Quake4XR: Proof of Life (Development Update)

Dr. Beef, as he usually is, was entirely right in terms of the feel of getting VR working in the native ports. We are the petulant child who won't accept the round peg doesn't fit in the square hole and just keeps bashing them together until they do.

Any modern port of a classic engine changes the core code significantly. At this point Quake4VR is based on at least 6 different interpretations that all represent a variety of shapes all trying to fit in the same hole. Quite often the code forks at a certain point historically so it’s not a simple case of 'this code is newer than this'; they are both different and often do different things. This long moan is to say, despite me giving it a 'A' difficulty rating, it’s been a busy and often challenging week.

I'd actually stopped Wednesday morning at 4am, sent Dr. Beef and Bummser a grumbly message about giving up and dreamed the whole night about code moving backward and forwards. Thursday evening I was back on it, in what I can only surmise is why my shrink wrote the word 'obsessed' in her notes and underlined it twice, in red ink.

So after a eye-watering 16,923 code line additions and one 266,869 line refactor (titled 'Operation Clusterf*&k' in my version control), I screamed the obligatory "It's Alive" maniacally this afternoon as Quake4XR lives!

Multiview multi-threaded stereo rendering is active as is sound, FMVs and immersive cinematics. Controls seem fine as does the flat "Big-Screen" view for the menu.

So what's in the way of getting your beautiful little Patreon fingers on a playable build?

> There is an issues with fonts in the menu which makes it very hard to navigate. I need to see why these aren't being read by the engine.

> Need to now hook up a few things from the game library for controls / camera behaviour.

... and that's about it for at least a early alpha in-development look. It will need the usual Team Beef enhancements to be the best VR experience possible (see Dr. Beef's upcoming JK update for a perfect example). I can't wait to share it with you. The graphics in VR look fantastic, really in our opinion some of the best graphics you can get in standalone VR. I also realised I'd never played this game so was kind of shocked when the floating corpse of a space marine floated 30cms in front of my face in the opening sequence.

- BaggyG