DRIVR Part 8: Unlocke your potential

As Goethe once said, "There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these is roots, the other, a metaverse that is neither tethered nor confined. Oh, and Costco hot dogs should always cost a buck fifty." His prescience is not only uncanny, it's the subject of today's discussion.

One of the primary motivations behind DRIVR is the ability to explore a virtual world without being limited by the confines of a real room. However, we would like to be efficient with our layout, as this will allow us to operate in more places. Remember, the only requirement that we have in order to guarantee driver safety (when in a single-player environment) is that they remain inside the designated driving zone. With this in mind, we can employ two simple tactics to increase the virtual size of the game. The first is to have different "levels" that occupy the same two-dimensional space. The second is to modify each level in real-time to create additional areas of exploration. It's like a magic parking garage but with fun sounds and better lighting (validation not included).

This helps address the issue of confinement, but what about removing the tethers that Goethe was so worried about? As previously mentioned, one of the biggest changes moving from V3 to V4 was developing the game to be a standalone application running on the headset, as opposed to connecting the headset to a game running on the PC. This greatly improves the experience for the player, but there are some downsides to developing a game that runs on a VR headset:

• You need a headset at your desk, which is already overcrowded (and that Jack Slater action figure isn't going anywhere)

• It's tough to look cool at the office when you've strapped a weird white box to your face. And it's already SO hard to look cool when you have an ergonomic keyboard and trackball mouse.

• Every time you make a change to the game, you have to build a new version and then transfer it to the headset, which takes long enough for you to get distracted, start another task and then forget what you were doing in the first place. So despite Unity finishing the job in 90 seconds, you might as well have thrown your computer into a black hole.

But never fear! There is a way to simulate the headset in Unity with the Meta XR Simulator (which is even more effective if you have an Xbox controller). So we can iterate purely on the computer for most of our testing, and only push to the headset when honor demands it. There are also ways to speed up the build process, but you don't really want to know about those.

Come back next time for more "improvements" to the development process, which we really just use as excuses to keep developing and never ship, because people can't hurt your feelings if they don't know you exist. #lifehacks

-Greg

The story continues with Part 9: One bite at a time