Tips and Tricks for Oculus Quest Development with Unreal Engine 4(.25.3 — .26.1) Part 2
I spent a fair bit of time after my last article gathering up feedback with regards to Oculus Quest development. Since then, Oculus has dropped the 4.26.1 developer build of Unreal Engine, which I am working through right now.
In this post,I will be address the following topics:
Project Setup
Android Setup
Source Control (Perforce)
Virtual Reality Frameworks
The best, current guide for project setup can be found on the Oculus Develop blogs here:
Some of these options may change with your particular game setup, but this is a good place to start, especially if you are more of a beginning and don’t quite understand some of the jargon associated with Unreal Engine 4.
One of the key points to consider is whether to use a standard Unreal installation (from the launcher) or to use the Oculus branch of Unreal Engine, which has extra, Oculus only features and appears, at least anecdotally, to build more reliably. For our purpose, we will use the Oculus branch, which may be found here:
https://github.com/Oculus-VR/UnrealEngine
If you receive a 404 error, you need to execute the following instructions to receive access to the Oculus Github branch:
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/ue4-on-github
The guide for Unreal 4 setup for Android (step by step tutorial, accurate as of 4.26 Oculus Dev Branch. This tutorial is absolutely outstanding, and works for 4.25.1 through 4.26.
With this tutorial, you will have a working installation of the Unreal Oculus dev branch engine, as well as have your project configured to build appropriately.
Next on our list of best practices is to set up source control. If you are willing, you can set up a local server using any of the Unreal 4 supported options. I prefer a off-premises server (i.e. the Cloud), especially due to a recent issue I had with a simultaneous project corruption and failure of my local source control server.
The best (in terms of money) option I have been able to source is Digital Ocean, coming in at roughly $15 a month for 150 GB of storage and source control. This outcompetes the next available off-prem offering from Assembla, which is $45 for hosting (and the support staff at Assembla are mind-shatteringly inept)
Guide to set up Perforce Source Control on Digital Ocean:
So now, we have a project that can build, source control, and appropriate settings throughout. Where to now?
Now, I understand some people may have a different perspective than I do, but I firmly believe that time is money, therefore I prefer to use a VR framework for my projects. The two I found most appropriate for my purposes are:
The Virtual Reality Expansion Toolkit by MordenTral
This is a free VR toolkit that provides a lot of great base functionality and has a great support forum on Discord.
The Advanced Framework by Human Codeable
This framework currently goes for $150 on the Unreal Marketplace, but has a lot of functionality to offer, particularly for a variety of project types and also has an active developer Discord.
Once you decide on whether to use a framework, or *if* to use a framework, you can roll into deciding what type of game or project to develop. For the next blog post, we will dig into debugging tips and tricks, especially those designed to maximize the amount of time you spend coding and limiting how much time you spend putting on and taking off your headset.
Until then!
