Razer Hydra and Unity
I've ordered the Rift devkit and Razer Hydra and plan to do some experimental stuff in Unity 3d. I'm not an experienced programer, but I've managed to learn Unity well enough. I have managed to do stuff like NPC pathfinding, line of sight checks and basic gun controls for a shooter. The pathfinding I did is obviosly redundant now since unity has it's own navmesh pathfinding system.
With the Razer Hydra and Rift I would obviosly want to try some first person gameplay. I have access to Unity 3.5. The problem is while there is rift support for Unity 3.5 the Razer Hydra unity plugin from the Unity asset store requires Unity 4. I will offcourse be getting the 4 month test license for Unity 4, but that is only a short term solution.
I would like to know how hard it would be to get Razer Hydra working with Unity 3.5. I would also want to know how difficult it is to make basic controlable hands In unity 4 and the sixense unity plugin. By basic controlable hand I mean the control scheme that is shown in The Gallery: Six elements or the Improved Tuscany demo. I understand that Unity Rift integration is at the point that you can just drag and drop a rift supported first person controler in to a scene that works automatically. Does the Sixense plugin have similar functionality?
I'm also curious on how dificult it is to have the hand objects collide with geometry. I'm thinking of a control scheme where you have 2 pairs of hands. One pair of "physical hands" that collide with geometry and another pair of transparent ghost hands that show the actual position of the Hydra Controlers. When the hands are not colliding with anything the physical and ghost hands will obviosly be in the same position and the ghost hands would not be rendered. This could be used in gameplay mechanics. For example in a sword fighting game having the physical and the ghost hand's out of sync would make the player lose stamina faster and perhaphs decresase hand strenght. So if a enemy blocks an attack the player has to react and stop his sword in the impact point. This would make the gameplay similar to what actors do. The player would need to pretend that he is actually carrying a heavy sword for instance.
Here is a shooting game test I did in the past. This might give some indication on what I might be able to accomplish with the Rift and Sixense plugins in unity.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/277 ... ipeli4.zip
With the Razer Hydra and Rift I would obviosly want to try some first person gameplay. I have access to Unity 3.5. The problem is while there is rift support for Unity 3.5 the Razer Hydra unity plugin from the Unity asset store requires Unity 4. I will offcourse be getting the 4 month test license for Unity 4, but that is only a short term solution.
I would like to know how hard it would be to get Razer Hydra working with Unity 3.5. I would also want to know how difficult it is to make basic controlable hands In unity 4 and the sixense unity plugin. By basic controlable hand I mean the control scheme that is shown in The Gallery: Six elements or the Improved Tuscany demo. I understand that Unity Rift integration is at the point that you can just drag and drop a rift supported first person controler in to a scene that works automatically. Does the Sixense plugin have similar functionality?
I'm also curious on how dificult it is to have the hand objects collide with geometry. I'm thinking of a control scheme where you have 2 pairs of hands. One pair of "physical hands" that collide with geometry and another pair of transparent ghost hands that show the actual position of the Hydra Controlers. When the hands are not colliding with anything the physical and ghost hands will obviosly be in the same position and the ghost hands would not be rendered. This could be used in gameplay mechanics. For example in a sword fighting game having the physical and the ghost hand's out of sync would make the player lose stamina faster and perhaphs decresase hand strenght. So if a enemy blocks an attack the player has to react and stop his sword in the impact point. This would make the gameplay similar to what actors do. The player would need to pretend that he is actually carrying a heavy sword for instance.
Here is a shooting game test I did in the past. This might give some indication on what I might be able to accomplish with the Rift and Sixense plugins in unity.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/277 ... ipeli4.zip