Epic Games, creators of the Unreal Engine game authoring software, plan to include support for Samsung’s new Gear VR headset in the next major version of the software.
Unreal Engine is one of two big game authoring engines with support for virtual reality headsets like the Oculus Rift and Sony Morpheus. Both Unreal Engine and Unity pledged support for Oculus back during the company’s initial Kickstarter. Competition between the two to attract virtual reality developers has proven fruitful for devs, with a back and forth of improved VR features and support for additional VR platforms in both game engines. With Unity already supporting Gear VR, it’s Epic Games’ turn to fire back a salvo.
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The company plans to include support for Gear VR, starting with the next major release of UE4, according to the company’s public roadmap. The current version of Unreal Engine is 4.6.1, so we may see a few minor releases before version 4.7 which is planned to include initial Gear VR support, with “continued optimizations and bugfixes” in following (likely minor) versions.
In addition to support for Gear VR, Epic Games notes on the roadmap that they’re working on ‘VR Project Settings’, which will likely come in the form of a template, “making it easier to start a highly performant project, with stripped down rendering setting to make getting to high framerates easier.”
UE4 4.7 will also include the latest Oculus Runtime, allowing developers to continue working with the most optimized version out of the box. Oculus notes that “due to the difference in Epic Games / Oculus release schedules, the SDK that comes with UE4 from Epic Games is usually one version older than what we have already released.” The next major update to UE4 (4.7) will bring the engine’s Oculus support in line with the latest version from Oculus (4.4 beta).
To assist with VR development in UE4, Epic Games has put together quite a bit of official documentation on the subject. Would-be VR developers are encouraged to check out Oculus Rift Quick Start guide, Virtual Reality Best Practices, VR Cheat Sheet, and the Performance and Profiling sections of the engine’s documentation.
Thanks to Scott McCutchen of Soverance Studios for fact checking assistance.