Rewrite:
My motivation for the rewrite is mostly not about upgrading to a new version of the engine; UE5 is nice but most of the new functionality isn't working with VR yet (of course the old functionality still works fine). I was happy with UE4. The rewrite is to remake the pawn (player character) system easier for me to modify, have more consistent behavior for the player, and be more performant on less powerful hardware. Additionally, the the system controlling the ship AI, and every other object in space, is a mess that needs to be upgraded for the same reasons. Both systems are hopelessly tangled up with every other system in a way that makes it difficult to fix, hence a complete (actually quite a lot of stuff will get copied over verbatim, but I think it is still necessary to start a new project from scratch) rewrite. This seemed a good a time as any to upgrade to UE5 and avoid any migration bugs later.
VR Pawn Template:
For some time now I've been publishing a free template for Unreal Engine that improves upon the stock VR template, but the latest version is almost two years old and I have learned a lot since then. My goals for the new template are to retain most of the functionality from the old template, but drastically simplify the blueprints to be easier to understand and modify, as well as increasing performance. The item interaction system especially was both clunky and slow, but player movement could also be erratic and required way too much fine tuning of the environment to work well. I have not made a huge amount of progress on this lately due to unrelated real-life stuff, but in the next month I expect to have something available for public testing.
Low Hanging Fruit:
I often find that I (or someone else) have some quirky idea for a fun VR experience that is not really big enough to justify its own game (or taking attention away from Non Fingo). In the future, if I anticipate that I will get some value out of experimenting with the idea or just can't resist something really goofy, I'll use the template to implement it in a collection of experimental mini games which I will probably publish freely to demonstrate the flexibility of the template, and possibly will use as a basis for tutorial videos or something.
Join us in the discord channel to report bugs, influence development priorities, and learn to make your own VR games.
https://discord.gg/XQHhvVmJ7Y