Virtual Reality on Roblox continues to inspire both players and developers alike. We have ongoing engineering efforts to support VR and make it even easier to create VR experiences on the platform. Previously, Roblox required extra steps from game developers in order to provide players with a comfortable VR experience in their games. In the spirit of continuing to Power Imagination, we set out to improve this experience for everyone.
To address comfort concerns, we have recently released a new camera system called Comfort Cam. When a player moves their avatar, this camera remains stationary. Once the player stops moving, the camera moves to a new position to accommodate for the movement and change in avatar position.
We are aware of the following issues and will have a fix released for them by next week.
Using the Xbox Gamepad, the comfort cam doesn’t automatically snap to the character when you stop moving. Need to manually reset the camera with the Left Trigger.
Sometimes the tools/items that are equipped to your character cannot be used by pressing Right Trigger.
For a more in-depth look at our new VR Comfort Cam, be sure to check out this blog article.
I have a Vive. I tested with the Vive headset and an XBox 360 controller.
Issues (not necessarily related to Comfort Cam)
Auto walk:
It seems like double tapping A pathfinds the character to the selected spot, but for some reason double tapping A doesn’t always trigger this. It only works sometimes
Chat:
I could not see chat in-game
Age display error in radial menu:
The radial menu displays <13 even though I am 13+. The 2D UI out of VR shows the correct value.
When you autowalk to a location by double tapping A, Comfort Cam will automatically move your camera to that location. This includes even if the location is vertically unreachable. For instance, I pathfound to the top of a wall, my character walked to the wall, and my camera was moved to the top of the wall. Expected behavior is that the camera goes to the X/Z position, but matches the Y location with where the character will be standing instead of the area that was selected.
Edit: Also, I’m not seeing a VR mode option in the Escape menu
Suggestions:
Realign camera to face character direction
When I realign the camera, I’m always facing the same direction I was before. This is kind of annoying because to turn around I have to physically turn around in my chair instead of sitting relatively stationary. It wold be nice if I could rotate my character to face backwards, realign my camera, and then be facing that direction. It would make it significantly more convenient to navigate the world without requiring more-than-necessary physical movement.
Concerns:
This is not a one-size-fits-all control scheme
Is there a way for me to change VR camera behavior? This works great for the standard ROBLOX game, but for first-person immersive experiences and experimenting with new VR camera behaviors, this doesn’t work well. If we can change the VR control scheme, can we do so easily? We’re not really powering imagination if we make it difficult to craft dedicated VR experiences.
For instance, I play Metroid Prime VR from 4-6 hours a sitting. It’s a first person game, and I control both character and yaw camera movement with the joystick. This control scheme works well and I haven’t ever felt nausea playing it. The whole benefit of Metroid VR is that it’s immersive, so making it difficult/impossible to change the camera behavior would make it a miserable experience to develop a similar game on Roblox.
I think roblox is trying to cheer us up from the boring school by giving us anouncements, hence the 10th anouncement these past weeks. Only problem, its working too well!
Anyway, I don’t like this update. The previous one was perfectly fine-- the only problem is that most games do wacky stuff to the camera that makes the game incompatible with VR (like Jailbreak, where VR players are forced to just stare at the ground without being able to open the context menu because the camera is constantly moving)
Also, yes, what @EchoReaper said. Bubble chat has not worked for quite some time when in VR mode.
