With the recent set of VR headsets being announced with various feature sets, and capabilities, and SDKs, has CIG commited to one platform such as Oculus, or are you holding back work on the VR aspect until the right choice has become clearer?asked by Anomnom
TL;DRCIG won't commit to one VR platform and plans to support many headsets and peripherals, but VR work comes later, perhaps with multicrew, because core back-end engine work takes priority.
We're definitely not committing to one VR platform, that'd be like saying we're only allowing one controller or joystick setup, the idea of SC is to embrace all the variety of peripherals that you can get on a PC, that's part of the reason we're ON the PC. We'll be supporting TrackIR, we'll be supporting Oculus Rift, we'll probably be supporting Valve's Vive and if they ever get Morpheus onto a PC maybe we'd support that too, some other versions of stuff, like Magic Leap etc. There's definitely work that's going on to support some of these features, not in the current builds but we'll be including them later on. We have 3 or 4 builds going at once, so the team that's working with the FPS module is using a slightly more advanced version of the engine than what you have with AC, then the social module guys are on an even more advanced version, and finally the SQ42 and multicrew ship combat are using the "main" version which is the most advanced one. We do this so that the modules that are released now and in the near future stay stable, so we don't introduce any game breaking issues as they get to you. The new VR stuff will come in down the road, I'm thinking that it'll come with some of the Multicrew stuff later this year, but it's all about prioritising what we have to get out. So we're finishing off the large world, which we're nearly finished now, we're just on the 3D rendering/camera relative stuff now. Some base engine streaming stuff that we're working on to bring in the massive amounts of data this game needs at any one time. These are all back-end things that are needed pretty much across all parts of the game, and that obviously trumps supporting individual hardware (As cool as it is). But know that we will support everything and anything we can get our hands on, we're not gong to go exclusive to any peripherals.