Regardless to how actual sales have turned out, there is no question that VR support is now one of the hot button must have features for a game engine. The folks over at Silicon Studios, the makers of the Xenko Game Engine (previously Paradox3d) are aware of this trend and have made VR development a priority. They recently released a blog post about the future of the Xenko engine, and VR specifically.
From the post:
Therefore, we are now 100% on track to support VR in Xenko. So, what does this mean? First of all, the technology hints were in place before the decision was made in July. Important rendering, lighting, and audio features were already in place or planned to soon to be in place. For instance, Forward Clustered rendering, touted as the best rendering for VR, is now supported, our support for Oculus Rift is in place, our performant multithreading and back-end support of next generation APIs such as Vulkan smooths the way for AAA style VR games needing the best possible performance, and last but not least, we are working on adding HRTF support to our audio system to accommodate a sense called proprioception, necessary for a true VR audio experience.
In conclusion, let’s not bury the lead here: the game industry disruption caused by this race to widely support VR, trough of disappointment or not, is the reason why Xenko is now on track to become the first built-from-scratch comprehensive VR engine for game developers.
When? Soon.
Is VR a must have feature for you when evaluating an engine these days? If you’ve never heard of the Xenko engine, I featured it in the Closer Look game engine series when it was still called the Paradox engine. In fact we also did a short tutorial series on using the engine.