Mastering Oculus Rift Development

By Jack Donovan

About This Book

• Create immersive 3D games especially designed for the Oculus Rift platform
• Build complex realistic virtual reality (VR) games with the Unity Engine
• Create striking VR environments with advanced graphical techniques

Who This Book Is For

This book is for aspiring indie developers and VR enthusiasts who want to bring their ideas into virtual reality with a new platform that provides an unprecedented level of realism and immersion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Release date: Feb 6, 2017
• ISBN: 9781786461780

Book preview

Table of Contents

Mastering Oculus Rift Development

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewer

www.PacktPub.com

Why subscribe?

Customer Feedback

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Downloading the example code

Downloading the color images of this book 

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. Exploring a New Reality with the Oculus Rift

The concept of VR

Depth perception

Common limitations of VR games

Locomotion sickness

Lack of real-world vision

Unnatural head movements

Vergence-accommodation conflict

Constellation tracking

Input with controllers, remotes, and more

The importance of frame rate

Asynchronous Timewarp

Installing the Oculus runtime

Summary

2. Stepping into Virtual Reality

Getting started with Unity

Installing the Unity3D engine

Incorporating the Oculus Utilities package

Taking your first steps in VR

Scripting basic player movement

Enabling interaction with gaze-based mechanics

Implementing gaze-based teleporting

Building and running your first VR app

Configuring Unity Build Settings for VR

Configuring Unity Quality settings for VR

Summary

3. Improving Performance and Avoiding Discomfort

Using the Unity profiler

Analyzing CPU usage

Using coroutines to split up complex work

Mesh optimization

Optimizing a mesh using Simplygon

Displaying dynamic detail with LODs

Keeping a handle on memory allocation

Stack and heap memory

Value types and reference types

Boxing and unboxing

Unity specifics

foreach loops versus for loops

Material references

Comparing tags efficiently

Object pooling

Creating an object pool for strings

Pooling Unity GameObjects

Summary

4. Interacting with Virtual Worlds

Designing basic player input

Using Unity input axes

Using the OVRPlayerController script

Adding projectiles

Implementing a firing mechanic

Implementing gameplay around input

Creating a target dummy

Creating custom Unity input axes

Summary

5. Establishing Presence

Setting up the game environment

Configuring lighting properties

Adding some color to the scene

Adding colliders to imported mesh objects

Accentuating depth with particle effects

Customizing the skybox

Enabling player interaction with the world

Creating the dynamic wall prefab

Scripting our prefab

Populating the game world with resources

Making the practice dummies drop resources

Using resources to interact with the environment

Summary

6. Adding Depth and Intuition to a User Interface

Adding a VR input module

Constructing a simple menu

Setting up a canvas

Adding buttons to a canvas

Adding functionality to UI elements

Creating a GameManager script

Adding UI elements to the game world

Adding complexity to the dynamic walls

Adding teams to the game

Adding a health bar to the dynamic wall

Summary

7. Hearing and Believing with 3D Audio

The science of how we hear

Lateral localization of audio

Vertical localization of audio

Learning the basics of Unity audio

Spatial blending between 2D and 3D

Implementing 2D stereo audio

Playing a sound when a button is clicked on

Playing a sound when a button is hovered

Adding basic 3D spatialization

Making an audio source 3D

Immersing your player with HRTFs

Sampling Unity's first-party HRTF

Importing the ONSP

Using the ONSP

Adding sound reflections to the scene

Filling the game world with sound

Adding footstep sounds

Adding projectile sounds

Adding ambient looping to energy orbs

Summary

8. Adding Tone and Realism with Graphics

A simple breakdown of the rendering pipeline

Defining the geometry

Transforming the model into world space

Transforming the world into camera space

Lighting the objects in the scene

Deriving a projection from the camera

Clipping geometry outside the camera's frustum

Rasterization and texturing

Forward and deferred rendering

Forward rendering

Deferred rendering

Demonstrating the value of deferred rendering

Adding tone with color grading

The basics of color grading

Adding a color grading script to the camera

Sampling a lookup texture

Creating dramatic effects with vibrant LUTs

Changing the appearance of objects with shaders

A quick overview of ShaderLab shaders

Importing a textured model

An overview of ShaderLab's fundamental syntax

Writing your first shader

Defining a diffuse texture property

Adding a normal map property to a shader

Generating a normal map

Summary

9. Bringing Players Together in VR

Creating a lobby space for joining matches

Setting up the lobby scene

Creating the Create menu

Adding event triggers to the Lobby menu

Creating a networked game

Defining player spawn points

Assigning players to teams

Using Unity's matchmaker system

Creating a matchmaker game

Joining a matchmaker game

Tying together the multiplayer lobby

Linking the menus together

Synchronizing data in multiplayer matches

Syncing player movement

Handling object spawning on the network

Detecting bullet collisions on the network

Ending a match after a set time

Summary

10. Publishing on the Oculus Store

Packaging a final Unity build

Adding a game icon

Configuring final player settings

Configuring final quality settings

Getting to know the output log

Meeting the Oculus submission guidelines

Meeting the Oculus content policy

Meeting the Oculus minimum technical requirements

What about Asynchronous Timewarp and Spacewarp?

Uploading your first build to Oculus

Managing release channels

Uploading submission information

Other sections of the dashboard

Summary

Mastering Oculus Rift Development

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Mastering Oculus Rift Development

Copyright © 2017 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: February 2017

Production reference: 1310117

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

Livery Place

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B3 2PB, UK.

ISBN 978-1-78646-115-5

www.packtpub.com

Credits

About the Author

Jack Donovan is a 24-year-old software engineer living in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated from Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont with a BS in game programming and soon after joined IrisVR, a startup founded in Burlington to create one-click software for architects to visualize models in virtual reality. IrisVR moved to New York City after being accepted into the startup incubator program Techstars and has since moved to an independent office in NoHo, where Jack continues to work.

Jack also wrote OUYA Game Development By Example, a book focused on the basics of developing games for the Android-powered OUYA console. Both books use the Unity3D engine for development, which Jack has been using to develop games and software in since 2010.

Thanks to Matt Gooding for being an invaluable friend and mentor, and Ezra Smith for his dedication and guidance in helping me put the finishing touches on this book. I’d also like to thank my parents, Paul Donovan and Jody Petersen, who have always supported me and inspired me to work hard on what I love. Lastly, I’d like to thank all of the brilliant people that I’ve been fortunate to work and grow with at IrisVR, especially the founders Shane Scranton and Nate Beatty for working tirelessly to make it all possible.

About the Reviewer

Ezra Smith is a software developer at IrisVR and one of the co-founders of FridgeCat Software. He's been writing mobile apps with Unity since 2011, and started experimenting with virtual reality in 2013. Ezra has been dreaming about playing video games in VR since he was a child, and is very excited to see those dreams becoming a reality.

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Preface

Welcome to Mastering Oculus Rift Development! With this book, you'll learn the fundamentals of creating complete virtual reality experiences for the Oculus Rift VR headset using the Unity3D game engine. Each chapter will guide new and experienced developers alike in building and expanding a project with basic gameplay, spatialized audio, and networked matchmaking. It also covers in-depth optimization and the process of publishing your game, ensuring you have everything you need to release a polished experience. 

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Exploring a New Reality with the Oculus Rift, briefly outlines the basics of virtual reality and guides the user through getting set up with their Rift.

Chapter 2, Stepping into Virtual Reality, introduces the reader to the Unity3D game engine and implementing simple navigation in a new VR project.

Chapter 3, Improving Performance and Avoiding Discomfort, explains the importance of avoiding VR sickness by ensuring the game is optimized and always running smoothly.

Chapter 4, Interacting with Virtual Worlds, covers how to handle interaction and different input devices in Unity, including the controller and remote that ship with the Oculus Rift.

Chapter 5, Establishing Presence, teaches the reader about several factors that make VR experiences immersive and interesting, including 3D environments, particle effects, and interactive objects.

Chapter 6, Adding Depth and Intuition to a User Interface, guides the reader through setting up a user interface (UI) in VR and explains what makes it different from conventional game UIs.

Chapter 7, Hearing and Believing with 3D Audio, introduces the reader to the concept of spatialized audio and its importance in establishing presence and scale in any VR world.

Chapter 8, Adding Tone and Realism with Graphics, provides a detailed overview of rendering the pipelines and shaders that help establish both realism and artistic flair.

Chapter 9, Bringing Players Together in VR, teaches the reader how to create networked games and interact with other players in VR over the Web.

Chapter 10, Publishing on the Oculus Store, outlines all of the steps involved in packaging a VR game and publishing it on the Oculus Store for the world to download and play.

What you need for this book

The following software is recommended for use with this book:

Unity 5.4.0

CrazyBump 1.22

We will also need the following hardware:

Oculus Rift CV1

Xbox controller and Oculus remote (included with Rift)

Make sure you also have the following:

Internet connection

Windows 7+

Who this book is for

This book is for aspiring indie developers and VR enthusiasts who want to bring their ideas into virtual reality with a new platform that provides an unprecedented level of realism and immersion.

Conventions

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Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: Create a folder called Scripts to put your game's code in.

A block of code is set as follows:

void Update()

{

  if(Input.GetKeyDown(KeyCode.Space))

  {

    Teleport();

  }

}

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Note

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Tip

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Questions

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