Day Thirteen With The Oculus Rift - Rift Racer

Having tried an earlier build of Rift Racer last week I have to say I was very pleased to see the developer of the small sandbox racing demo had updated it to include two new maps!

Rift Racers v4 now includes a small city map to race around it and a small race track.

Upon loading the demo and entering the city I saw the same familiar vehicles that were in the first demo (but as far as I can tell they're not drivable which is a shame). I also noticed a problem with the skybox which looks like it's being rendered as a physical cube around the world rather than a proper skybox and the depth buffer is rejecting pixels that are too far away. Easy fix for their next update though.



I noticed the devs had stated it worked well with an Xbox 360 game controller. I just happen to use one of those with my own game Positron so decided to give it a go. I mapped the buttons but unfortunately found that using the right trigger to drive actually ended up reversing, so I then had to set accelerate and reverse to use two of the face buttons instead.

Back to game, I dropped back in the city map and had a good drive around. There were a few more glitches but overall it's pretty nice considering they've put it together in a few days. A few things I noticed were that you can drive on top of the river which looks a bit weird, and the skybox depth issue becomes more apparent when you're near the edge of the map.



Overall it's a pretty nice improvement over the previous version but it still gets boring quick. Maybe with some AI cars in the city or an actual timed mode on the racetrack it'd be more game-like. I look forward to seeing how they update it in the future.



You can download Rift Racer direct from the Decane websitehere:
http://www.decane.net/game/oculus-rift/riftracer/

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