Expand support for VR

Feature Requests Engine Features
#1

As I’m sure many people are aware, VR is becoming more and more prevalent in the average home. With headsets like the Oculus Quest and Oculus Go, you no longer need a powerful PC or annoying lighthouses for an enjoyable VR experience - you don’t even need a phone, it’s all built into the headset!

Games like Beat Saber and Job Simulator have both sold over 1 million copies. This is not a small and niche thing anymore - it’s growing rapidly.

I seriously think that Roblox has made an enormous mistake, not putting more time and money into VR support. Headset support is weak, it’s buggy, and the default VR character controller is, frankly, horrible (little to no customisation and feels weird when playing). It’s also confusing and clunky to add support for VR to our games.

There are two main reasons why I think next to no one plays Roblox in VR:

  • Lack of support in games. It’s way too tricky and time-consuming for a developer to add VR support because the workflow of doing it is very complicated and clunky - usually not worth the time. I think if Roblox provided a far more streamlined set of tools to develop for VR, then this problem could finally be solved.

  • Lack of headset support. Currently, the only headsets that Roblox officially support are the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. There is support for Windows Mixed Reality (that’s what I have, it works on Roblox) but it isn’t mentioned on the support site so I won’t say it here. Most people can’t use VR on Roblox because it only natively supports high-end headsets discussed above. These can be pretty expensive and need an expensive high-end computer to run - it’s not just the headset! If Roblox added broader support for lower-end headsets like the Oculus Quest, Oculus Go and Google Cardboard, then I think that not only will more users be able to use VR, but more developers can test their games with it too!

I’m a huge advocate for VR on Roblox. I think it could really change the platform - especially with cross-platform play. These are just my two cents though. I’m curious if Roblox is already expanding the support and if it will ever come.

72 Likes
#2

A proper support for SteamVR will cover most devices alone. There is no finger tracking, which is probably the most disappointing part of it all.

1 Like
#3

I tried adding VR support for our games about two years ago. It was really painful because VR in Roblox has a lot of issues right now, more than just lack of headset support. None of them have been resolved or commented on in the past two years. That said, I’d personally love to experiment more with VR if Roblox decides to work on it some more :smiley:

4 Likes
#4

Roblox actually dropped their VR team, so there’s no one internally working on it as far as I’m aware.

2 Likes
#5

Yes please. There a numerous problems with Roblox and their VR:

  1. Horrifically poor documentation on the API reference, good thing we have @filiptibell around digging through the CoreScripts :slight_smile: ,

  2. It is very nauseating, I’m a huge lover of VR myself. I’ve played games like Superhot, Beat Saber… the list goes on. The worst game I’ve ever played on there is Roblox, the controls are awkward (in my opinion) and it takes atleast 5 mins before you step out.

Please get a team to handle this! I would really want to see more games supporting VR as it’s a increasing large market now (some day it’ll be an everyday item). Cannot stop thinking about the possibilities, I hope this issue gets addressed some point soon.

5 Likes