One day, I looked at my two Oculus Rift kits after reading that Q8CON is going to happen. And here’s the usual conversation:
Me: Wouldn’t it be neat to demo Oculus Rift to those who didn’t have the chance to experience it?
Me: Oh yeah! SHARE THE JOY!!!
Me: Let’s search for demos!
Me: How about I make my own demos?
Me: Hmmmmm… Unity isn’t hard… And I’ve already tried some stuff there thats Oculus Rift compatible… IT’S ON BITCHES!!
So yeah, I ended up making two demos for Q8CON that supports Oculus Rift.
Here’s a video I recorded recently (Few hours from writing this post) of how the game looks like:
Believe me. If I can do this, many people can! But of course, I wouldn’t have done this smoothly. Here are the list of problems I encountered and how I fixed’em:
Problem #1 – Terrain:
I wanted to make a randomly generated terrain. But that’d be a tough one given the short time and lack of experience, I struggled to even think of a way to do it.
So I decided to make a big terrain. The terrain thingy that comes with Unity is amazing. You can import a picture there and start fixing it, but importing a weird looking map that ends up having spikes and then smoothing and fixing was a pain in the ass so I decided to look for a better solution.
I decided to make a huge terrain from scratch in Unity. But having a limit of 4096×4096 per terrain and not able to stitch or edit two terrains at the same time was silly. Had to find a better solution…
After seeing this video, it inspired me to make multiple terrains and have them placed close to each others:
I used the same software, but didn’t bother with the coding part because, well, I was in a hurry to settle this demo to preview it in Q8CON.
Problem #2 – Models:
I wanted to use models where I can simply just control them and does look nice. I looked around for models with the right axis and all, but none worked well for me (I’m inexperienced. I’m sure they could’ve).
Anyway, I ended up using this aircraft. Right textures. And I’m sure I could’ve had some proper 3D animations, but I still haven’t gotten around that yet.
I figured then I might as well add a pilot model. And why I didn’t add a real pilot model is because I couldn’t find a rigged pilot model to use it there that’s free. It’s just a demo after all.
I found this model of Maya from Borderlands 2 and figured “Hey, this is rigged! I’ma use it!!”… So I did and replaced her head with the camera.
Problem #3 – Homing Missiles:
This is an ongoing problem which I’ve paused the whole project without resolving it because, well, I’m working on “monochromePainter” for android now :3
Well, that basically explains my journey with Unity’s Flight Simulation demo which hopefully will evolve to a good network-enabled flight simulation game.
If you’re interested in helping me out with this project, drop me a message or something. I’m looking for gamedev expert’s wisdom and wise words, 3D artists, and sound tracks\effects