DR VR

[Jedi_Wannabe]

I know. Probably a pipe dream. But imagine. I watched the making of the Lion King remake and Jon Favreau basically built a video game world, used VR to explore and edit things, and filmed in engine with camera men using VR cranes and dollies. It was a very fun and informative doc to watch and got my mind reeling. If we can imagine it, it's possible; the obvious factors being the usual manpower/resources/time. But suspend your disbelief for a moment and imagine us 10 years in the future, how quick and easy it would be to create maps. It's not realistic now, but if I win the lottery I'm buying a dev studio and backing the idea.

[ERH+]

Yes imagine drawing a blueprint with your left leg - that would be as intuitive as doing anything precise with a wii controller. I can't wait.

[freyk]

dr in vr, like unreal editor in vr:

 

[Jedi_Wannabe]

YES. Didn’t even know Epic was doing that. The guys at id need to catch up.

[Amadeus]

This is pretty rad. I had no idea this was even a thing.

[freyk]

making of lion king 2019:

 

[Jedi_Wannabe]

15 hours ago, freyk said:

making of lion king 2019:

 

Yes that’s the one. If you have time to kill, I encourage everyone to watch it. It’s fun, interesting and informative. Let your imaginations run wild.

[woah]

Regarding VR editors (e.g. Dark Radiant VR), right now VR is pretty awful for any sort of productivity applications.  Lacking pixel density and the inability to interact with your immediate real world environment are the obvious things but the main thing is actually the lack of variable focus, which makes desktop usage, UI interaction, and reading text a really uncomfortable experience.  Lens anomalies (distortion, chromatic aberration, glare, god rays) are also really apparent when interacting with flat UIs in current gen VR.  You'll still want to use mouse and keyboard as well--motion controllers are terrible for anything that requires finely controlled interactions and we still haven't figured out text input either, which is essential.  The whole Minority Report UI thing is only cool for 5 minutes--after that you realize how much energy expenditure is required for even the most basic of inputs and it's incredibly fatiguing.  Today, the main thing I see devs using VR for during development is to properly get a feel for the scale of things, which works quite well.  But even then, most VR developers do a good chunk of their development through a typical desktop mode because it's just so much faster, convenient, and less fatiguing.

Overall I think AR will be a bigger deal when it comes to optimizing development workflows--whether it's in the form of a VR headset with *very good* passthrough or just AR glasses/a visor.  VR input will get better as well but I wonder if it will ever get good enough to fully realize the dream of being able to "sculpt" 3D objects in VR because without some sort of grounded device that restrains your arm/hand/fingers you will just clip through the virtual object.  High resolution feedback/response over many haptic dimensions is absolutely essential to that experience and there seems to be some sort of uncanny valley effect that happens when trying to simulate hand/fingers with high fidelity.   Perhaps the most viable alternative I've seen to this is from a company that is using multiple LRAs to simulate the sensation of positional and rotational forces through an ungrounded motion controller.  Depending on how well this can be perfected this may give you a sufficient degree of feedback but even then I think it will still be conveyed through an abstraction rather than directly trying to simulate hands.

Edited November 13, 2019 by woah

[OrbWeaver]

The only need for building in VR is if the game is going to be played in VR, in which case the VR editor will give you a better idea of what players are going to see.

Being able to interactively add and position objects in 3D space does not require VR; in fact it is a common feature of MMOs which allow players to create their own housing or private areas (I suspect the same interface is used by the developers to build the game world itself, which is why it is relatively easy to make this feature available to players). Converting this 3D interface into VR doesn't magically make it easier — it would provide stereo viewing of course, and make it slightly easier to move your head around to get a different view of the object rather than using the mouse, but as others have mentioned it introduces its own problems too.

I'll be the first to admit that DR has many usability problems, but making it into a VR app isn't going to fix them.

[peter_spy]

I'd rather see DR coupled with game renderer first, so we can have a true WYSIWYG preview in perspective viewport.