UEVR, or the Universal Unreal Engine VR Mod by [praydog] is made possible by some pretty neat software tricks. Reverse engineering concepts and advanced techniques used in game hacking are leveraged to add VR support, including motion controls, to applicable Unreal Engine games.
The UEVR project is a real-world application of various ideas and concepts, and the results are impressive. One can easily not only make a game render in VR, but it also handles managing the player’s perspective (there are options for attaching the camera view to game objects, for example) and also sensibly maps inputs from VR controllers to whatever the game is expecting. This isn’t the first piece of software that attempts to convert flatscreen software to VR, but it’s by far the most impressive.
There is an in-depth discussion of the techniques used to sensibly and effectively locate and manipulate game elements, not for nefarious purposes, but to enable impressive on-demand VR mods in a semi-automated manner. (Although naturally, some anti-cheat software considers this to be nefarious.)
Many of the most interesting innovations in VR rely on some form of modding, from magic in Skyrim that depends on your actual state of mind to adding DIY eye tracking to headsets in a surprisingly effective, modular, and low-cost way. As usual, to find cutting-edge experimentation, look to the modding community.
Can I play Doom in VR with it?
DOOM is ID Tech, not Unreal, so unfortunately no.
If you mean the original Doom games, that already exists on the sidequest launcher, it’s called QuestZDoom https://sidequestvr.com/app/796/questzdoom
Ok this sounds like something I’m going to have to look into. Though I have to say I don’t know what title to consider, off the top of my head I don’t think that many if any of the games I’d most like are actually using the Unreal Engine common as it is (or they already just do a VR version anyway).
Here is their list of tested games. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZcjCQwzPOltaRZnpYU5_HPihEDareZq_0Ww1DZQ4USw/edit#gid=0
They also have a software that detects Unreal 4 and 5 games already on your PC and displays them, because nobody can keep track of them all.
Wake me up, when a a.i. is turning a gameboy mario game into 3d vr game.
That’s an interesting question. Like with AI art, is it ethical to take a highly curated experience that the designer went to great lengths to deliver and warp it to your own desires without compensating them?
Absolutely, it’s your game, it’s just like hacking a console, they shouldn’t have the right to stop you from personalising it to your own desire and needs
It’s going to look like an LSD trip anyhow, so who cares?
What’s about a Nintendo 3DS emulator? https://www.uploadvr.com/quest-3ds-emulator-citra-vr/
“Turns games into VR”, first random video I check (from the tested games spreadsheet) shows a 3th person camera and a HUD that is usually out of vision range. And that is listed as “works perfect”. So, it turns the camera into VR, not the gameplay.
This is what people don’t seem to want to acknowledge about this kind of mod (along with how this is hardly the first project to try this sort of thing). Individual mods lovingly crafted to bring a title into VR, along with good motion options and solid VR centered controls and HUDS and cinematics carefully transfered to be visible and useable are a far cry from sloppily throwing a second view from a slightly different angle and controlling the camera through headset position into a bulk of games with no concern at all over tue actual play of a single one of those games beyond the most basic pass/fail of whether the game meets the low threshold of being viewable (note I did not say playable) in VR. I have seen so much excitement over this mod, but it feels like it really detracts from the real efforts of individual and lovingly crafted mods while legitimizing the “slap some VR on this game” approach that supposedly put games like Fallout 4 into VR years ago but were and are widely recognized as nearly unplayable without (those same, individualized) mods.
I guess we have to sort this out again now that VR is going from niche to comparatively more mainstream while devs are
seeing past the initial excitement of “something new” and sorting out whether they can still afford to throw time and resources at any but the most successful existing VR franchises or the worst shovelware. There are some great VR games being produced, but the flood of novel ideas for VR has cut to a small stream and so we must once again bring out the idea that any game can be VR with enough brute force. It’s a bit painful to watch, but hopefully we will see more people understand that VR is more than head tracking and stereoscopic camera views by the end of it.
I don’t think there is any suggestion that any game can seriously be trivially made as good in a VR HMD as a curated VR experience. But that doesn’t make the effort to make it possible at all bad, or the experiences you can probably create for yourself out of that game bad even when its a less than perfect result – heck it is quite possibly going to be fun just to see some of the hacks that get you a performant/pretty ‘3D’ game on the 2D plane of a monitor revealed by changing how its rendered to a more real facsimile of 3D, but its also a step in the right direction for creating a good VR mod, assuming that game concept can be worked into VR.
Absolutely agree. I think this would be a large enough stepping stone to be the primary mod for a game. Make it easy to turn it into VR and the other modders (like Skyrim) will follow. Personally if it doesn’t have a teleport movement I won’t be able to play it without a lot of discomfort after an hour (and ultimately completely abandoning it) but it’s a step in the right direction to dual system compatibility.
There is a lot more to this tool than these comments are implying. Yes, out of the box it is “just” stereoscopic 3D and 6DOF head tracking which looks exactly like a native UE4 game in VR. But there is an entire framework behind this to add motion controls that the user creates. There’s an entire system within the menu to attach in game objects to the user’s hands, and attach the camera to objects, make meshes invisible. People have made profiles without any code involved to turn Returnal and other games into first person, with motion controls.
This isn’t even mentioning the API behind this that modders are already taking advantage of. They are creating more bespoke experiences that you would be expecting from a VR game, on top of the base that this tool provides which has been the missing piece for modifying these individual games in UE.
Also check out helixmod: https://helixmod.blogspot.com/
As a simple gamer, not a programmer, I don’t see why games can’t be so easily converted to VR. If games can have 2 player split screen it can already render two different viewpoints. So surely those viewpoints can be linked together for each eye. Surely it could be as simple as that for some games and genres.