Now the game has been updated to work with the Oculus Rift DK2—specifically SDK 0.4.0—which includes the tremendously easy-to-use ‘Direct HMD Access’ mode, essentially a one button operation to get the game started on the DK2.
Eden River HD’s lush world pops even more thanks to the improved saturation of the DK2’s display and everything is far sharper with the improved resolution. Positional tracking support makes it a more comfortable experience than ever before. Lemke has continued to optimize the user interface, making the operation of Eden River HD as easy as tilting your head. This means you can sit back and find your flow without searching for keys you can’t see. The game’s menu now includes several options for new environments which are teased as coming at a later date, all of which are expected to be just as peaceful and beautiful as the River.
The original soundtrack has also seen further work with experimentation of additional instruments lead primarily with some beautiful pedal steel guitar sounds.
While the early-access release of Eden River HD has some issues here and there—notably some odd overshooting on headtracking with quick head movements—Unello Design plans to deploy major optimization update next week to make sure all issues are sorted out ahead of the game’s full launch on Steam in late August. On my system I found that moving my head slowly alleviated the issue in many cases. Fortunately, given the nature of Eden River HD’s calm gameplay, quick head movements aren’t a necessity. Unello Design elaborated today on the process of moving the game from Oculus SDK 0.3.2 to 0.4.0 to support the DK2 and the need for an earl-access release:
In working to support DK2 we have been using the latest SDK from Oculus (v0.4.0). However there were a number of unexpected drawbacks that arose upon installing the new SDK, the first of which was the lack of Mac support. This meant we had to transfer the entire project over to Windows, which is not too difficult a task if you know what you are doing and have access to PCs, it’s just time-consuming. The main drawback however, was that currently you cannot run DK2 in the Unity editor. Anyone familiar with optimizing games in Unity knows that being able to tweak the game in the editor while monitoring the profiler is a crucial aspect of the optimization process. Over the past few days it became clear that we would not have the game fully optimized by our release date. So I want to emphasize, this is early-access, this is not the final game.
The early-access version of Eden River HD can be purchased at Unello Design’s website. Pre-order and early-access purchasers will receive Steam keys if desired and also get access to the Opera Nova DK2 demo, according to the developer.
