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Simple Hack Enables VR Mode For Oculus Rift In Alien: Isolation

Posted by samzenpus on from the like-it's-in-your-living-room dept.

An anonymous reader writes In a surprising appearance at E3 2014, Oculus showed a virtual reality demo version of Creative Assembly's forthcoming first-person horror game, Alien: Isolation. Despite intense reactions to the demo, the publisher stated that the full game would not feature Oculus Rift support. However, intentional or not, the developer left the code hidden in the game which can be enabled with a simple hack, leading to full support for the Oculus Rift including positional tracking.

10 of 57 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Penalty if caught? by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 2

    Games who uses this can be changed under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and be come felons

  2. The point? by master_kaos · · Score: 2

    SO if all it is is basically an ini hack, and it works flawlessly, what would be a reason that the developer would not have it enabled by default? (And I am assuming not to release DLC later since they left the code in the game)
    If it was unstable, or sucked I could understand why.. but if they had it working I don't follow the logic.

    1. Re:The point? by peragrin · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Who says it always works flawlessly? have they played through the entire game several times? maybe there is crash code or places where you can literally get stuck in a wall.

      Lastly it isn't like you can go buy an oculus at best buy. Maybe they haven't fully tested the system. maybe they are waiting on oculus to actually release a product to consumers. Instead of a small beta tester pool.

      --
      i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
    2. Re: The point? by Wycliffe · · Score: 2

      Sinister conspiracy?? I vote money was someone involved. Maybe they wanted money from oculus rift or
      oculus rift wanted money from them. Maybe they wanted to do more testing or charge extra for it as an
      addon later. I bet in one form or another it can be traced back to money.

    3. Re:The point? by NitsujTPU · · Score: 2

      I could offer a handful of reasons, but the top one would be that they don't want to maintain it. Probably, the developers had Rifts, they wanted to play around with the tech, and they were gambling a bit on the development of the Rift during the development of the game engine (the right time to get involved, if you want to be first-to-market, so a smart move).

      However, very few people own Rifts, and so if they left this in, Rift users finding bugs and incompletely-tested code would need to be supported (otherwise, PR nightmare).

      When people use the "hack," they have the company has the option of saying, "That's not officially supported, you had to change things in order to do it." So, when there are bugs and things that don't work very well, the company has its hands clean, the enthusiasts still get to fool around with their early-adopter toy, and the company looks better in the long run.

    4. Re:The point? by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 2

      Yeah, let's just write some code and assume it works as it intended. What could possibly go wrong?

      --
      systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
    5. Re: The point? by i+kan+reed · · Score: 2

      Official support, though, does mean people calling your useless tech support. And taking their time.

    6. Re:The point? by i+kan+reed · · Score: 2

      If you just mod the camera behavior to use an additional input, you leave out a lot of important things.

      1. The game has a "lean out of cover" button. When you physically lean, the game would need to discern if you're leaning out of cover enough to count for gameplay purposes.
      2. There's 2 extra rendering steps to get the screen content to match up with the optics' skewing. Small problem, but still one that needs to be embedded in the code.
      3. The framerate has to be really high to not cause motion sickness.

    7. Re: The point? by kactusotp · · Score: 2
      I think you are correct.

      I read a thread on reddit where people were playing it on the rift and basically the entire UI, computer terminals etc were unusable. Also those cinematic bits where the game moves your vision around is really disorientating within the rift. Add to that a couple of bugs that require the unit to be recalibrated a couple of time an hour and you have enough reasons to axe it.

      Rift support was probably one of those "nice to have" things but meant more work so it was simpler just to drop support.

  3. First VR related death in by Kryptonut · · Score: 2

    5....4....3....2.....1.....