Lumberyard 1.3 beta to include support for VR game development and new VR devices

Lumberyard Beta 1.3, which Amazon is releasing in a few weeks, includes support for VR game development and new VR devices.

Lumberyard Beta 1.3, which Amazon is releasing in a few weeks, includes support for VR game development and new VR devices. VR implementation uses Lumberyard’s Gems, which are self-contained packages of assets and features that developers can drop into games. Lumberyard Beta 1.3 includes Gems for both the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive. Moreover, these Gems serve as templates for users to build their own Gems and support any VR devices they want.

GDCVRDemo (1)

Here is how this support works according to the latest blog post:

Utilizing Gems, small chunks of code can be created that interact with the engine but don’t require editing the engine code itself. This means that developers can add support for any VR device without having to delve into the engine source. As long as a new VR device conforms to the public interfaces that Lumberyard has defined, the engine will automatically use it. Developers can create their own integrations for additional devices without having to wait for an official Lumberyard update, as they would in other engines. With so many new VR devices coming out soon, we wanted to provide a way for customers to make their own support decisions. Additionally, developers can easily override existing device support to add any experimental features that may be important for their gameplay. Below is a high-level diagram of the way this works inside the engine.

The HMDManager contains an IHMDDevice, which is then implemented by a device-specific Gem. The manager takes care of device initialization and device-abstracted head-mounted display (HMDs) interaction with the rest of the system. On the rendering side, Lumberyard’s stereo renderer makes use of the D3DHMDRender object, which takes care of creating graphics-API-specific render targets, social screen rendering, and frame submission to the VR device. To add support for any new VR devices, you simply wrap the vendor-specific SDK in a Gem as defined by IHMDDevice. That’s it! There’s no need to edit Lumberyard’s underlying HMD code, which is represented by the Lumberyard Engine section of the diagram.

On engine startup, the selected HMDs are scanned for connectivity and selected for use. If you want to support both the Rift and the Vive, for example, simply go into the Project Configurator, enable both Gems, and the engine will pick which one to use at runtime based on which device is plugged in.

Device-Specific Functionality

A good example of device-specific functionality is in the differences between the Rift and the Vive controllers. To handle VR device variations, Gems allow the user to supply custom Flow Graph nodes to the engine, meaning that each device-specific Gem can create its own nodes that appear when a specific Gem is enabled. These nodes can expose device-specific functionality for the end user, such as different controller schemes, tracking information, and room states. Because VR is so new, a lot of experimentation is taking place.  VR devices are often quite different from one another. It’s likely that, over time, devices will all start to share popular features that used to belong to only one device. When that happens, features that used to be device-specific will then be put into Lumberyard’s device abstraction and shared across all devices.

Enabling VR

Any Lumberyard project can easily add VR support by enabling one or more of the supported Gems when configuring the game project. However, even though a Gem is enabled, that doesn’t mean that any connected HMD will actually get used until the proper cvar (output_to_hmd) is set. The reasoning behind this choice is so that games can ship with VR support enabled in the game’s executable, but support will only turn on if the end user actually wants to use it. The current state of VR rendering can be queried in Flow Graph, so game designers can make different choices based on if the game has entered VR mode or not.

Developing in VR

Game developers need to be able to see what they’re doing in the editor at all times. Without a way to see VR in the editor, developers would have to export a level, load it into the launcher, enable VR, and take a look around. This is obviously inefficient. The Lumberyard Beta 1.3 editor will have full VR Preview support built in. VR Preview utilizes the same Gems system as the engine runtime, and it works in a similar fashion. We’ve added the “VR Preview” button to the editor, which you can click to see in VR right away. This allows developers to make VR-specific adjustments to their level designs right in the editor, which reduces iteration time. Flow Graph nodes are an important part of developing in Lumberyard, but they can only be debugged in the editor. With VR Preview, users can debug their VR Flow Graph nodes and see what they’re doing.

Lumberyeard seems to be doing great with VR projects. Share your thoughts on the news in the comments below.

Source: Official Blog Post

Join discussion

Comments 0

    You might also like

    We need your consent

    We use cookies on this website to make your browsing experience better. By using the site you agree to our use of cookies.Learn more