Real Garage Games...

I few days ago I posted a blog about Beach Ball Break with a little blurb about Leroy Baynum getting back in contact with me. We met last year just before IGC. I thought of our meeting as a sort of prelude to IGC. After going to IGC I realized that was the perfect way to think about it. Leroy along with everyone I met at IGC ended up feeling like some long lost brother/family member ... we just clicked!

Back in October Leroy helped me test the kinks out of Oust and Aerial Antics Reboost (the multiplayer prototype I demo'd at IGC also). It was all good and I could tell we both had the same passion and tenacious attitude toward getting things done. I was definitely keen on working with this guy on something ... the question was what and how?

The first night we met Leroy had showed me two of his VR machines, which were operating out of a local arcade down at the beach. One was a non-interactive theatre type experience and the other was the traditional pod, helmet, and hand controller. The games on the pod machine of course were less than desirable. Leroy had hinted that the games I had worked on such as Aerial Antics and Oust would be great for VR ... what with all the high jumps/flight etc... they really might give you the whoozies once you put the helmet on.

I have to admit initially a lot of what Leroy spoke of with regard to VR sounded too difficult and costly for us to pull off. Generally speaking I'm fairly conservative with what I choose to try and tackle. I like to make sure I don't get involved with a project I cannot complete and this VR stuff definitely had a lot of intricacies involved.

After IGC I spoke with Leroy a few more times but I got busy with flooring work and he took on a full time government job so we fell out of contact for a while, although we had planned to sometime get to work together on a project it started to look like it might never happen.

Well, this past weekend Leroy emailed me and then we talked on the phone a bit and finally got back together. I went over his place where his whole network and two workhorse machines are literally in his GARAGE! Initially, I just played around with a Torque build he had where he linked VRPN into Torque and then overwrote the mouse functionality with that of the head tracker. This was pretty convincing for certain but there were a few things just plain missing from the player class such as head roll and dynamic animation of the head. On the Torque front we're working toward a new VR player class, which has the head and hand units tracked separately.

Now for the part that's really exciting for me. Back a few months ago we talked about how cool Aerial Antics would be in VR but I was a bit skeptical of it being a first person game. The first night in the GARAGE we revisited the idea and came to the conclusion that Aerial Antics was perfect for VR because you don't use your legs which usually ends up being the aspect of VR that doesn't work too well.

Bottom-line, I spent the last 3 days reworking Aerial Antics to be played from the first person perspective and writing a .dll to wrap the VRPN functions into the Aerial Antics engine. Going from 0 knowledge of VRPN to actually having it control Aerial Antics wasn't that easy and I spent a ludicrous amount of time fighting with the linker in Visual because various builds of VRPN didn't work right and then the documentation wasn't in sync for the build that linked properly.

However, in the middle of our work time today we were finally playing Aerial Antics in VR and it was absolutely kick ass! Leroy at one point was flying and looking out across the water over his left shoulder ... by the time he decided to turn around and face forward he was upon a tree at which point he screamed and fell out of his chair!

I now present Leroy and Aerial Antics Reboost VR:

Leroy - "Hey was that building always there?"


Pay close attention to the Matrix like plug on the back of the VR Helmet hmmm ...



Notice the tree and motion blur on this one because Leroy has knocked me back after falling out of his chair ;)




The VR experience in Aerial Antics was by far the best I've ever had and just playing the game for 5 minutes was worth the last 3 days. For the most part it really made a big difference just to switch AA to a first person perspective ... even with just the mouse controlling the head but by going all the way to real VR (real virtual reality ... hmmm lol) it really made the game come alive.

Not bad for literally working out of a garage if I do say so myself ;)

More to come ... much more!