Oculus Rift

[The Purple Panzer]

I've had the early developer's version of the Oculus Rift for a while; it's got plusses and minuses. I was reading a Wired article (http://www.wired.com/2014/05/oculus-rift-4/), and saw this, which to me at least suggests that something like BZFlag might be ideal:

"The gamer fantasy of VR tends to involve a full-body first-person shooter—dropping players into the middle of a Call of Duty or Titanfall death match. But that’s not going to happen for a while: Photorealistic games of today simply can’t be rendered at the frame rate that current VR technology demands. Instead, Carmack says, much as Angry Birds defined iPhone gaming, Oculus’ first breakouts will take advantage of the unique properties of the medium. And that presents an opportunity for independent developers. “The magic is not in the 6,000-line GPU shader that’s going to make a highlight just right,” Carmack says, but in designing games that could have run on a less powerful computer: “It’s not like good games are only made when you can throw teraflops of performance at them.” For now programmers need to concentrate on the simpler aspects of a game—how motion works, for example—rather than the crazy visual pyrotechnics. Otherwise you’re just slapping pretty icing on a cake that no one can eat."

[JeffM]

I have registered BZFlag as an Oculus Project, when my DK2 headset gets here I'll see what can be done. Properly support it will probably break some older platforms since we'll have to swap to using shaders, or a different graphics engine.

[Mopar Madness]

Properly support it will probably break some older platforms since we'll have to swap to using shaders, or a different graphics engine.

This would mean a break in protocol then, correct?

[JeffM]

no, it would simply be how the client rendered things, why would it change what is sent over the network?