According to Gunnarsson, the game is technically ready for online play as it stands right now, though it still needs some work before it can be functional outside of a dev setting. It is a multiplayer game after all, but the FanFest demo was built around local play only. There is, of course, the obvious question of how EVR might be fitted with netcode to work with online play. “Leveraging the stereoscopic view to give you the sense that you’re there getting the scale of the cockpit right, getting the sense of the glass over you… all of these things are things you don’t need to deal with when you’re doing a flat 2D game.” Gunnarsson is quick to admit that EVR is very much a “work-in-progress.” So you need to find slightly different ways of doing it, so they actually have volume and you can feel them.” They don’t work in VR they just look flat. “Another challenge is cheating with visual effects. It doesn’t work in VR, so you have to find new ways of doing UI that actually make sense,” Gunnarsson explains, citing one example. “Like, how do you do UI in VR? Traditionally you place things at the axes of the screen or at the top and bottom. You’ve got a situation where these tech-minded developers are solving for problems that no one else has tried to tackle before. It’s not that the programming is hard it’s the creating. Unity is a flexible game engine, and a surprisingly powerful one given how scalable it is, but creating something for Oculus VR to play introduces some unique challenges on the interface side. We just met after work and we had loads of ideas, and then the prototype was working later that night. For me, Unity was the key thing that allowed us to do that. We had a few internal CCP demos where we just invited everyone to the dining hall to come play the game, and people were really liking it. “In one week we had something running, and from that point onward the game changed every day, every two days. “We started inputting in assets from EVE, did some network coding, got the multiplayer running really early on,” Gunnarsson says.
By the end of the first week, the team had a prototype that was in a playable state that’s the moment when EVR went from a hobby project to something serious. “ Wing Commander, TIE Fighter, Freelancer, Battlestar Galactica fights, Star Citizen… all of these things that we wanted to fit into the EVE universe,” he says. Gunnarsson rattles off a rapid-fire list of titles that inspired the team’s efforts. They were building something that excited them on a personal level. The game was built almost completely from scratch over the course of seven weeks, with much of the work being put in during off-hours and weekends. From that point onward we started actual development.” Early this year we were playing around with tools in Unity when we got in touch with the Oculus guys and got a very early alpha version of the kit. We weren’t convinced how good it would actually be. “Last year was more ideas because we didn’t have a dev kit and hadn’t seen ourselves. “So it snowballed,” Gunnarsson says, grinning. In retrospect, it seems obvious: EVE Online is a game of ship-to-ship space combat, so wouldn’t it be cool to hop directly into the cockpit of one of the game’s fighter craft? Image used with permission by copyright holder The first challenge was figuring out what the heck to do. A core team of four people took on the bulk of the work, with around 10 others contributing in various ways, at various times. Word spread quickly and it wasn’t long before Gunnarsson and Clarke were joined by others. We both were day one backers of the Kickstarter and we started talking.”
“Slowly, over the summer and the following fall, I started checking with people. “I wanted to pull people together to do something with me,” he continues. “ I’ve been waiting for VR to become a good thing for two decades now, so I was excited,” Gunnarson tells us in an informal EVE FanFest 2013 chat while a mob of fans waited patiently behind him for their chance to try the game. The journey to EVR began in 2012 when reports started coming out of E3 about this crazy VR headset that id Software’s John Carmack was showing off to select members of the press.
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