VR IN THE GAMES INDUSTRY
The push to break open the VR games market has begun, bringing with it fresh opportunities for joypad-savvy artists and animators
There’s little doubt that the games industry is currently the driving force for VR home adoption right now, as sales of around one million Playstation VR units in the first six months since launch attest. This is all the more impressive given the relative paucity of Vr-specific gaming content currently available, and all the more exciting for 3D artists. With publishers rushing to capitalise on this fresh thirst for content, VR is injecting new life and fresh opportunities into the games development industry.
The first-person viewpoint has dominated gaming since its popularisation in the early 1990s so VR is – superficially – familiar territory. In reality, however, there’s a perspective shift involved, a good number of graphical considerations to deal with, plus fundamental changes to the way players navigate, interact with and experience these digital worlds.
“There’s been so much focus on cinematic gaming, with postproduction style effects such as lens flare and bloom, but these are irrelevant with VR because you’re no longer emulating the view through a camera,” points out Ben
Curtis, a Bristol-based freelance producer and creative director with credits on VR projects at Aardman, the BBC and Play Nicely. “It’s also interesting that a lot of familiar techniques, such as bump-mapping and non-volumetric particle effects, just don’t work in VR. Dark colours can lead to motion blur, so you find yourself choosing bright, flatter textures. And if you do try to aim for photorealism, you can actually find the user squinting a little, so it’s better to stylise to some extent.”
The lack of a single VR platform to work towards is also a consideration. Beyond Playstation VR’S fixed console platform, both Oculus Rift and HTC Vive are designed to work with PCS of varying CPU and GPU configurations. VR for mobile must also be taken into account at for some projects. Artists should appreciate the need to create assets for different, sometimes moving targets, and that scalability is therefore vital for the best chance of commercial success.
interaction challenges
This variety of platforms also impacts on the way players navigate and interact with VR worlds. Beyond head tracking, there’s still no real standard hardware set-up for user input – not all users have access to hand controllers. Furthermore, VR game developers need to consider just how intuitive their target audience will find the various control methods.
“Whether you’re developing a game for the home market or for an experience to be used in a public space is going to greatly affect your approach,” says Scott Fletcher, director at Play Nicely. “So too is whether they’re going to be sat down or walking around, and even how much time they’re likely to spend in the VR environment.”
Locomotion undoubtedly poses the biggest interaction challenges for gaming right now. Even ignoring the limitations inherent with wired headsets, there’s no way to have players walk and run in the real world in order to navigate the virtual one. Attempting to solve the issue with standard joypad movement causes a degree of sensory disconnect and may induce nausea. This makes it impossible to directly port most first-person shooters to VR, though of course it also impacts on any kind of exploration-based VR experience.
Of course, necessity can be the mother of invention, and one of the draws of VR is the way it throws up new creative challenges. “You have to remember there are restrictions in every medium,” says Scott. “And contrary to what people think, freedom of movement can be counter-productive to a sense of immersion,” he continues.
What VR gaming does share with its monoscopic counterpart is
A LOT OF FAMILIAR TECHNIQUES, SUCH AS BUMP MAPPING AND NON-VOLUMETRIC PARTICLE EFFECTS, JUST DON’T WORK IN VR Ben Curtis, freelance producer/director, Aardman, BBC and Play Nicely
THE OPTIMISATIONS REQUIRED FOR VIRTUAL REALITY CAN BE QUITE DIFFERENT TO THOSE WITH ‘DESKTOP’ REAL-TIME RENDERING Nick Thibieroz, director of game engineering, AMD
a reliance on graphical processing power in order to deliver the best possible experience for the player. And as with regular gaming, that involves sufficient hardware resources – both on the CPU and GPU – in conjunction with a muscular, efficient game engine.
“The optimisations required for VR can be quite different to those with ‘desktop’ realtime rendering,” explains Nick Thibieroz, director of game engineering at AMD. “The simplest approach with VR is to create a separate render for each eye. But that involves double the processing work, since draw calls are repeated for each view, therefore increasing CPU overhead.”
Render effeciency
While desktop gaming performance is typically Gpulimited, with VR it can turn into a CPU bottleneck. “This may not be a problem on a powerful CPU, but since we’re trying to lower the cost of entry for VR, it is important that we investigate hardware and software features to optimise stereo rendering,” says Nick.
This is where the latest generation of explicit APIS, such as Directx12 and Vulkan come into their own. “They are designed to process large numbers of draw calls by spreading them out to multiple CPU cores,” explains Nick. “We’re starting to see VR content leveraging those APIS for optimal efficiency, which is really exciting.”
While many of the larger studios traditionally develop proprietary game engines (take, for example, Rockstar’s Rage, EA/ DICE’S Frostbite and Bethesda’s Creation Engine) rather than utilise off-the-shelf solutions, the fact that third-party creations like Unity, Unreal Engine and Cryengine have been quick to integrate Vr-friendly features has made them the most popular choice to date. This in turn makes it easier for companies such as AMD to provide support.
It seems clear that VR gaming will benefit as much from creatively ambitious content produced by smaller teams as it will blockbusters from the larger studios. Though even with the latter, there’s likely to be a tendency towards content that tries to make the most of the medium.
“I do think that for VR gaming to be truly successful it’s important that [existing] AAA titles are translated to VR, but rather than porting the full, standard gameplay over, I think we’ll see versions explicitly designed for VR, through the use of new levels and environments,” says Nick.“we’ve seen a few killer applications, but I think the best is yet to come.”