Hello everyone!
I just finished my VR game. It was designed for and developed on the HTC Vive. I used Unity Version 5.3.3f1 and SteamVR plugin v1.0.8. I don’t own a Rift but my understanding is that SteamVR automagically supports Oculus (via Steam)? That is, it re-maps buttons to the rift controllers, or is this incorrect? Do I have to do something else? Seems to good to be true.
If anyone can let me know or nudge me in the direction of some useful documentation I’d be grateful. Thanks!
“automagically suppports Oculus” → Yes and No. We did exactly what you are planning to do in our game (EscapeVR: The Basement on Steam).
SteamVR (at least the beta of SteamVR) does indeed support the Rift including the Touch controllers. Valve have their own implementation though, so you won’t be using or even needing the Oculus SDK (in Unity). The upside is that most things “just work”, the downside is that you can’t submit to the Oculus store - for that, you need to exclusively use the Oculus SDK. But you can claim Oculus support on Steam.
There are some considerations though. The obvious one is that the Rift doesn’t have proper 360° tracking support without being setup to use “experimental 360°” (see https://support.oculus.com/help/oculus/199906947113632/). If your game is only 180° then no issues.
The second is that the buttons on the Touch don’t map 1-to-1 to the Vive controllers as in “I would expect something different to happen here”. The grip buttons on the Vive, for example, share the same code as the grab buttons on the Touch, but I’d use them differently. Also, there are the A/B/X/Y buttons on the Touch which could/should be used instead of Trackpad Push which is very hard to do on the Touch and feels kind of wrong. So, if possible I would acquire a Rift to test.
Our mapping is:
Vive Trigger / Touch Grip: Take/Interact
Vive Grip / Touch A : Teleport (Touch A is EVRButtonId.k_EButton_A)
Vive Touchpad / Touch Trigger: Use
Vive ApplicationMenu / Touch ApplicationMenu: App Menu
HTH.
Thank you so much! This is very helpful. Given your info, I’d like to indicate Oculus support on the Steam store but I’m still a little hesitant given that the SteamVR plugin I’m using (1.0.8) came out before the consumer touch controllers were released. If possible, can you verify that the aforementioned version of SteamVR does in fact support touch (as you’ve described)? Thanks again.
Sorry, I can’t do that.
We are using the SteamVR plugin 1.1.1 (which came out Jul 28, 2016 and thus also before the Touch controllers). I can tell you that it did NOT work with that version, but then some changes were made entirely on the SteamVR side and now it works (means a SteamVR update solved the problems. We did not have to do anything).
I would suggest finding someone with a Rift and let them test-drive.
Thanks much!