Epic has worked on Virtual Reality games until now but it has come up with something utterly unique. Epic’s Unreal engine lets you make games inside Virtual Reality. Playing a game in Virtual reality is definitely cool but what if you could make a game of your own while you were in a virtual world? Well, surely it’s something users hadn’t expected but its one hell of an amazing concept.
Epic recently announced an upcoming module of VR which will be an addition to its famous Unreal Editor. The module can be used by developers, animators or even gamers to create and then explore their VR environments through Oculus Rift or HTC Vive.
Also, the Unreal Editor has already been employed in superior games like EVE: Valkyrie and another popular space exploration game named Adrift. The surprising part or the industry’s dirty secret as quoted by Epic’s founder Tim Sweeney is that every experience is developed sitting at a PC using a keyboard and a mouse and he also said that it is only weird when one sees the results as the technology improves.
One major aspect of development in VR is that measurement scales don’t translate well in the Virtual world. Objects that feel normal in a 2D game seem too small, large or peculiar in the VR. Therefore developers have to program and reprogram to bring all the objects into relative sizes using the Virtual Reality headsets almost like welding Goggles putting them on and off while coding and simultaneous testing.
The Unreal VR editor is however, a lot like a flat screen interface but designers can examine objects while walking in the physical space. To travel or teleport through long distances the designer or developer just needs to point a controller. The users can also change the size of the VR world to examine scenes with “pinch and zoom gestures.”
Epic as per Sweeney has spent almost a year working on VR- enabled Unreal Editor as their Team loves working on this project along with Epic’s Bullet Train. The exact announce date of this editor will be announced on March 16th at a GDC event.
