Today I was torn between trying Hawken or Doom 3 BFG but I went with the latter as it's one of my old favourites. The BFG version of Doom 3 includes slightly improved visuals over the original, extra missions that never made it in the original release and a few other extras (like stereoscopic rendering) which make it perfect for the Rift.

Unfortunately, when John Carmack originally added Rift support in to the game the SDK was completely different. It was all hard coded to work with the original prototype units and doesn't work correctly with the new Developer Kits. Since the source is available however some clever modders have taken it upon themselves to put the Oculus code back in to the game and have released the binaries so we can use them in our Doom 3 BFG installations.

Read the full article...

Yesterday I didn't have much time to play with the Rift but I did manage to play a little Half-Life 2. Since I've already covered Half-Life 2 in my configuration efforts in previous days I think I'll just show some pretty cool parts from the start of the game which look particularly good when wearing the Rift.

Read the full article...

So today I really wanted to try out Portal with the Rift. Unfortunately Valve have not rolled out Rift support to titles like Portal, Portal 2, Left 4 Dead, or Left 4 Dead 2, so the only option currently is to use the Vireio driver.

After my less than optimal experience with the driver on previous days I looked in to the SHOCT calibration some more, read through the whole guide on how to properly calibrate it and loaded up Portal.

Read the full article...

Today I had a little more spare time so I took the time to check out the new Minecrift (yes that's how it's spelt) mod for Minecraft. It's not exactly the most straight-forward thing to install since you have to modify your minecraft.jar file and install some VC++ 2012 runtime packages but once I got it running it worked surprisingly well in-game.

Read the full article...

Yesterday I decided not to play with the Rift after work as I'd felt a bit ill all day and didn't want to make it worse, so to cover my third day with the Rift I think I'll share a few observations I've made during my first two days using the device.

Read the full article...

Following on from Day One and my severe nausea, I decided to have a go at calibrating the Rift to try and improve my experience.

First up I wanted to try out Team Fortress 2 and I knew it had an in-built calibration tool which is supposed to be able to accurately determine your IPD (Interpupillary Distance) which as I mentioned in the previous article, helps to accurately place the virtual cameras to simulate your own eyes looking in to the 3D scene.

Read the full article...

My Oculus Rift turned up a couple of days ago and I got it all set up and played around with it for a while yesterday morning.

The Rift itself is pretty easy to set up, the control box attached to the headset has power, USB and HDMI connections which all need plugged in and then you switch it on. The PC (or in this case my iMac running Windows 7 via bootcamp with an HDMI->DisplayPort adapter) will auto switch to 1280x800 and mirror the rift screen to the monitor.

Read the full article...

It's been a while since I posted a movie review and I recently took my Daughter Willow to see Iron Man 3 so figured I'd write up my thoughts on the film.

Please note there will be spoilers in this review but I'll try not and spoil anything major for those who want to read the review before seeing the movie.

So, first of all, I loved the whole movie. It had the right mix of action, drama, and comedy we've come to expect from the Iron Man and Marvel movies over the past few years.

Read the full article...

I see hundreds of developers these days using the 'Indie' label and personally I feel they're creating confusion by grouping themselves with much more established studios with much higher production values. It's something I've been wanting to comment on for a while and here I'll state my personal opinion and I ask those reading to comment if you agree or disagree with what I have to say.

Read the full article...

This whole process has annoyed me so much that I decided I'd make my first proper blog post of the year about it;

The Kids' PC buggered up about a month or two ago and having had a quick look at it I came to the conclusion that one of the sticks of RAM was bad (Damien kept turning the PC on and off one day as it wouldn't boot).

Read the full article...