So as it turns out, I’ve actually spent very little time working on that Rift port of Atop.\u00a0 I’ve instead been working on a user interface for buying new game regions in MMORPG Tycoon 2 (buying with in-game cash.\u00a0 No real-world microtransactions here!\u00a0 Although I do plan to eventually have simulated ones inside the game world.)<\/p>\n
The thing that took me by surprise is that the Oculus Rift apparently doesn’t support Windows XP.\u00a0 And it fails to support Windows XP in a way which kills their library stone dead.\u00a0 And since VectorStorm links against that library to determine whether or not a Rift is connected, it means that if I want to support the Oculus Rift for projects, I have to do one of the following:<\/p>\n
1. Drop Windows XP compatibility.<\/p>\n
2. Ship separate Rift vs. Non-Rift builds (at least for Windows).<\/p>\n
3. Spend time figuring out how to make Oculus’s library not fatal-error the game during startup, on XP.<\/p>\n
4. Spend time making Oculus’s SDK actually XP-compatible.\u00a0 (A casual glance suggests that there are only a small number of spots which require non-XP functionality — doing this might actually be easier than #3, above.)<\/p>\n
Luckily, I’m not in a position where I actually want to ship games using the Rift, because none of those options look fantastically compelling to me.\u00a0 (My Windows dev box is actually still running Windows XP — that’s how I discovered the issue!)<\/p>\n
In any case, I now have working binaries for Windows Vista+ and for OSX, so I’ll put those online tomorrow.\u00a0 They haven’t had the sort of interface love that I usually like to put into games;\u00a0 this is just mapping the direction you’re looking directly to the cursor movement from the original release.\u00a0 And with the small ground targets you have to focus on and the general non-precision of the Rift’s orientation sensors (and the average player’s neck muscles), it can be a bit tricky to play well.\u00a0 So I dropped the difficulty substantially, to make up for it.<\/p>\n
I’ll post those builds tomorrow.\u00a0 For tonight, going to be taking it easy.\u00a0 Yay, nausea.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So as it turns out, I’ve actually spent very little time working on that Rift port of Atop.\u00a0 I’ve instead been working on a user interface for buying new game regions in MMORPG Tycoon 2 (buying with in-game cash.\u00a0 No real-world microtransactions here!\u00a0 Although I do plan to eventually have simulated ones inside the game…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[39,4,3],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/po9WK-K1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2853"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2853"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2853\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2855,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2853\/revisions\/2855"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}