One of the things that motion controllers have helped popularize is the fitness gaming category. We've seen it on consoles and the PC alike, and it's a trend that isn't going away. Just the opposite, there are new products coming out to make gaming even more physical. While at GDC, we stopped by to check one of them out -- the Realm resistance training controller, which is intended to make you forget you're getting a workout.
Whether it's slashing zombies with a knife or boxing an opponent, the greater the force you put into your swings, the harder you'll hit your virtual opponent. According to Realm, the fitness benefit is simply a byproduct of playing whatever particular title has you working up a sweat.
The controller consists of a strap that goes around your waist. Hand grips attach to both sides. Inside the hand grips are a bunch of sensors that communicate with a camera, be it a Kinect or a webcam, to measure how much force is being used when you flail about. It's also a wireless control scheme that communicates with a USB dongle.
Take a peek at the first game using Oxide's Nitrous engine
The future of AMD's Mantle is up in the air since AMD recently told developers to focus on DirectX 12 instead. However, it doesn't appear as though AMD is ready to completely dismantle its API, which will have a future in Vulkan, the next version of the OpenGL API. You may recall that Oxide Games was a big proponent of Mantle -- check out our interview from a year ago. How does Oxide feel today? To find out, we headed to Oxide's booth at GDC and talked about a number of things.
The first thing Oxide showed us was a forthcoming game called Ashes of the Singularity. It's a massively large RTS game developed with Stardock and the first to use Oxide's Nitrous engine, which the company claims can render 10,000 individual units at the same time. The goal with Ashes of the Singularity (other than to make money, of course) is to bring "an unprecedented scale" to the RTS category.
Oxide tells us the Nitrous engine has been ported to DX12. The company is also working with Vulkan to make sure it emerges as a top class API. Unfortunately, Oxide wasn't willing to divulge much about Vulkan at this early stage.
One thing gamers with high-end rigs will be happy to know is that Oxide developed Ashes of the Singularity to take advantage of top-shelf hardware, if you have it. The beefier your rig, the more settings you can crank up. On the flipside, owners of lower end hardware can dial things down for a playable experience.
Early Access will be available this summer, and if all goes well, the game will release this winter. Here's more.
Epic Games earlier this week announced that it was dropping its subscription fee to license Unreal Engine 4. Now instead of paying $19 per month on top of any applicable royalties, developers can dive in and get access to UE4's complete C++ source code hosted on GitHub. They can even make a little bit of pocket change without sharing the wealth -- up to $3,000. After that, a 5 percent royalty per quarter applies. Not a bad deal, and we caught up with Epic at GDC to talk about this and more.
General Manager Ray Davis was manning Epic's booth. He explained that the subscription removal and 5 percent royalty above $3,000 is designed to remove any barriers that developers might have from using UE4. Not all projects are going to be hits, and so Epic set up a model where it succeeds when and only if developers succeed.
"These days there's a wide diversity of developers and the types of products we're going for and so we want to make sure that there's no friction for people to get started, to pick up the tools and start actually building whatever their idea may be," Davis explained.
Davis also touched on UE4 supporting multiple VR technologies, including the new Steam VR hardware, Oculus Rift, and others. With so many hardware options, we asked if he was concerned about a standards war. For right now the answer is no, as Davis noted that until there's a clear de facto standard, they're all helping to push VR forward.
Here's more:
We also have some footage of Epic's Crescent Bay Unreal Engine demo. Here it is:
What is it like to experience VR's latest prototype called "Crescent Bay?" How does it feel to have a T-Rex breathe down your neck as you stand in a pile of her unhatched eggs? Does the T-Rex really have a walnut-sized brain? Awesome, scary, and watch Land of the Lost. Those are our quick answers if you're in a rush. For everyone else, let us elaborate a bit about what we saw at GDC.
We stopped by Crytek's booth to check out its T-Rex demo, which is a modernized version of Dinosaur Island, a 14-year-old demo that was originally designed to show what Crytek could do with graphics. Crytek overhauled the graphics and cleaned it up for a VR demonstration using CryEngine. The response was so overwhelming positive that Crytek extended the demo to three and a half minutes for GDC, while collaborating with Oculus VR.
Here's a look at the demo in action:
So, why doesn't the T-Rex go postal in the above demo and swallow us whole? The demo is actually in the perspective of a baby dinosaur that just hatched. You're surrounded by unhatched siblings when all of a sudden the mother T-Rex comes charging over to investigate.
We spoke with Crytek's director of production, David Bowman, who told us that the responses from the T-Rex demo have been mixed. Some people have yelled when the dinosaur comes running up to them, others have tried to play it cool before flinching, and yet others have tried to crouch down and hide behind an egg. All of these are natural responses to what's ultimately a realistic VR experience.
Bowman wasn't allowed to talk about Crescent Bay's hardware, but one thing he noted, and that we experienced, is the lack of nausea. Of course, this is a standing a demo without a lot of motion, but previous to Crescent Bay, a user might feel nauseous by swinging his or her head from side to side.
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Adding physicality to gaming
Take a peek at the first game using Oxide's Nitrous engine
An Epic perspective on VR
Going face to face with a T-Rex
