It's been a little while since my last post. I've actually still been trying demos but have also been working on Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force Rift which is coming along nicely.

A few days ago I received an email from Ralf Ostertag the creator of vorpX with an invitation to try out the latest beta of his 3D driver.

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It's been a while since I posted my previous entry in this series, I've spent the last few weeks working very hard on Positron and Z: Steel Soldiers. I've literally had no time to even check out any new Rift demos.

Then late lastnight just before bed I saw someone mention on Facebook that the -vr flag now works in Portal, so I just had to check it out this morning!

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Today was more of a development day, having been in at work for most of the day I got home and was in the mood for some more coding so I loaded up the Elite Force Rift solution and got the ioSTVEF VM compiling, was pleasantly surprised that the patches worked even though the ioQuake3 source has changed somewhat since ioSTVEF was last updated.

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Didn't have much time to play with the Rift today, got a major milestone to reach on a project at work and have been working on that in my own time too.

I did however find a little time to try out a little racing game but unfortunately had issues with it. Fortunately though my T Shirt and poster arrived!

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There really seems to be a lot more demos popping up over the past few days and not only that but some of the earlier demos are now receiving updates which is cool so there's plenty of new stuff to try.

I downloaded Unity for the first time this weekend and had a quick look over it. As a professional games programmer I've always dismissed Unity as a tool for those who aren't capable of programming a game from the ground up themselves but the recent demos I've been seeing have been quite impressive hence the reason I've decided to give it a chance.

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First, let me start by saying Proton Pulse is my favourite Rift experience thus far! It's simply amazing and is a shining example of what the Rift was built for.

With its bright neon VR graphics it immerses you in the game world where you simply use your head to control a virtual paddle in what is effectively a 3D game of breakout.

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After trying Jamulus Rift, another little demo I saw posted on the Oculus forums was a small space based shooter called Space Cadet.

I downloaded the game and tried it out. I spent a minute trying to figure out how to control my space craft before realising that it was fixed on a 2D plane within 3D space. This works well but I'd still love to play a full 3D space flight game with my Rift.

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Today I noticed a few new demos had popped up on the Oculus Forums and the Oculus sub-reddit. One that caught my eye was a game jam entry entitled Jamulus Rift.

The game is a lane based racing game in similar style to say Audio Surf or Switch Galaxy.

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Since FRAPS seemed to work pretty well yesterday recording some Doom 3 BFG footage, I decided today I'd record some gameplay from Half-Life 2.

I've not get too far in to the game just yet, only been playing in short bursts but during this 12 minutes I recorded I came up against the first few rounds of Manhacks.

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This time round I had intended to try out one of my old Doom 3 maps with Doom 3 BFG but after downloading it and dropping it in to the game directory I came up against a couple of problems.

Firstly I couldn't access the console, a quick Google search showed me how to do that from command line. Then on loading the map it gave me an error due to incorrect format of a monster model in the game.

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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.

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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.

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Just a small update today compared to previous days since I had a lot of work to do. I was going to try out my old Doom 3 maps but saw in my downloads directory I had a demo called Zombies On The Holodeck.

I was surprised I hadn't tried this one yet so unzipped it and had a quick go. This is another little game made in Unity but it's actually a pretty nice wave-based zombie survival shooter.

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Today I wanted to try out a few more demos but after looking through most of the lists of what was available to download I have to say I was a little disappointed that most of it looked either pretty basic, or doesn't quite have proper support for the Rift yet. I did manage to try a few small demos but in the end I had another 10 minutes on Doom 3, now in Mars City just after all hell breaks loose.

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Today I thought I'd experiment a bit with a few of the smaller demos being developed by the Oculus Rift community.

Rather annoyingly it's actually pretty hard to find downloads for the demos that are available. There are various forums out there with threads and videos but in the end I found riftenabled.com which gives a nice list of games in development or released with the download links.

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I had intended to write about Hawken and Doom 3 again today but FRAPS seemed to stop capturing my screenshots so instead I thought I'd check out one of the smaller demo apps I'd downloaded.

Museum of the Microstar is a visually impressive Unity-made application which is set inside a futuristic museum, teaching the history of the Earth and it's destruction.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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