Oculus Rift DK2 Speedboat Simulator

I'm making a speedboat simulator centered around the Rift and figured a few of you might enjoy some vids. It's got a built in hull creator so you can build and drive your own speedboats.

There's no sound yet. I've written a real time engine simulation that does procedural audio on the fly from the gas dynamics in the exhaust system that I hope to include. It runs in a compute shader in order to do the many billions of computations per second needed to do compressible gas dynamics in real time on these scales.

 

This video shows all the adjustments the boat creator makes along with a couple new things. I've added camera position changes depending on what part of the boat you're adjusting. Also added a wide angle spotlight positioned forward of your left eye almost right up against the buttons. The result is a tiny light that helps you track where you're looking quite nicely and also acts a bit like a flood light on the boat behind it. Works pretty well!

 

I've added a propeller model that solves forces on the individual blades the same way it's done on the boat triangles. Wow, what a difference in the handling. The boat turns a lot harder than it did before and is much more stable while doing so. The engine trim now affects the boat a lot more too. This is more like it.

Shown here are individual propeller blade forces, buoyancy forces, skin friction forces, lower unit drag force, along with aerodynamic and hydrodynamic forces on the body of the boat. All forces are shown to the same scale. Keep an eye on the engine, it's trimmed up and down significantly in a couple of spots in the video.

I recommend cranking it up to 1080 HD if it doesn't do it by default.

 

Houston, we have chine walk.

 

Added the Final IK driver rig:

 

Very Cool. What are you planning to do with the simulator?

 

Put up a web site and sell it direct to the end users myself, maybe go for Steam Greenlight.

 

Here's a page at my site for the boat simulator:

http://www.performancesimulations.com/wp/speedboat-simulator/

 

-The boat comes up on plane more realistically now with a much more bow up attitude. With enough engine torque it almost launches out of the water.

-The waterline and hull intersection is now displayed with a blue line. This is useful for shaping the hull to minimize wetted area and maximize speed.

-Added professionally done audio so you can hear the engine and water now. Audio by Greg Hill, the master behind iRacing, GTR, GTR2, and many other car racing sim titles.

 

8 second before and after video. This adds the bilge pump shader to get the water out of the boat.

The method is described and a "how to" link are provided in the description.

 

New camera to get some cool fly-by views along with doppler effect.

This hull shape flies really nicely thanks to some careful shaping of the pad if the engine is trimmed just right. In parts of the video only the rear couple of feet is skimming the water.

 

Added a new moving camera type that seems to work pretty well without much in the way of stutters. Details in the video description.

 

Here's a quick and dirty video from the hull creator screen quickly showing all the adjustments and what they do. In this screen you can shape and size the hull however you want, then hit a key to instantly teleport to the water for a test drive.

 

Wrote a simple script to easily set up analog gauges accurately. Here's a test with a tachometer and speedometer.

 

The new 4.6 UI buttons running on the Rift with a virtual mouse pointer instead of the "turn your head and look at the control" type of approach. This is exciting for a couple reasons: First, it looks better than my old system. Second, it means the same GUI can be used for the Rift and normal monitors.

 

With the help of the excellent add on, World Composer (https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/13238) , I'm adding the lake I grew up on.

Adding houses from https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/9689

 

This engine sound simulation is very good. Very sophisticated approach to simulation of an engine sound, but very realistic too.

 

Thanks. Unfortunately right now that's not being used in the boat sim. I've tried it and it works there, but it's very GPU hungry and doesn't sound as good as professionally mastered samples yet. Maybe some day I can make it better. It was a neat experiment anyway. For now I'm contracting out to a professional audio guy to mix the audio the old fashioned way with FMod.

 

New Oculus Rift video from the new lake.

 

Hey Todd there seems to be some overlay with your work and what I'm currently working on. Are you interested in selling any portion of the simulation code? My project would not be a direct simulation and would be mobile based, so I don't think there's much conflict with it.

Also would you mind sending me contact info for who you are using for engine sounds? I'm looking for sounds for a new game (nothing to do with boats).

Thanks,
Zach

 

Thanks for writing.

Audio: Greg Hill of Soundwave Concepts. It'd be nice if you let him know I referred you to him.

http://www.soundwaveconcepts.com.au/

Simulation code: I'm too busy at the moment to deal with supporting anything like that unless the money was good enough to set the boat sim to the side for awhile. Are you thinking something for your drag racing sim or something else? I was the vehicle dynamics engineer/physics programmer for VRC Pro for 14 years, just left a year ago:

None of that was Unity, we wrote our own engines from scratch, so my physics model there couldn't be used in Unity without a great deal of work unfortunately.

I'm usually pretty happy to discuss or consult on these types of things free of charge to an extent. If you have questions on the subject, feel free to shoot me a message.

 

Wow, that VRC stuff is incredible.. I'll PM you about what I was thinking about working on.

Thanks,
Zach