Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation
What Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality developers are talking about
Nintendo has successfully filed formal takedown request with GitHub over a Game Boy Advance emulator hosted on the website. The emulator also included access to ROMs of Nintendo games.
The post Nintendo gets GitHub-hosted Game Boy Advance emulator taken down appeared first on Digital Trends.
Videogame modders can do remarkable things, as VRFocus previously reported with the Half-Life 2 VR mod. A modder on Reddit has released an Alpha build of a mod that allows horror title Alien: Isolation to be played in virtual reality (VR).
A poster on Reddit going by the name Nibre has released an early Alpha build of a mod on to Github that allows users who own Alien: Isolation on Steam to be able to play the title in VR using an Oculus Rift headset.
The mod is currently only available for the Oculus Rift and is recommended for Seated play only, since there is no Snap Turning or teleportation movement, only free movement and slow turning. Motion control has not yet been implemented, and can currently only be played with an Xbox controller or a keyboard and mouse combination, though keyboard and mouse lacks a re-centering option. The developer is working on introducing HTC Vive compatibility, and hopes to introduce some basic HTC Vive function ‘soon’. Room scale play is also planned for a later date.
Since the mod is an Alpha build, there are some known issues, such as the monitor screen remaining black and not showing gameplay, though the Headset is functioning. Using the Oculus Mirror function is a workaround for this. The Menu can also sometimes appear off-screen, though the menu still functions and some objects can sometimes spawn too ‘close’ to the player to be properly focussed on. The developer is aware of these problems and is working to correct them.
Reception to this mod on Reddit has largely been positive, and a slew of requests to reward the modder for their hard work has prompted them to open their Paypal account to donations.
Further information can be found on the Github page.
VRFocus will continue to bring you news on VR videogame mods.
Nostalgia and retro gaming is a big deal in the videogaming community. As observed by the success of the recently discontinued NES Mini and the continued growth in the market for retro consoles and games. Recently released 3D platformer Yooka-Laylee aimed to plug into the appetite for nostalgia, and now nostalgia can be even closer than ever with a virtual reality (VR) mod.
Yooka-Laylee was created by Playtonic Games, a studio largely made up of former employees at Rare, the studio that created platforming classic Banjo-Kazooie for the Nintendo 64, and was largely intended to be a spiritual sequel to the N64 title that inspired it.
Yooka-Laylee has received largely mixed reviews from critics, but has developed enough of an enthusiastic fan following to inspire the creations of several PC mods, including one created by HTV Vive modder Eusth that enables the title to be played on a HTC Vive headset.
The mod does not put the player in a first-person perspective, however, it remains in third-person and puts the player in a position of hovering above the action whilst controlling the characters with a traditional controller pad.
The mod is free, but not officially supported by the developer, so some glitches and bugs might surface, and the optimisation for VR play may not be perfect, since Yooka-Laylee was not designed explicitly with VR in mind.
The mod files can be found on GitHub, along with a full list of necessary instructions. Yooka-Laylee is available through Steam for £34.99 (GBP). A video trailer for the VR mod can be viewed below.
VRFocus will bring you further information on VR game mods when it comes in.
The developers of the PokéLens demo for Microsoft's HoloLens AR headset provides the source files on GitHub for all to use. The demo currently enables HoloLens wearers to initiate a battle and summon their favorite Pokémon.
The post Pokémon invade reality in a demo for Microsoft’s HoloLens AR headset appeared first on Digital Trends.
Today NVIDIA has revealed some juicy additions to its open sourced VR Funhouse application, described as “the world’s most advanced VR game”, which allows users to create more of their own experiences using its GameWorks, PhysX, and VRWorks technology. There is a new editor, mods, and availability to use all of this as of today.
During a press conference yesterday, Victoria Rege, who is involved with NVIDIA’s VR ventures and has produced work as a product marketer, shared the news that there is now a mod kit available for VR Funhouse, which allows users to access the game’s Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) blueprints and assets to create what they will via Steam Workshop. “The idea is that people can create their own levels, they can create their own actual games and experiences using everything that will be provided.”
As well as this new editor, there are also five mods added to VR Funhouse itself that expand on the already available games: Super Whack-A-Mole; Zero-Gravity Goo, where the water that was shot into the clowns’ mouths is replaced with green sludge; Big Top; Great Moles of Fire, where their hair is replaced with fire; and Tommy Gun, where they replaced the pistols with tommy guns for the shooting gallery. These are all available to download for free on the NVIDIA VR Funhouse application, which is also free on Steam.
“It’s not necessarily about building new levels for Funhouse, but we hope that happens. It’s more about enabling the community to build more realistic, more physically accurate types of games that people can enjoy,” said Rege.
VRFocus asked whether or not additional mods would become more frequent, to which Rege replied: “We’re never short of ideas, I actually have lots of requests for Dane, and we are actually going to be working on some downloadable content, some future games that will be announced later in time, so we’re still working on some things. I can’t comment on how many, but we’re definitely going to build and explore.”
As well as these two big bits of news, it is also shared that the full source code for VR Funhouse is available on Github to create their own experiences.
There’s no doubting that NVIDIA VR Funhouse has been a hit, as there have been 100,000 downloads – which is what is estimated to be the number of Vives that have been bought. Rege also went on to say that one of the leading developers who has used VR Funhouse is Sulphur Studios, creators of Everest VR, for its realistic snow physics.
For more on the latest news, updates, and features in the world of VR, make sure to check back with VRFocus.