Day Twelve With The Oculus Rift - War Thunder

This time round I took to Twitter to see what people could recommend that I try on my Oculus Rift. One suggestion was that I try out an aerial combat game, War Thunder.

A recent forum posting had been made on their forums showing how to get the game running in the Rift so I saved the link and set the game downloading (it's free) when I got home from work.

I wasn't quite expecting the game's download to be so huge! Not only did I have to wait for the game to download almostt 6GB of assets but they downloaded at about 0.5MB/s so it took a good few hours.

When it was done and I'd eaten and put the kids to bed, I loaded up the game to have a quick play. I worked through the quick tutorial and found a funny part where I was prompted to press my middle mouse button to target enemies. My Apple Magic Mouse doesn't have a middle button (well technically it only has one button, but it doesn't expose a simulated middle button click. I failed this step in the tutorial a few times, searched how to enable middle button support, gave up, then looked in the game options. I then found out that I could press X to target the planes, did that and finished the rest of the tutorial.

I then went back to the forum post:

http://forum.warthunder.com/index.php?/topic/36262-oculus-rift-setup-guide/

I started reading it and downloaded the files attached to the post, visited the link for the 3rd party 3D driver then read through all the set up instructions. I realised this was not some simple download-and-run VR experience. I would have to calibrate the game to be used with the 3rd party driver, hop in and out of the game, change configs, run programs side-by-side with the game... It all just looked a bit too much. I just wanted to try something cool on my Rift but couldn't be bothered with the complex set-up.

So, I had another little play with Doom 3 BFG and got a little further. I've also downloaded Unity and intend to have a play around with that (but want to get Positron released first!). I might come back to War Thunder in a few days if I have more time as I imagine it would be good in the Rift if it's set up properly.

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