pipeline, so you can buy art assets from the Unity store and use them in Unreal, you will probably have to tweak the assets a bit in a package capable of working with FBX, but there are people already doing this.
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