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October 31, 2014

Oculus unhelpful to small developers?

So I'm making a program for the rift, using Game Maker studio. It does not natively support the rift but there is a community extension, which I have even contributed a tiny bit to myself: http://www.gmoculus.com

We have standard client rendering working, but not direct-to-rift SDK rendering, which would be a much better solution because of lower latency, automatic updating with the sdk, and because we are missing a lot of features in our own rendering, like chromatic aberration.

The reason we have not gotten sdk rendering to work is because neither me or the main extension developer are very experienced in c++ and certainly not directx. But I think we've got the bulk of the work done, if someone knowledgeable would step in and help I'd think they could get it working pretty quickly. So I thought I'd email oculus and see if they could help, because who knows their SDK better than themselves, and I would have thought they would be very eager to help enable as many developers as they can. Instead I got this rather template-looking rejection:

Hello Gitle,

Thank you for taking the time to email us, we appreciate your support.

We don't currently support third-party applications or development engines, we only support Unity and Unreal.

You can visit the forums to see if other developers in the Oculus community are working on projects using the same engine at:

https://developer.oculus.com/forums/

I would also suggest getting into contact with the developer that created the extension and working with them to integrate it more seamlessly with the Oculus SDK.

I apologize I am unable to do more.

Hope this helps,

[***]
Oculus Support


I understand Oculus is busy, but I don't understand why they won't delegate some time to problems like this. Surely we can't be the only indie developers who are having a bit of trouble integrating oculus support into their programs, it seems obvious that oculus would want to focus on helping them and thus getting as many programs (and even whole engines as in this case) with rift support working as possible, in this critical product phase.

Just another example I can think of is the lunar flight developer, from what I understand he's been struggling with integrating dk2 support for a long time (was incidentally fixed in the last sdk though, I hear).

Are developers that are either 1) not AAA-sized or 2) not using unreal or unity basically ignored? It's a bit disappointing.

    27 replies

    Up and Coming
    November 4, 2014
    I feel Oculus has been very helpful to small developers. There are plenty of examples of that all over this forum and Reddit.

    My question to the original poster, why are you not using an engine with integrated Oculus support? Why are you trying to integrate a C library prior to bringing someone on board with C programming experience?

    This is a management issue on your end. Saying Oculus not providing you with a programmer for your project is equivalent to them not being helpful is misguided to say the least.
    Synthesis - Abstract Molecular Dynamics Simulator @HartLabs
    Up and Coming
    November 5, 2014
    "HartLabs" wrote:
    I feel Oculus has been very helpful to small developers. There are plenty of examples of that all over this forum and Reddit.

    My question to the original poster, why are you not using an engine with integrated Oculus support? Why are you trying to integrate a C library prior to bringing someone on board with C programming experience?

    This is a management issue on your end. Saying Oculus not providing you with a programmer for your project is equivalent to them not being helpful is misguided to say the least.


    I concur that overall Oculus has been helpful to the development community as a whole. I don't think anyone suggested that Oculus has been bad.

    We just need this "Direct" to Rift issue fixed for OpenGL!

    And while I agree with your question and statements to the OP in fairness the issue he is experiencing is the same many others are experiencing as well with different systems and OpenGL implementations.

    So let's keep asking for Oculus' help here!
    Up and Coming
    November 5, 2014
    The title of this post is someone unfairly suggesting Oculus support has been bad.

    The OP's post asked about implementing SDK rendering not direct to rift.
    Synthesis - Abstract Molecular Dynamics Simulator @HartLabs
    Up and Coming
    November 5, 2014
    "GrixM" wrote:
    The reason we have not gotten sdk rendering to work is because neither me or the main extension developer are very experienced in c++


    Seems like OP knows what the problem is.

    In all serious and constructiveness, OP, if you want to learn these will help a lot:

    http://www.cplusplus.com/doc/tutorial/
    http://www.arcsynthesis.org/gltut/
    Synthesis - Abstract Molecular Dynamics Simulator @HartLabs
    Up and Coming
    November 5, 2014
    "HartLabs" wrote:
    The title of this post is someone unfairly suggesting Oculus support has been bad.

    The OP's post asked about implementing SDK rendering not direct to rift.


    Sure, the OP is talking about SDK rendering but the "Direct" to Rift part (AKA "Direct" mode) is relavent to everyone else's problem.

    I agree that saying "Oculus is bad" is unhelpful but we do need to keep screaming about the "Direct" mode problem for OpenGL so that they can look at it.
    Up and Coming
    November 5, 2014
    Please note the OP said they are working in DirectX. Continuing to discuss direct mode for OpenGL (which as I understand it is somewhat working in 0.4.3) is fine, but this is the wrong thread for it. It is completely off topic with the OP's assertions and requests.

    Their problem is not a technical SDK issue, it is that they lack a programmer.
    Synthesis - Abstract Molecular Dynamics Simulator @HartLabs
    Up and Coming
    November 5, 2014
    "HartLabs" wrote:
    Please note the OP said they are working in DirectX. Continuing to discuss direct mode for OpenGL (which as I understand it is somewhat working in 0.4.3) is fine, but this is the wrong thread for it. It is completely off topic with the OP's assertions and requests.

    Their problem is not a technical SDK issue, it is that they lack a programmer.


    I'll agree that the OP is different from other folks requests; the only item of contention is the OpenGL "Direct" mode issue.

    It isn't working for a lot of folks and I don't want the folks at Oculus reading this to think that it is a small issue only affecting one or two people.

    I'll leave the thread alone and hopefully the OP can get the support he needs :)