November 9, 2024, article “brought back” on the occasion of its translation into Japanese and English.
Posting on bobdupneu.fr is a hobby about which old Bob refuses to put any pressure on himself. So even if the plan was to offer a Halloween game four years after my system-seller “Witches and Pumpkins,” I’m presenting it to you more than a week late! But here it is, the new masterpiece from Bob Dupneu Entertainment: I present to you “Thrills in VR!”
Once again, I’ve played around with Unity to design something akin to a carnival ghost train, but in VR! The last VR endeavor I proposed was my Zelda-skinned archery game (a great success on itch.io: almost 3000 views and 500 downloads nonetheless! The completely unauthorized use of a famous Nintendo IP probably had something to do with it…), but I often design small prototypes that don’t necessarily turn into full games. The accumulated experience sometimes allows me to bring a complete project to fruition.
With my ghost train, I primarily wanted to experiment with optimization for limited hardware like the Meta Quest 2. Specifically, I tried to manually replicate Unity’s occlusion culling system, which is known not to work optimally on virtual reality headsets. Practically, the different areas of the haunted mansion visited by the player appear and disappear based on their movements, in order to limit the number of objects drawn in each frame (the number of draw calls per frame); the animated GIF below is probably clearer:
My idea was to determine whether this approach proves to be more efficient in terms of optimization than occlusion culling, but I couldn’t get a clear answer T_T
Another thing I’ve been experimenting with for some time and wanted to integrate is the hand tracking system that Meta has been trying to develop for the past few years. Overall, the integration is much simpler and more effective than it was a year or two ago, and I believe the technology has great potential if virtual reality headsets manage to sustain and break through!
In “Thrills in VR!”, you don’t need a physical controller then! The menu is controlled with your hands (be warned: it’s pretty rough and messy!), and a game mode allows you to throw magic balls to light up Halloween pumpkins (clench your fist to concentrate energy, and open your palm to launch the ball). It’s quite fun, and I’ll likely propose more hand-tracking-based features in the future. Once I feel like diving back into programming for the Quest…
Developing on the Quest remains somewhat restrictive, even though the situation is improving. However, I wasn’t helped by Unity this time, with its recurring issues related to version updates and the hub, which become frustrating over time. This time, I had to migrate versions twice, reinstall the editor, and finally manually configure the ADK/NDK/JDK trio needed to compile for Android devices. At least this ordeal introduced me to the “Unity pour les nuls” channel, whose video on manual trio configuration was a huge help! Overall, though, this incident turned development into a real ordeal, explaining the delay, the lack of polish on lighting, and several small bugs I didn’t feel like addressing (notably, the score displayed at the end of the game…).
Nonetheless, after a complicated delivery, the new marvel is born, and I invite you to take a ride on Bob’s ghost train!
Bob Dupneu
