How the hell do you picture the full-blown zombie game in Oculus Quest?

When we first got our hands on the ever-changing VR tech for Oculus in 2018, no one at Vertigo Games ever thought of the mobile Arizona Sun., our virtual reality hit game that pushed the frontiers of gameplay and PC-based VR gameplay back in 2016.

So how you did it do we get here?

Arizona Sun. is a first-person shooter built exclusively for VR that brings four players to the idea of ​​trying to survive the zombie apocalypse. Players can carry weapons in supernatural movements, explore a world bombed by zombies, and put their survival skills to the test by constantly being alert and looking at threats in every direction – and then you have to physically aim and turn off your existing weapons while playing. It's hard to survive, but you're actually in it, not just looking in the mirror.

You can check out the original launch trailer below.

We started launching the game on PC VR in December 2016, and continued to the port Arizona Sun. across all major VR platforms. including PlayStation VR and free-roam co-location VR before finally arriving at Oculus Demand in December 2019.

Getting the game to be played at all on a portable Oculus Quest was a major challenge, but to find it carried on in a way that was as enjoyable as the original versions – without sacrificing anything that made the game so exciting – seemed like it should have been impossible. However, as you can see in the last trailer for this version of the game below, we were able to make it work.

It's the last port we're going to talk about today, because it's been one of the biggest challenges in the process Arizona Sun., and it took a lot of effort and creative thinking.

This is how we did it.

Why you should do this at all

We discovered two things when we first looked at Oculus Quest Hardware. Kutaka is different from other large VR platforms in that it packs everything inside a computer-based headset, and offers limited compute power compared to most gaming PCs but doesn't make concessions on how it handles head tracking and full motion control. It's a portable-powered system with intelligent settings features, a combination we've never seen before.

This means creating an Oculus Quest Arizona Sun. playing as a PC VR type would not be possible, but getting it to work properly can be a huge challenge. We had a clear, simple goal: Bring Arizona Sun.

We were hoping we could pull it off, but it would take a lot of "creativity" to make the final experience more comfortable for the player. To accomplish all that Arizona Sun. does it on Oculus Demand, while running at 72 frames per second, this has always been an almost impossible task, but we found it worth the effort.

The work began with the most important part of any zombie game.

Hi, let's use a zombie!

Zombies are one of the most important, if not the least and Most importantly, the features of the game. They live in the world and pose a very pressing threat to the player. If the zombies didn't scare the player, the game wouldn't work. I will not Arizona Sun.. But we also have to make sure that our zombies won't be too many for Hardware to handle.

We decided to give the most visible parts of our zombies a lot of detail, to make sure they looked and felt as close to the original as possible. That meant spending most of our igamesnewss on head models.

Naturally people look at their heads and eyes when they meet anyone, anything, in real life and VR, so we had to get that stuff. This is especially important in a zombie game, because headshots are the most effective way to kill zombies. That is just accepted wisdom. So players will always be looking for a strong head while tapping their heads.

Photo: Vertigo Games

Note the head. It is the most detailed method of the whole body.

You can see the result in the image above. We've been able to simplify the zombie character model – while keeping it visible – and also making sure that heads keep as many igamesnewss as possible.

Does your brain care if the arm looks like it's been properly provided? Of course not. But it will inform your head without the right details very quickly, and you will be overwhelmed with the experience. The compromise allowed us to keep our zombies on screen without consuming all the power of the computational system.

However Arizona Sun. and includes a mechanic that makes shooting zombies so profitable: You can shoot an arm, a leg, or hit your head clean. Where you were aiming for things, but making the change in weapon functionality on Demand wasn't as easy as it sounds.

First, let’s explain a few things

Conversion has many systems to work in conjunction with each other, and it requires several insights into how the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) works. Nothing happens to the player's screen until we send instructions to the GPU, or whatever else happens in the game code. This tutorial can be anything: draw a tree, draw a chair or draw smoke from a gun. But we have to get the GPU to talk on screen with these instructions if you are going to see anything while you play.

We can give you this extra meaning by comparing your order count Arizona Sun. on PC and on Demand. The PC supports 1,000 GPU commands while Oculus Quest, in contrast, supports 100 GPU commands. That's a big difference, but we thought we could work a little harder.

Why is command count limited to Demand? We want to bring you a smooth player experience, and we have to move it to 72 fps on Demand to get comfortable while playing. They are tiny, and people can feel sick to their stomachs. So we knew that we could make the kutaka GPU to provide 100 objects on the screen while keeping that amount of value, but it would start to drop if we added something else. And causing motion sickness in our players is not something we wanted to consider.

And GPU commands add up fast. Suppose you shoot an arm at a zombie. First, we have to build GPU instructions for & # 39; cut & # 39; arm and place it on a separate object. After that we have to fill the holes we created with damaged items, one with a zombie shoulder and one with a new cut off arm thing. Finally, we tell the increased piece to fall when it is dropped from the character type. In conclusion, we have three GPU commands, at least, for this interaction that seemed easy on paper. Now imagine that for 30 Zombies!

The solution

So how have we solved this? Well, we decided to combine the zombie thing with the wound thing, during the flight, in the event of a slumber. We were supposed to modify the zombie GPU commands and add support for this, making the GPU instruction more complicated, but this complex integration ended up being a GPU faster than the extra instructions something new could produce. Especially when there were multiple mutations in one zombie. That answer may be a little complicated in an article intended for a general audience, but it does show that solutions to these problems exist, as long as you're willing to try, create creativity, and spend time and energy.

Another accomplishment we made was to pre-calculate all the possible zombie shootings, so we didn't have to do that when the game started. After that, we used a limit so you would never have to change too many body parts.

Arizona Sunlight isn't just a game about zombies, though. It's also about how you fight with those zombies.

We ended up participating in, and sometimes rebuilding, all levels and encounters all based on how many zombies were streaming, and what events were happening. We basically turned around GPU commands to keep FPS strong, and comfortable. .

In the quiet part of the scale we can draw much of nature, such as rocks, grass sticks and cans or other waste into the ground, making the world feel more real. The fewer zombies, the more room we had to make the actual world look as beautiful as possible.

But we had to make space for all the zombies and thus reduce the biodiversity if there was to be a major war in the area. We had to create a lot of engine tools and an art team that helped us raise our standards so this would work at all.

When people think of "doing it right," when they know what the word means in this context at all, they can simply think of developers who have to write the best code. But it goes much deeper than that; we had to make all the new tools and techniques for how our game worked on Hardware to hit our targets. Doing things is time-consuming and expensive, and often requires significant work on the engine itself. It is also one of the last things to do a lot of great releases.

You can see the final product in the gifs below. With so much work, we were able to save ourselves a lot of orders.

But here's an important thing to remember: Doing so takes work, and many talented people work long hours. Moving a game from a VR theme filmed to Oculus Demand is a costly, time-consuming process, so I'd like to keep that in mind when asking a developer there, or, if their VR game will be moving to a mobile platform.

What are the Bridge Level GPU instructions, which show what it looks like before and after a proper use. Here's a look at the 143 GPU instructions:

And here is the same place with only 24 GPU commands, after it was compiled.

The easiest way would be to remove half of the elements in the game, reduce the igamesnews count, disable self-control, reduce the zombie count and call it a day. But that would mean removing the heart Arizona Sun.

Oculus Demand is very similar to PC VR in terms of tracking and beyond it adds an additional 360 degree freedom of control appeal. That's why we forced ourselves to get more game in this remake.

Zombie burns, small pieces of trash on the floor, interactions … all add to the port Arizona Sun. that looks and sounds like the real thing, not a devoured copy. It took a ton of work, but it was worth it. In the end, we take pride in how much the real world has managed to save.

What is the most important thing you can learn about your game before you start the packing process or do it well: What are the most important things in your game designs? What things should stay in the final release to be the game you want your players to enjoy?

Once you know what you can't live without, you can start thinking how to keep it, and you have to be willing to put in the work to make that happen.