We've just uploaded a new demo called Blue Marble.
What does it do? Blue Marble takes you on a journey into space while listening to your favourite music. We've put a few royalty free tracks in the demo, but you can also listen to your own music. Just put your favourite songs in the "YourMusicHere"-folder in the Blue Marble directory and select one of them in the in-game menu. Hit launch, sit back, relax and enjoy. Note: Songs must be in the .ogg file format. Unfortunately, due to licensing issues, we cannot support mp3. We've included Audacity in the download, with which you can easily convert your mp3's to the .ogg format. To convert your song, open the mp3 in Audacity > Export > Select .ogg extension > Save.
Why is it? We love being game developers, but we want to be astronauts! 😉 Apart from that, we've noticed that some people who do not yet have their "VR-legs" can feel uneasy when they try the Rift, because a lot of demos feature quite a bit of motion. Blue Marble is designed to be a very relaxing experience which can be enjoyed by anyone, even those unfamiliar to virtual reality or prone to motion sickness.
Read me Use the highest possible resolution at a 16:9 aspect ratio and connect your Rift through DVI.
1. Even though the Rift's resolution is only 1280x800, image quality is greatly improved when selecting a much higher resolution on startup. It seems that the Rift accepts high input resolutions, resulting in a much smoother looking image when compared to running the build in the Rift's native 1280x800 resolution.
2. It seems you should run the demo in a 16:9 aspect ratio -or- at an aspect ratio matching your primary monitor. When the aspect ratio isn't 16:9, the view inside the Rift will be distorted. This is weird, since the aspect ratio of the Rift's screen is 16:10. We think this is a bug with the Unity Rift integration. Since we only have 16:9 monitors, we cannot test this thoroughly. It might be that you should choose an aspect ratio fitting to your primary monitor when you mirror your Rift.
3. When connecting the Rift through HDMI, black levels are greatly affected when running any other resolution than the native 1280x800. When we connect the Rift through DVI, we don't have this problem. Note: We don't know if our observations are consistent across different setups. If you experience different results or any other weird stuff, please let us know so we can get to the bottom of all this!
Any recommended songs? You should try Space Oddity by Col. Chris Hadfield - the boss of space. We also really enjoy the demo with Mad World by Gary Jules and Protectors of the Earth by Two Steps From Hell. They are awesome. (Don't forget to convert them to the .ogg format.)
Do you know any other cool songs to go along with it? Do share!
Thanks for checking it out, we hope you enjoy it and we would love to know what you think. Cheers! Vincent and Laurens, Jaywalkers Interactive
This looks very promising, unfortunatelly I'm stuck in a loop and can't get the demo to start. No matter what song I select, I only get as far as "song selected - sit back, relax" and then I end up at the song selection again and the songs never play. Am I missing a codec or something? This is on a Windows 8 64bit system.
Thanks so much, guys. This is actually the first thing we've released since we started, so even though it's just a small demo, it's very exciting for us and we love to read your comments! 🙂
@Mark.
Since the menu works and it is displaying songs (right?), it does access the folder. We use .ogg files for the music, so it seems Windows 8 doesn't like .ogg? It might be a codec, but that would be a bit strange. Unfortunately we don't have any Windows 8 PC's to test it on, so we don't know how to fix that.
Don't worry though! We're working on making a build with the songs built in, which will most likely fix the problem. (You probably won't be able to import your own songs, because those need to be .ogg)
I don't have my Rift yet but I tried to launch the demo, can't control/choose anything. Mouse or gamepad does not work. What is the input method for this?