UNITY, you are losing so many new devs to UE4 due to Oculus support

Yes, you found me out. I am actually a zombie. I feed of Unreal fanboys' brains.

My point was that new hardware and new hardware concepts have been hyped as a huge game changer and then just fallen over before. Sometimes they were just atrocious (like the Virtual Boy was) and sometimes, it was because they didn't have enough good games (Nintendo 64, anyone?) or because the hardware concept was better in theory than in practise (that's why the Lynx tanked and the GameBoy succeeded with its monochrome display). If you can't draw parallels between today and back in the 80es and 90es, have a look at the WiiU's great new controller system instead.

We will see if the Rift is the next big thing once it hits the shelves and been on the market

Nah, I'm just fed up with 90% of the threads in this category being about how everything about Unity is horrible. Also, I'm pretty sure the Unity Devs heard how Unity Pro is evil already, considering how it comes up on the forums about twenty times a day.

 

I have been using Unity for more than 4 years (and still love it) but I don't intend to make money from the VRdemos I make, so 1500$ was just too much so I bought a UE4 subscription 2 weeks ago. Will give it a spin for a few months and see how it goes.

 

What @Taschenschieber wrote is called an analogy. Rule 1 of analogies: you can compare stuff from 2014 with stuff from the past. Yes I know, it's incredible.

It's so nice that you can't see different opinions other than as "these douches are fanboys if they don't agree with me!". There's people in this thread (me included) that have been pretty vocal against Unity when we didn't like something (the contrary also applies obviously). So relax.

 

Not to mention it is so nice to see when they can all agree with one another of their fellow 50,000 developers. Oh wow, look at how its already up to 100,000. Talk about a successful product if it can increase that fast in one day!

 

OK I'm a bit of a VR evangelist but just like Unity Free has a Web Player and will have WebGL in version 5. I think as the future of the web will be VR. Unity should make sure it provides VR in the Free version. As a 4 month pro trial with Oculus Rift may not be long enough to get a decent game completed and does not allow for the developer to sell the game and purchase a pro license.

Sounds a bit like the VR Game Developers version of the Chicken and Egg problem.

Come on Unity you know the world needs a Unity Powered VR version of Flappy Bird!

PS I'm a paid in full Pro 4.x indie developer who has not made enough money to pay full for 5.x version.

 

Well this might be slightly off-topic but Oculus Rift has still a long way to be a successful product and Unity might still see it as too early risky investment to support it some way in free. It's not even a consumer product yet and the moment most of the people who have bought it are devs or gamers toying with it.

I backed up DK1 for business purposes and was also about to get DK2 at some point but then later came to conclusion that it won't probably be worth it. Why? because the challenges VR has - motion sickness. After lending DK2 for testing purposes the results were better (for me too) and that less people got sick in our testing group but what worried me more was that some of those who tested games and stuff with DK1 refused to try the new version because they had horrible flashbacks of previous experience. You can see one of my posts here sand similar around the net:

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/oculus-rift.188490/#post-1323118

People said Kinect was expensive and did not want to pay for it with Xbox One. Now with Oculus Rift it will be hard to get a "expensive" consumer version to be a massive hit if there are people who just can't handle the VR experience and will tell their experience to others who are maybe thinking of buying one. Maybe I will be wrong in the but at the moment I don't see Oculus Rift nothing but an extra option in many games and in those it might not mean much in sales.

I'm not sure how much Unity is actually losing at this point when there are only some devkits out there and probably half of them are not for game devs. Maybe Unity guys already saw the direction when they gave trial keys with DK1. How many were activated and how many of the activated ones used Unity more than week or two? Maybe Unity 5 will have support in free OR comes successful enough.

 

Guys.. Unity free is like free, zero dollars paid to download and use it, you don't like it, don't use it, if you like it use it, if you're serious go pro, if you like the pro features and can't afford it, create a game in Unity free, collect enough money from it, Buy Unity pro.

 

You raise an interesting point. I do wonder about the support of the Rift for web games. It could very well spark another attempt at something akin to VRML.

 

That's the issue though. If you are creating VR games and are not serious enough to go pro, you can't make a game with Unity.

 

But if you want to make a VR game, you can't do this! OK VR games are still 3D, but putting what could be an amazing VR experience out in 3D to PC would not have the same potential as releasing a VR game in this new market.

E.g. Roller coaster rides, Space combat sims who would buy them for the PC, but in VR they are amazing.

Like I said the VR chicken and egg problem, only with Unity.

@Ryiah had similar thoughts but would we want a markup language for VR, maybe for most things we could just use a stereoscopic spatially encoded video/image stream with some HTML and WebGL then for more intense experiences requiring performance portal into a Unity or Unreal powered experience.

 

There are alternative ways to acquire the funds. Crowd funding, such as through Kickstarter, with a small goal might work pretty well. Just give yourself long enough to integrate support into your game.

 

If you're not serious enough, please make it stop, all those S***ty games coming in Unity free. and/or as @Ryiah said

 

So you have a choice, pay $20 for UE4 or start a Kickstarter to try to raise $1500 for Unity. Which do you think would be more popular?

 

I think many of you, and possibly Unity are seriously underestimating the backing Oculus has. They are working with many AAA studios for future games, have hired tons of top talent to their company, been bought out for $2B, will be announcing an input device to go with their hardware soon, have sold ~100k developer kits already, and the VR experience is completely mind blowing when given a good game. For those of you downplaying it, you really need to try it. It's not without it's issues, but you would be mad not to see the enormous potential.

I can easily see it taking over a majority of electronic visual media forms within 10 years if they overcome some of the obstacles they currently face.

 

I sink $600 into upgrading unity early so I can support mac, windows and linux. I don't really care about mobile just yet. Could I use Unreal 4 / udk to develop for mac and linux? I only stick with unity because it doesn't leave anyone out... besides linux developers.

 

I wasn't aware that throwing cash at something guaranteed its success.

Unreal 4's editor only officially supports Windows and OS X at this time, but it is possible to compile and run it on Linux.

https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Building_On_Linux

 

It doesn't matter one jot if the rift is successful or not, what matters is that a reasonably large group of developers are moving away from Unity and recommending that others do the same. Did you see the OP's latest reddit post:
http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/2gitmt/question_from_unity_employee_to_me_how_many_new/

Thats a pretty overwhelming response for less than 24 hours, and a lot of the responses are from people who have not just chosen UE4 but switched from Unity to UE4.

Developing an Occulus Rift barrel shader effect that works for Unity FREE without opening up all render textures is not that hard, they can seal up the classes, or write it on the C++ side. Even if its a downloadable beta or something (reducing QA costs).

 

I only got a 30 day trial when I entered the code for the 4 months free after I got my rift.......now I just bring a computer home from work with pro and use it for rift dev.

The kinect 2 mysteriously does work with unity indie/free editor, despite using plugins.

I remember when they stopped charging for the basic mobile licenses. I had both but was annoyed because I couldn't refer anyone to unity for mobile dev at the time, because there was a $400 cost of entry. Making it free was one of unity's best decisions.

 

There are two basic discussions in this thread that are intertwined with one another. Namely one centering around justifying the purchase of an Oculus Rift and the other is justifying the purchase of Unity Pro.

I fully agree that Unity has areas it needs improvement, but I have only a passing interest in the Rift.

Potential does not equate to automatic success. Enormous or otherwise. I simply cannot bring myself to invest $350 into an Oculus Rift. It is that simple.

Really your constant posts make it sound like you're trying to justify your own purchase more than convince us.

 

Just to chime in - I love making game prototypes in Unity and have a further-than-prototype Unity android game in development. I purchased Unity Indie when it cost $ and I've bought maybe $300 worth of assets from the store. I have a full-time game design gig, but like to prototype at home to keep my scripting skills fresh and try out new ideas. Not looking to make money with these projects, although if I hit on something cool in the future, that'd be awesome.

Anyways - I'm not quite ready to take the Pro plunge, due to cost - and because it wouldn't help my android project unless I get Android pro too.

Knowing my rift was a few weeks out and that I couldn't use Unity Free to prototype for it is what encouraged me to sign up for Unreal. I have a VR prototype going on with UE4, using C++ since I haven't had time to dig into blueprint.

I'm not convinced I'll stay with Unreal, since I'm so much faster in Unity at this point and I'd rather spend my free time doing than learning, but I definitely would be Unity-only still if free supported the rift.

 

Blueprint makes for excellent glue logic.

 

If Occulus Rift becomes the next big thing and a huge innovation in gaming, you are going to look really really stupid saying this.

Otherwise, you're safe.

 

The Rift is simply too much of a gamble for me. I would rather invest the money into development tools, such as Substance Painter, which I know will be useful.

 

I have no idea about "The Rift", and am very skeptical as to its innovation or quality for gaming.

Then again, I will never have an opinion on it until I actually have one in my hand, to experience it myself.

All the youtube videos are "The Rift" are hilarious. As if you can show a 2D video of a 3D headset and get the same experience....lol....

Has anyone actually TRIED the Occulus Rift yet? I'm very curious to hear about personal opinions on their experiences with it. I am skeptical of articles about it, given the hype surrounding it.

 

And make sure you check back with these people in month, 2 months, 6 months and a year and see just how far they got with their rift game. Or it sits on a shelf due to them not being able to do anything.
Most where students. Sorry I was loaded with homework and other activities to sit in front of a computer. Also funny. They can afford the money for rift and ue4 but couldn't figure out that for students unity pro isn't that expensive.

 

Yep. That's part of the problem for me (along with disability only paying $8400 a year). I cannot test it when nobody out in the middle of rural Virginia has one.

It is a shame that hobbyists cannot also get a discount alongside students.

 

Yea, it really is.

$1500 is not hobbyist pricing anywhere in the world. Even building complex robots is cheaper than that

 

Hopefully Samsung will set up GearVR demo stations in phone stores sometime around Christmas when that guy comes out. Then you can go into town and try it out!

As for hobbyists and Pro thing, in my particular case having Pro cover all platforms would probably make me jump in since it would help my android game too. I'd love the profiler for sure

 

Charge $10-20/mo for perpetual noncommercial trial version (monthly trial version 30 day extension).... that would be new money without costing them anything...

On the rift, I've worked on 2 projects that were six figures and weren't even public...One took $100k in costs to produce (10 developers) and it was 5 minutes long. Not only had to sign NDA but also publicity rights, can't even say "I worked on this"

 

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/oculus-rift.188490/

Read at least starting from where people received theirs and tried it. Those are DK1 impressions and DK2 is better but still has motion sickness issues like I wrote earlier in this thread.


@Stankiem, huge cash resources don't mean it will be automatically a huge success if it will be too hard to fully resolve the simulation sickness issues. Also huge investments in research might now allow the price to be low enough for consumers.

 

I was personally forced to choose UDK for a rift project last year over Unity (university project) because of cost. Not even UE4, but UDK (UE4 wasn't out yet).

The Rift is pretty slick, and so is the Samsung Gear VR...but you can get into VR for Android for <$20 with some ingenuity. 4.5x magnifying lenses have a focal length of about 55mm, and somewhat less distortion than Rift lenses.

VR for android would only require RenderTextures for the distortion, you already have access to the accelerometer, gyroscope, compass and GPS.

The Rift is great, if you have access to one, but you don't particularly need the Rift or RenderTextures to do convincing VR. Heck, Durovis even has a Unity package to handle head tracking and rendering on Android for free (latest update apparently helps get rid of the "Durovis drift" issue).

 

This conversation seems to focus on the whole qualitative judgement on the rift as a whole

Here are some facts, and they might surprise some people who havent used the rift (no virtuality from the early 90s doesnt count). It's going to fail the same way the television and the speaker and the telephone have. Notice a slight sarcasm mixed with cognitive dissonance there? Its cause if you haven't used it, you dont know what it is. It's a new way of absorbing information, like the television or the speaker. Unity should provide support for it on some basic level because it's not a toy, it's not a fad, it's part of many converging technologies that will create quite a seachange in how much every day human live integrates computer generated content on a perceptual level, and learning how it works now is vital to be able to even communicate in that field, when all these technologies that range from VR's spatial awareness, google and presumably apples 3d local scanning, improvements in positioning and broaband data connections (and mobile brute force) to etc etc etc combine

If you haven't used VR, i do politely ask that you never say another word on it again until you've spent a few hours with it, using a demo like sightline or hacking in vr to Dear Esther with tridef. You don't have an opinion on VR until you've used it, that is the sad fact. I wouldn't say TV was a toy before seeing it because i respect that innovation may happen that i cant comprehend until i experience it, the same should be extended to VR in the oculus mould. And as they all use the same concept it shouldn't really be that hard to be supported, a stereoscopic mode hardcoded into Unity would be quite lovely even though the stinginess of no render textures is really hamstringing Unity free, isnt the sub 100k annual earnings enough? really?

 

Pftt... who needs the Oculus Rift... when there is this:

http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/16/6256729/airvr-attach-your-ipad-directly-to-your-face
Clearly a far superior product, at least in one respect. Let's be honest, the Oculus Rift looks a bit dorky when you wear it, strapping an iPad to your face takes dorky to whole new level!

 

No, I believe the Rift will be successful the same way the Betamax was successful. It clearly already has fans, which is evident by those who blindly claim it will be successful without having seen any proof, but it will eventually lose out to the competition.

Competition I believe will come in the form of those selling a basic non-electronic headset that allows you to easily install a smartphone into it. Buying a device you can use for multiple purposes is better than a device that has only one purpose and is more easily justified.

You also do not need a computer if you're using a smartphone. Just a wireless Bluetooth controller.

 

The Rift might work. It might not. Only time will tell, and history shows that people who are dead sure that a certain technology will (not) succeed more often than not make fools out of themselves. Remember that time when everybody was convinced Second Life would be the next big thing and change the world forever? Or how E-Book readers needed about twenty years or so from proof of concept to actually working on a large scale, just to be replaced by general purpose smartphones and tablets about three days later?

Let's just all be a bit more patient about this whole thing. (Why does nobody ever listen when I make suggestions like that?)

 

Because the fanboys are trying to justify their purchase by being as loud as possible. Or it could be people have a tendency to latch onto something they like and believe it cannot fail.

Both are pretty valid by this thread.

 

Um, what you describe has happened, there was an unmistakeably enormous fanfare by samsung and they spazzed out a television presenter with it live on stage. It took a samsung galaxy note 4 in a custom housing

I've been using HTC One phones in the google cardboard project for a few months, the cardboard is a $20 kit if you dont make it yourself

They all use the same principle, your betamax analogy is pure hot air and underlines again tht you do not understand this technology

Unity shouldnt support OR, it should support adjustable stereoscopic rendering - they all work in very similar ways!

 

Except the Rift is not available for consumers, so it has not happened yet. We've seen some earlier prototypes from various sources and little else. I think the general concept may pick up to some degree, but I cannot justify buying the Rift specifically.

Now the cardboard, which I knew about, is actually in my price range.

 

omg, I almost spilt my coffee on that one... lol

 

Well i'd be more tolerant if people stopped talking about it, used it, then came back, cause their arguments against read something like this:

apple blue fish banana trend mondybong

Go do it, come back, talk

 

I don't think that is entirely the case. I have tried it, it is awesome, I want. But, I kinda have the same general opinion that @Ryiah is voicing. I am going reserve excitement until it ships and there is good content for it. Remember how the OUYA was going to change the game industry? How about the Optimus keyboard? Frankly, I am just a bit "hyped" out. I hope it does succeed and not just be a fringe geek toy. Not doubting its awesomeness in any way, but awesome doesn't guarantee sales

 

With the new oculus sdk, it doesn't need render texture : the barrel distortion is handled by the Oculus drivers (if i understood well), the only thing which it needs is the support of native plugins.

 

I don't have to try it to know I like the concept, but I simply cannot justify $350. I would try the cardboard but I don't have a smartphone.

 

An new Apple product!? <preorders>

 

lazygunn, I once tried out the Palm Pre (once hyped to be an iPhone killer) and really, really, really, really loved it. Which does not change anything about the fact that Palm crashed and burned.

I do not care how awesome the Rift is or is not, because it is irrelevant when discussing realities of the hardware market and technological advancements.

 

The rift is a totally different market to the cardboard, the gpu grunt is miles apart, they both have their place - the point is you're talking about how Unity implements this technology, well, big surprise! They all do the same thing! You can adjust a few things and bam, you could have the functionality there and profiles for all the different hmds and et voila, problem solved

 

I've got a DK2 and while I think it is amazing they have to fix the motion sickness somehow. All my friends who have tried it feel the same, love the tech, hate the nausea. If they can get over that I think it will be a winner.

 

How much of that money was seen by the company? I know in the case of Mojang, the majority of the cash went to the core developers who left the company. Did the $2 billion actually go directly to Oculus for development? Or did it go to a combination of the founders and the investors?

On a side note, $2 billion is enough to ship over 5 million devices for free. If they got so much money, they should charge a much lower price for the developers kits. I'd be more willing to pay up to $99.

 

You need to go try it, then come back, along with everyone else

This is not fanboy talk, i'm a grown adult, i'm experienced in computer graphics and i'll tell you two interesting camps people fall into

One, the people who doubt it, they say its a fad, and dont understand the fuss. Sometimes they'll try be extra obnoxious about it

Two the people who tried it. They'll say they can see where it could be improved, but theyll say it was nothing like they were expecting and they may say they feel a little bit foolish. If they were extra obnoxious before trying it they'll try their hardest to criticise it then they'll do the cave section of Dear Esther or something and then just go quiet and think for a while. And that thing is a ridiculously narrow and linear example of what the options are for game development

Ryiah, reading you is like watching someone argue against the benefits of the television in the 50s, you'll see what I mean when you have your first decent experience in one


And id like to add i only have the dk1 atm, it makes me VERY sick sometimes, but it's also given me the best gaming experiences of my life, in games seemingly prescient in ability to predict their effect - half life 2, dear esther especially and if you want a brilliant absolutely convincing argument for the mediums place, get yourself the sightline - the chair demo, iyt really will show you whats there, and its just tentative first steps