Epic Games’ Robo Recall has been one of the most highly anticipated virtual reality (VR) videogames since its debut at Oculus Connect 3, San Jose, in October last year. Today, the company has launched the full version of the videogame exclusively for Oculus Rift with Oculus Touch compatibility, available to download now for free via the Oculus Store.
In addition to a fully featured videogame experience, Epic Games has included mod compatibility with the title at launch. Robo Recall will support user-created content through the distribution of a complete non-commercial Robo Recall Mod Kit with full videogame source code. This will be available with C++ source through UnrealEngine.com with mod kit downloads managed by the Epic Games launcher, similar to that of the ARK Mod Kit and NVIDIA VR Funhouse Mod Kit.
According to Epic Games, “The mod toolkit will contain samples and link to tutorials demonstrating the creation of new guns, new enemies and new maps. Modders will be able to package their mods into .robo files that can be shared via hyperlinks (e.g. via forums supporting file attachments, Dropbox, or file sharing).”
Those who download the Robo Recall Mod Kit will gain access to the Robo Recall development team’s original assets and full source code to extend and build upon or recreate from scratch. They’ll be able to take any enemy, gun or level in Robo Recall and make their own version of it for others to experience. Furthermore, any combination of mods can be loaded at any one time.
As an example of what can be created, Epic Games is also releasing a selection of the company’s own in-house mod packs, including a Fortnite Weapons Pack available from today.
Robo Recall is available to download via the Oculus Store now, for free. VRFocus has of course prepared a detailed review of Robo Recall, which will be available for your reading pleasure very soon.
With a myriad of wave-based first-person shooters (FPS) available for virtual reality (VR) head-mounted displays (HMDs), the genre is becoming increasingly saturated to the point where a new release needs to do something special to get any recognition. Epic Games has become renowned in the industry for its Unreal Engine software and tech demo Bullet Train, but can it pull of the increasingly difficult task of providing an FPS that consumers will want to play. With the release of Robo Recall it just might.
An exclusive for Oculus Touch, Robo Recall combines the studio’s VR expertise in providing game development tools with its pedigree in producing home spun titles. Taking the lessons it learnt from Bullet Train, the team has combined what are essentially VR standards now – teleportation, hip mounted guns, etc – and added a layer of polish and precision that’s still a rare occurrence in VR.
Robo Recall starts with the flair and grandeur very reminiscent of 90’s videogames. This is an action title that doesn’t take itself seriously, it’s all about having fun, shooting robots, ripping them apart, then moving on to continue the carnage. Highscores are the name of the game here, stick with one tactic and you’ll get through, but that multiplier won’t increase significantly. Mix things up and that’s where you’ll gain the most points. Use your handguns, shotguns, grab an enemy’s gun or just simply use your hands.
Highscores aren’t just about online bragging rights, points mean prizes here, unlocking stars which will allow you to upgrade your weapon loadouts with higher capacities, reduced recoil, laser sights and more. This not only makes latter levels somewhat easier, but more importantly it aids racking up those maximum points.
While the action can be intense, it’s certainly beautiful. The aesthetics of Robo Recall are pure AAA all the way through. It might just be cityscapes but it’s no less impressive, with towering skyscrapers that are pin sharp. The hordes of robot enemies are lovingly detailed and richly coloured, decapitating one creates a mass of twisted and sparking wires.
It’s the simple things that Robo Recall does that showcase it as an exemplary VR experience. When used, teleportation for example is a crucial mechanic that can make or break a VR title. Both sticks on the Oculus Touch controllers allow you to warp, and a twist of the stick changes the direction you’ll face. Nothing groundbreaking but it works, feeling snappy and accurate. Adding to this is a feature needed specifically for Touch’s two sensor setup. Turn away from the dual sensors and Robo Recall will begin indicating that you need to turn back around, thus ensuring you’ll have no loss of tracking mid fight.
Does Robo Recall have its flaws, of course it does. Some may find it somewhat short, or just aren’t interested in another FPS, but they’d be missing out. Robo Recall elicits such a high standard that future FPS titles will be measured by it, and should be considered a killer app for Oculus Touch. And the best bit of all, Touch users get Robo Recall for free, so what’s there to moan about?
Epic Games is using the Game Developers Conference (GDC) to give an advanced preview of the latest additions to its Unreal Engine VR Editor, which allows creatives to build worlds in a virtual reality environment using the full capabilities of the editor toolset combined with interaction models designed specifically for VR world building. The goal is to officially launch the new VR Editor by April 17.
Mike Fricker, technical director at Epic Games, told UploadVR that working directly in VR provides the proper sense of scale necessary to create realistic, believable worlds, while the use of motion controllers means artists and other non-programmers can build environments with natural motions and interactions.
Epic’s own Robo Recallteam used the VR Editor to build out the free pack-in game for the Oculus Rift with Touch, which also makes its complete debut at GDC this week.
“As soon as they started using it, they realized what the most beneficial use cases were to them,” Fricker said. “Inspecting and tweaking was one of them, but sometimes they just want to throw in things really quickly and see it at scale without having to constantly take the headset off and on.”
The Robo Recall team had a direct impact on the new VR Editor that everyone will have access to in April. Fricker said the team needed little power user features like the ability to snap objects right to the ground instantly without having to go grab them from a menu and move them down to the ground.
“They asked us to give them the power to use these additional features so that they can stay in VR longer,” Fricker said. “That’s not to say that we’re trying to replace desktop. If they’re going to go and do blueprint scripting or material editing, you can get to that stuff in VR and you can make some progress if you knew you were going to tweak something or make a quick change to something. If you’re going to develop a function library or a new game system, you’re probably not going to do that in VR today. But the fact that you can go and see it and inspect it without having to leave VR, that’s the feedback that we got from the team.”
Developing inside VR not only opens things to all members of a team, it also speeds up the development process.
“It’s much faster to navigate a scene in VR than it is with the desktop, where you’re constantly using the combinations of the mouse and keyboard and modifier keys to orbit around an object and zoom the camera around,” Fricker said. “In VR, it’s one-to-one. I know exactly where I’ll end up at any point. Once you get used to it, it’s super fast.”
Lauren Ridge, tools programmer at Epic Games, said they’ve put in safeguards to ensure developers don’t get sick working within VR. For example, you can only move in rotation towards one direction. Not a single Epic user has ever had any motion sickness problems while in the VR Editor at the studio, where high-end PCs ensure a fast framerate.
“We have various levels of safeguard settings that will do things like turn on a grid for my tracking space or dissolve the sky into grayness,” Ridge said. “For example, in real life, I don’t have the ability to grab the world, turn it like a steering wheel and see the sky change. To some people, that’s instantly not good, so we’ve looked at all the different cases people have and added safeguards for them. You also can’t tip yourself over.”
Ultimately, the VR Editor has been designed to allow creatives to do whatever they want. Epic showcased a complicated scene set on a beautiful beach during its GDC Keynote, which includes a surfing mini-game as well as a sea plane flying overhead. Moving the plane to a higher altitude is done in seconds by grabbing the plane and moving its trajectory.
“We’ve been improving things since last year, which was the equivalent to our early access,” Fricker said. “We know that navigating 3D spaces is really fun and fast in VR, so that’s another cool thing that we’re excited about.”
The GDC beach demo also shows how easy it is to access the Unreal editor UI in VR to change settings or change what types of plants you’re painting down for foliage painting. The brush has been improved and makes things like undo and redo more accessible with a quick action.
Simulate mode allows developers to see how objects act when physics are attached. Ridge shows rocks of different sizes accurately falling off a cliff that overlooks the beach.
“This means you can use physics as an art tool,” Ridge said. “When you move the rock around gravity will act on it. You can also trigger gameplay events.”
The demo shows accurately built wooden 2x4s being snapped together into a staircase for a wooden hut on the beach.
“We also added more precise snapping tools,” Fricker said. “That’s about having things look organic and natural, but we also wanted a way to have really precise interactions with objects.”
Epic is taking advantage of VR, which offers more degrees of freedom with motion controllers than when using a traditional mouse and keyboard.”
“If I paint using different pressure on the trigger of the motion controllers, it’ll paint different strengths of the rock material down,” Ridge said. “This is cool because the editor already had various painting and fluid creativity features, but then being able to use those with motion control suddenly made them way more accessible. I can instantly get the bird’s eye view and see how it looks all in the scene and then jump down to see the player’s view of it to make any changes.”
Epic has also partnered with Disney’s Pixar Animation Studio to have Unreal Engine 4 and the VR Editor support Pixar’s Universal Scene Description (USD) 3D graphics pipeline. Epic showed the coral reef from Finding Dory and characters Crush the sea turtle and Mr. Ray the manta ray running in UE4.
“The cool thing here is that we don’t need any other separate tools to go from USD to what you’d see on screen with this demo,” Ficker said. “USD is a pretty big deal to the film industry and other non-gaming uses, but it has some special powers that make it equally awesome for games too.”
Pixar wants to add more plug-ins for creatives beyond Autodesk Maya, so UE4 now opens up new opportunities for companies working in VR.
“As more plug-ins appear, more people will begin using this format,” Ficker said. “USD has a really elegant set-up for just describing a scene in its entirety with all the information you need to uniquely instance specific things along with dealing with complex animation.”
“We know the film industry will like it,” Ridge added. “We will increasingly use USD here. Hopefully, we will keep working with Pixar to make it awesome for every use case we can imagine. Right now we are working on USD import, but at some point we will probably be able to generate USD files as well.”
One, two, three shotguns blasts and the most dangerous robot is junk. I teleport behind the two already shooting at me, grabbing my revolvers from my hips. As they fall, I turn to look at the newcomer already firing. I grab a bullet mid-air and fling it back at him, then teleport to the other side of the street. I take another shotgun from my back and prepare for the next wave.
Robo Recall is the latest free release for Oculus Touch, this one a collaboration between Oculus Studios and Epic Games, the company behind the ubiquitous Unreal Engine, Gears of War, and Unreal Tournament. Robo Recall has been presaged by Epic’s Showdown and Bullet Train demos, but now the full results of the company’s labor have arrived.
The First Person Shooter (FPS) is one of the most revered genres of PC gaming, but it is probably the hardest to do well in VR. Most traditional FPS games move you at a pace that will make most people absolutely sick in VR. And aiming with a crosshair inside an HMD via mouse or Xbox controller isn’t very intuitive, but the arrival of motion controllers like the Vive wands and Oculus Touch banishes that limitation.
In Robo Recall, you are Agent 34 of the Robo Ready corporation. Your task is to “recall” robots that are out of control in the city, slowly uncovering that the seemingly random malfunctions are the work of an AI named Odin. Through three levels divided into nine total missions you will face him and his mechanical minions.
But is your duty as a Recall agent any fun? Well, how could teleporting around and destroying robots be anything but fun? You point with a Touch controller, gesturing with both your arm and the analog stick, painting a spot with a target. When you let go of the analog stick, you teleport there. Time is temporarily slowed, allowing you to shoot enemies leaping through the air or running at you. Just grab guns from your back or your hips and start firing away.
Waves of robots come in a variety of types with different weapons. So you are hopping around to dodge attacks, get better angles on enemies, or get away from being surrounded. And you shoot in response, managing the use of your four weapons, always balancing out the ammo so that you aren’t stuck waiting there while an empty gun is still being respawned.
If you are weaponless, you can get close and grab enemies from certain points indicated by white circles. Rather than holding the Touch’s grip button like when you hold a weapon, you press the button to hold the robot. Then you can even use the other hand to grab another part of the bot and tear it in two. Ripping your arms about in those instances is incredibly satisfying. You can also grab a robot’s guns to use against them.
The moments of just teleporting around and dispatching enemies are interrupted by Time Trials to destroy a certain amount in two minutes or capture a particular number of robots by grabbing them and throwing them into an energy funnel that will teleport them away. Other times you might defend a relay for two minutes by killing all the enemies that try to attack it. And there are of course boss battles to survive.
If the frantic turning and teleporting, weapon juggling and bullet throwing overwhelms you, you will take damage. If not enough time passes for your life to regenerate, the screen turns red and you’re dead. After a 10% respawn fee you are immediately back in the action.
This is a minor setback, except that loss of points might cost you. As you make kills, you earn points. Do more stylish things like headshots, juggles, and simultaneous kills, and you get more points. The more points you get on levels, the more stars you earn. Hitting certain thresholds of stars will unlock new weapons or upgrades for the weapons you already have, such as laser sights, bigger ammo magazines, and more.
Each level also has a variety of challenges that earn you additional stars. Kill 10 robots by ripping them apart or only use scavenged weapons for a whole mission. And after finishing all of the challenges in a level, you unlock All-Star mode for it, where the difficulty of the game is kicked up a notch. There are leaderboards so you can compare how your score in each mission or All-Star version of it compares to the rest of your friends’ or the world’s.
These challenges and leaderboards, after beating the game’s 9 missions gives you a slight reason to go back and play Robo Recall again. Completionists will find getting all the stars difficult, but it is impressive to see the guns evolve into more and more lethal weapons. And it does help to have an excuse to jump back into a mission from the beginning of the game long after you have defeated Odin.
But this replayability also points to the game’s biggest flaw: repetition. The nine levels aren’t really that different, except for a handful of new enemies that come up and the boss fights on every third level. That is a nearly identical bossfight in missions 1-3, 2-3, and 3-3. And within the levels you are either shooting freely, shooting within a time limit, capturing within a time limit, or fighting the boss. More variety would be appreciated. There is mod support available for users to tinker with, but who knows how much variety that will really bring over time — it’s up to the community.
Final Score:7.5/10 – Very Good
Robo Recall has solid graphics and fun gameplay. As a free title for Oculus Touch it is more than worthwhile to give the game a go. Those frantic moments of shooting action are so thrilling that you are just swept up in it. But after several instances of such moments, the thrill dies and the barebones story and light humor doesn’t elevate the game enough in a meaningful way. You may not have the endurance to keep playing to beat your highscores, earn more stars, and upgrade your weapons — enabling you to beat your highscores and begin the process all over again. But even if you aren’t in the game for the long haul, the initial trip of ~3 hours is quite a ride worth taking.
Robo Recall will be available for free on Oculus Home to all Oculus Touch owners as of today. Read our Game Review Guidelines for more information on how we arrived at this score.
Today at the Game Developers Conference, Epic Games announced its VR shooter Robo Recall is available now for free on Oculus Rift with Touch. In addition, Robo Recall comes with full mod support at launch.
The Robo Recall mod editor allows you to manipulate various aspects of the game including environments, sounds, physics, skins, fire rate and object reactions. It also comes with a number of assets from various Epic properties, including Kallari and Twinblast models from Paragon, the ruler sword and baseball bat from Fortnite and even full maps such as DM-Chill from Unreal Tournament.
Judging from the demo today, you can change and tweak a variety of variables with ease, and since it’s built on Unreal Engine 4, you can use the Blueprints scripting environment to test all of your creations quickly to see how they interact with the game.
What started as a passion project for principal artist Shane Caudle has turned into a full-blown VR creation experience. Having worked on titles ranging from Unreal in 1998 to the Gears of War series more recently, Shane is an Epic Games vet, but this is his first VR project. He says he was drawn to VR (pun absolutely intended) because of how real and immersive everything felt on the platform, so he wanted to combine his passion for both digital entertainment and art into a VR experience.
Similar to Kingspray, Ghost Paint allows you to spray paint and tag various surfaces all while donning your Vive headset. As you would expect, the paint acts very realistically, complete with drips and overspray, and the various surfaces you can paint on – ranging from brick walls to canvases to unpainted 3D monkey-like figures like you might see around major cities – give an underlying texture to the final creation. There are also a variety of locales such as alleyways, concrete drainage channels and city buildings where you can plop and tag to your heart’s desire.
Ghost Paint includes a very realistic airbrush simulation as well, which is no surprise given Shane’s background. “I used to be an airbrush artist at the mall,” Shane explains, “and I held the Vive controller horizontally in my hand and thought, ‘hey, that’s kinda like an airbrush.’” The Vive controller does indeed work like an airbrush, allowing you to change the air pressure depending on how you move your thumb over the trackpad, and control paint spread and concentration depending on how far away from the surface you are.
While Shane was able to create some beautiful pieces freehand, as an amateur, mine weren’t nearly as polished. But with the included stencils I was quickly able to feel like an expert tagger without the worry of getting thrown in jail. The fully-scalable stencils look like they’re made of cardboard, which I thought was a nice touch, and the app includes a variety of multi-layer stencils as well, so you can easily shade and add highlights, giving your creations depth and detail.
I also enjoyed playing around with the mirror function which allows you to duplicate a reverse image of anything you’re painting, so you can get some nice symmetrical designs. After finishing your creations you can take screenshots in 4K and in different formats and shapes such as square for uploading to Instagram.
While Ghost Paint felt great and full-featured in its current state, Shane says he still wants to tweak it a bit, add some more stencils and give it a little more polish before release, but it shouldn’t be too much longer until you’re airbrushing with your Vive.
Robo Recall from Epic Games is one of the most anticipated VR games of 2017. When we first learned about the title last year at Oculus Connect 3 (OC3) and went hands-on for the first time, it blew us away.
The controls are tight, the action is intense, and the tongue-in-cheek humor was a breath of fresh air. And all of that is crammed into a game that will be released totally for free for all Oculus Touch users.
In our previous demo we only really had the chance to try out a couple of pistols on our hip and two shotguns on our back, but this time at GDC 2017 Epic turned things up a notch. As lead designer Nick Donaldson told us, “’I wish I could… I wish I could… I wish I could…’ pretty much describes our entire design philosophy.”
“We want you to feel as badass as possible,” art director Jerome Platteaux added.
Before I dove into one of the game’s later levels, they unlocked all of Robo Recall’s various guns and upgrade attachments. In addition to the standard pistol, I could choose a revolver, an energy rifle, and even a large rocket-blasting gun.
In my left hand I opted for the standard pistol with upgraded sights and an automatic firing system. The revolver in my right hand switched to one that shot two bullets at once, resulting in only four shots total before needing to reload, but it packed a major punch. With the energy rifle I could hold the trigger and let it slowly ramp up its firing speed until red balls of energy blasted out at all angles. Finally, after shooting a rocket from my last gun, I could swing my arms in a direction to curve missiles through the air.
When I loaded into one of the mid-game levels (they said it was a little over an hour into the journey) I had the freedom to explore the city using the point-to-teleport mechanic that works similar to Arizona Sunshine. I press forward on the analog stick and point at the ground, then release to teleport, but I can also press a different direction to change which way I am facing after the teleport completes.
I jumped around the city, fighting off robots, eventually dying with only 10 seconds left on my final objective. It’s easy to get overwhelmed if you’re not careful. Getting a one-shot kill with a revolver was probably my favorite way of killing the robot scum.
Epic wouldn’t confirm a definitive release date just yet, but it should be very soon. It was also teased that this isn’t all of the secrets Robo Recall has left to uncover. When it does finally launch, it will be a free download for all Oculus Touch owners.
Everyone in the VR industry can envision a world in the next 10 years that’s radically changed by virtual reality. From healthcare, education, social, training, cinema, gaming, and more, VR has a lot of Killer Use-cases. But it seems most of the industry is in agreement that the Killer App—a single, platform-defining piece of software that compels buyers—has not yet arrived. Epic’s Nick Whiting weighs in on how we might come to find it.
Every day this week leading up to the 2017 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, we’re featuring insights on the hunt for the killer app from virtual reality’s leading companies. Today we hear from Nick Whiting, Technical Director of VR & AR at Epic Games.
Nick Whiting
Whiting oversees the development of the award-winning Unreal Engine 4’s virtual reality efforts. In addition to shipping working on Robo Recall, Bullet Train, Thief in the Shadows, Showdown, and Couch Knights for VR platforms, he has also helped shipped titles in the blockbuster Gears of War series, including Gears of War 3 and Gears of War: Judgment.
Road to VR: What traits do you think VR’s Killer App needs to have?
Whiting:
To me, the Killer App has to be something that uniquely justifies the medium. It needs to be an app that brings people into the VR ecosystem because there simply isn’t another way to get the same experience in any other way. That’s the defining characteristic!
Right now, we’re still very early in VR. As with other mediums, we’re in a period that is largely comprised of imitation of other media. For VR games, we’re largely imitating the canon of 3D games that’s been developing since the ’90s. For entertainment, we’re largely using the same techniques of framing and timing from film, but adapted a little bit to make it feel better in VR.
This isn’t anything new! You can see the same pattern in early film, which were largely imitations and recordings of stage plays or common events. It’s easy to forget that the grammar of cinematography that we know today took decades to develop into what we know of as film today! The same was true with games, which imitated sports, comics, and movies for many years before they really started breaking new ground.
Epic’s Unreal Engine 4 is one of the leading tools for VR game development. It also powers ‘Robo Recall‘, the company’s first ‘full’ VR title which is due to launch by the end of Q1 2017.
This wave of consumer VR has only really been around for a little over a year now, so I think we still have a little bit of time to go before we develop those ideas that are unique to the medium. I don’t know what they will specifically be, but I think we can hazard a guess based on the strengths.
Experiences out there right now, if we’re honest with ourselves, largely rely on the novelty of the experience of the hardware. As we all know, it’s magical the first time you put on a headset and can look around! However, without compelling content, that novelty wears off, and those experiences don’t seem quite as compelling. To make something with staying power, we need to identify what makes the medium unique, and figure out how to leverage that.
To me, the most important feature of VR is what I like to call “immersive interaction.” The idea is similar to presence, but centers more around the fact that unlike any other medium, you’re physically represented in the world, as well as your direct actions. You can not only look around, but reach out and grab things in a way that a game with its pre-baked animations can’t really match. You’re part of the action, and that builds the magical sense of presence. Because of that, I believe that the killer app must include interaction with motion controllers. It takes the immersive visuals of VR, and adds immersive interaction, which truly lets you be internalized as part of another world.
I think another very powerful extension of this is the social aspect. Social experiences in VR are so compelling because we track real human motion. So, if I nod at you, all the parts of your brain that are trained to recognize that motion do, and you feel the presence of another human in a shared space. That’s something 2D video can’t match, and something uniquely powerful for the medium. Multiple people sharing the same virtual space with such intimacy can’t be replicated without VR. As tracking technology improves, this could truly be something that is revolutionary.
Road to VR: If you had to make a bet, which sector of VR would you predict as the place where the first Killer App emerges?
Whiting:
Depending on how you define it, the “killer app” might already be here for enterprise. While it doesn’t move tons of headsets, or have the flash of entertainment applications, we’re already starting to see huge wins in terms of savings and cost reduction in enterprise applications, which is causing steady growth for VR usage.
A simple example is in the architecture and construction industries. When a client orders a multi-million dollar building, the architect has to do his best to give the client an idea of what the finished product will be like, years before it’s even built. While renderings and previsualization can give you a great sense of the style and aesthetics of a building, it is distinctly lacking in some of the “human factors” of how the space feels. Because of this, large-scale projects often spend large amounts of money after construction has begun to redesign and redo work once the client has been able to physically stand in a space. Savvy builders and architects have realized that this can be greatly reduced through putting the client in a VR mockup of the space, which allows them to get a better feeling for the final product, and make those changes while it’s still on paper, rather than already half-built!
You can easily expand that to many other areas of engineering and design, where ideas and concepts have to go through separate teams in order to bring a product to fruition. Being able to have everyone visualize a product while it’s still in early planning helps ensure that everything from design to construction to training can be accomplished before any fabrication has begun. That’s a huge cost and time savings, and given VR’s proliferation in those industries, I think that deserves to be called a Killer App.
Road to VR: Do you think VR’s Killer App will launch in 2017?
Whiting: Of course, because Robo Recall launches Q1 2017! In reality though, I think that 2017 is somewhat optimistic for a killer app. Great content, yes. But, killer apps are built on the shoulders of countless lessons learned from the apps that came before them. While we’re starting to see a lot of great content trickle out (the mainstream market attention of Resident Evil 7 and Rez Infinite are great indicators), you have to remember that great content generally takes two or three years to develop.
It was only last year that consumer headsets were first widely commercially available, and it was only a few months before that when the big players announced release dates and pricing. Because of that, many of the traditional funding vehicles that create killer content didn’t kick in until a little over a year ago. That means many projects that took that initial round of funding still have about a year to go before they see the light of day. Because of that, I think 2018 is going to be the year where we start seeing a wider variety of great content from a variety of developers, and hopefully our killer app is somewhere in that batch.
More from the ‘On the Hunt for VR’s Killer App’ Series:
Audio quality plays an important part in virtual reality (VR) immersion, so today Valve has announced the launch of its Steam Audio SDK as a free beta for developers.
Designed to enhance all interactive products, specifically VR applications, Steam Audio adds physics-based sound propagation on top of HRTF-based binaural audio. This allows in game audio to interact with and bounce off of scene geometry, aiding players by giving them more information about the virtual world they’re in.
Steam Audio’s range of features include HRTF-based binaural rendering, occlusion, physics-based reverb, real-time sound propagation and baked reverb and propagation. Supporting multiple platforms: Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, Steam Audio is not restricted to any particular VR device or to Steam.
The Steam Audio SDK currently supports including C API for integration into other game engines and audio middleware. “Adding Steam Audio to the arsenal of tools available to Unity developers gives them an easy solution for extending the acoustic depths of their VR and desktop creations, and is the latest result of out collaboration with Valve,” said Tony Parisi, head of VR/AR strategy at Unity Technologies.
Another popular engine for VR developers is Epic Games’ Unreal Engine which will see support added soon. “As a new plugin for the new Unreal Audio Engine, Steam Audio fundamentally extends its capabilities and provides a multi-platform solution to game audio developers who want to create realistic and high-quality sound propagation, reverberation modeling, and binaural spatialization for their games,” commented Aaron Mcleran, audio programmer at Epic Games.
“Valve is always trying to advance what the very best games and entertainment can offer,” said Valve’s Anish Chandak. “Steam Audio is a feature-rich spatial audio solution available to all developers, for use wherever and however they want to use it.”
For the latest Steam Audio updates from Valve, keep reading VRFocus.
Next week the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2017 will take place in San Francisco, California, bring the together industry professionals from across the world. Taking place at the same time for one day only will be the Unreal Engine GDC Education Summit, featuring a day of sessions aimed at Unreal users, especially educators and students.
Featuring a keynote address by Epic Games’ Marc Petit, general manager of the Unreal Engine enterprise team, the summit will also include Epic recruiter, Emily Gabrian, who’ll present the Epic Games Internship Program, outlining what educators and students will need to know to apply.
For those interested in virtual reality (VR), two dedicated sessions will be held. Joe Radak, a freelance level designer,will be hosting a talk called ‘Hitting the ground running in VR: UE4 and Udacity’s VR Nanodegree’, which looks at the rapidly changing world of VR, and Udacity’s VR Nanodegree. While Craig Bar will be looking at ‘Virtual reality and architectural visualization with Unreal’, giving an overview of the power of Unreal for architectural visualization and VR.
The Unreal Engine GDC Education Summit takes place on Tuesday, 28th February at the Four Seasons Hotel. Tickets are free, head to the Eventbrite page to register and get further details.
Last week Epic Games launched the next version of Unreal Engine, 4.15. This included several updated VR features for the Quick Menu and Radial Menu, with a new Number Pad UI. Support was added for the PlayStation Aim controller as well as an experimental Monoscopic Far Field Rendering option.
VRFocus will continue its coverage of Epic Games and Unreal Engine, reporting back with the latest updates.
