I've received a number of queries regarding this project lately, so I thought it best to clear the air and bring everyone up to date on things (Better late than never!).
When I set out on this project, I was hoping to get it finished in a year's worth of spare time. It would be a simple single-player island simulator where you could destress by just watching the water, painting, building sand castles, or resting in a hammock. Much of the work would be optimizing for performance so even computers that weren't built yesterday could handle it alright...or so I thought.
When I gave a copy of what I had done so far to a few testers, the unanimous verdict was that it was unusable on the Vive headset. As the simulation was built in Unreal Engine 4, I found that so hard to believe that I purchased one for myself to see it first hand. And it was terrible. It was more like watching a slideshow than a simulation; and a number of objects were in the wrong place, rendering incorrectly and even turned around by ninety degrees! On top of that, I tried submitting the app through the official Oculus validator only to return failure with issues that I could not reproduce on my home computer.
The two events led me to believe this would not be done in a year, that there were nuances to VR development I never expected to contend with, and that this was not as casual an undertaking as I expected. I'm no stranger to spending years on passion projects, but in this case I made the decision to turn my attention back to other projects that interested me more.
Is this the end?
I wouldn't go as far as saying that. The current passion project I'm working on, an online sports brawler, won't be done before late 2025. Maybe after that project enters maintenance mode I may come back to this. Or maybe I will find someone to help me reboot this project in Unreal Engine 5, which has many improvements over the previous engine. I really did enjoy watching the trailer and actually painting on the VR canvas in the simulation, after all.