During the Summer of 2018, I decided to dedicate some time working with VR in the Unreal Engine. I had been a Vive owner for two years prior so I knew the kind of VR games people were putting out. Instead of trying to make a full game in the short time that I had in between semesters, I set out to build three different demos based on mechanics I wanted to learn how to make in UE4.
Demo 1: Short Perspective
One Idea I was playing around with is the idea of player size. In real life I am 6’3 and in a lot of other VR games I tend to be looking down a lot. I wanted to make a Demo where players would view the world as a shorter character. While playing it, I discovered that items like tables and stairs become obstacles in an environment designed for a player three times their size. I had already designed this house for my WeaponSystem project so that saved time when developing this demo. If you would like to see the source code for this file click on this (LINK). If you own a Vive/Oculus you can download the demo as an executable at this (LINK).
Demo 2: Shooter
Many of the VR games that I play use a gun or weapon. So, I decided to try to develop a demo featuring gun play. Up until now, I have not worked with guns in the Unreal Engine. I decided to first make the demo for mouse and keyboard using the first-person Blueprint to figure it all out, which you can see in the video below. Once I got that working, I spent a lot of time trying to convert the demo into VR but the task was way out of my league. After some Googling, I decided to purchase the VR Gun Tool Kit on the Unreal Marketplace because it came with Blueprints that allowed you convert normal guns into VR ones. I finely got a working gun in VR and recorded the video you can see above this post. After that, the project became unstable and crashed repeatedly. I believe this was due to trying to build the VR Blueprints on top of the first person character. I salvaged the project by rolling back to before I added the VR stuff. Here is a (LINK) to the source code if you’re interested. I decided to move on to my other demo ideas but I plan to work on VR guns at a later date.
FPS Prototype:
Demo 3: Swordplay
By the time I started working on this demo, I had gained some experience working with VR in the Unreal Engine. The goal of this demo is to have a working sword and dagger that could be picked up and thrown at enemies. The tricky part of this was getting the weapons to be “Grippable”. That is what UE4 calls the ability to pick up and drop things. Even though it works, I was only able to pick up the items in the engine, not in a stand alone build. If you have the UE4 and would like to download the source code, take a look at the (LINK) here.