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What are the advantages of making a small VR game using the headset's native SDK vs Unity or Unreal?

General and Gameplay Programming Programming

Started by EBZ August 05, 2020 05:11 PM

4 comments, last by EBZ 3 years, 10 months ago

EBZ

Author

August 05, 2020 05:11 PM

I know if I use the XR Plugin and Toolkit in Unity, I'm pretty much ready to start writing my game. But besides all the conveniences engines provide us (like multi-platform support), why would somebody choose to use the native c++ SDKs? I'm just curious.

Juliean

7,352

August 05, 2020 05:29 PM

EBZ said:
I know if I use the XR Plugin and Toolkit in Unity, I'm pretty much ready to start writing my game. But besides all the conveniences engines provide us (like multi-platform support), why would somebody choose to use the native c++ SDKs? I'm just curious.

Some possible reasons off the top of my head:

For getting experience related to those native-SDKs
Because they might find it fun/interesting, as a side-project
Because they want to have full control over the integration of the VR-rendering
1. This can be because you keep getting stuck on issues or roadblocks in the common engines (ie. in our recent Unity VR-experiment we are right now having problems with UIs becoming blurred when moving the head; where we cannot really do much other than flip setting util the cows come home)
2. They want to achieve something special that is not possible in the other engines SDK-implementations (not likely)
Because they are already using a different engine and want to add VR-support (that would be me if I ever went full-on 3D/VR-development with my engine)

Shaarigan

1,471

August 06, 2020 09:08 AM

5. The company has an in-house engine maintained over the years and want to use this instead of Unity/ Unreal to provide VR support

kop0113

2,466

August 06, 2020 06:01 PM

One of the biggest for me is lifespan.

If you look at things like Unity or UE4 you will see that they don't support Windows XP. So if you project this ~10 years into the future you will probably be safe to assume that they will not support Windows 7 (or 10) at that point.

For gaming this is of course not a problem but for medical tools where the lifespan is very long (the NHS still uses Windows XP for example), this additional control from avoiding large engines is fairly important.

UE4 fairs better than Unity because the source is available, however unless you are a seriously large company, it still isn't really feasible to maintain or backport it to older platforms. Migrating between API's like OpenHMD or OpenXR is much easier than entire engines.

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