Hey Everyone!
This past week introduced an update to SteamVR that added the initial Oculus Rift and Oculus Touch compatibility through SteamVR. What does this mean? Any Vive game bought through steam, should work with the Rift and Touch controllers. Because of this update, Light Repair Team #4 is now sort-of Rift/Touch compatible through SteamVR. If you have a Rift and a Touch controller, you can play Light Repair Team #4 right now, if you wanted. We're not comfortable yet calling it full support, so you won't see us changing the store page to show the Rift being supported - let me explain why.
You can see me (Joe) play Light Repair Team #4 with the Oculus Rift and Touch below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMBdYcpjw_M
Each headset has their recommended "supported" set-ups. For example, the Vive instructs you to put the LightHouses up high, facing each other in the corners of your playspace. This is because they're supported set-up is for roomscale VR (and thus, Standing and seated too). For the Rift and Touch, as we understand it (we could be wrong! We don't know yet!), the "supported" set-up will be two cameras on your desk about four to five feet apart, facing out and slighting inwards. We call this 180degree set up. At least, this is the set up we've been shown and you see a lot in demos. While this gives you a lot of coverage, full roomscale is not the greatest as there are a lot of roomscale tracking issues with this set up (based on our tests). If you turn around and face away from the cameras, our testing showed that you will have very bad tracking issues because you're occluding the cameras. Issues to the point where it's not even playable, unless you turn around and face the cameras. This is the recommended set up, the one that we have to assume a majority of Rift/Touch users will be using and is the reason why we're not calling Light Repair Team #4 fully Rift compatible.
To play Light Repair Team #4 with the Oculus Rift and touch controller, you need to set your cameras up much like the Vive lighthouses. That is, you need to place cameras at the corners of your playspace, and face them at each other. Joe's tried both the roomscale camera set up, and the forward-facing supported set up and has found that the roomscale set up provides the best quality experience. However, the kicker is that to do roomscale Rift set ups, you need to buy some USB extenders, as the provided camera cables are not long enough for roomscale set ups. USB extenders are not necessarily the cheapest thing in the world, either. A 6 foot cable cost us $13USD at Target. Talking to other VR devs, they've had to buy upwards of 25ft cables to make roomscale Rifting work. Oculus doesn't provide long cables/extenders nor (again, as far as we understand) will they be suggesting the idea of Roomscale camera set ups. With all these things combined, it provides a barrier for consumers to set up roomscale Rift, and as such, since roomscale Rift set ups are not the officially supported camera set up, we're not going to officially call Light Repair Team #4 Rift compatible... yet.
Now, you might be asking "Well, why don't you just design the game to work for the supported set up?" And the answer is: it's not that easy! There's a lot of things we'd have to do, and we'd probably need to port up from Unreal Engine 4.10.4 to 4.12.2. There'd be a lot we'd have to do with the art, user experience and the design. It's about three blog posts worth of talking. We looked into it, and it's a lot of work for something we've put down the queue of 'things that need to get done'. We're just two people, we only have so much time, energy and resources to get things done.
We're going to wait and see how the Touch Controllers change and progress over the coming months. Like I mentioned earlier, both of us have touch controllers and Rifts. We'll keep an eye on how the hardware progresses and we'll be seeing how the launch of the controllers go (whenever that is). If at Touch launch, we see that many people are using the roomscale set up, rather than the recommended desk set up, we'll look at calling Light Repair Team #4 officially compatible with the Rift. Until then, it's kind of a loose post-it note on the box: "This works with the Rift and Touch, but with some conditions!" ... The game was designed on the Vive, for the Vive, and the best Light Repair Team #4 experience will be on the Vive.
tl;dr: Light Repair Team #4 works fine with Rift and Touch, if you set your cameras up like Vive light houses. Since this requires you to buy and do extra things, and is not the officially supported set up, we're not officially calling Light Repair Team #4 Rift supported yet. We'll keep an eye on the touch development and launch, and see if this changes.
Oh, and finally, a look at one of the new puzzles coming in the next update.
Toodles! ːledgewindowonː
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