Roblox should improve official VR support

As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to develop for VR
Here’s a few pain points for developing for VR:

  1. Support on headsets
    If I’m being entirely honest, no headset on Roblox works well. The only headset that semi works is the Oculus Rift (s) due to them actually supporting the controllers well. The HTC Vive and Valve Index aren’t supported nearly as much (with the valve index getting htc vive controls rather than rift controls)
  2. CoreUI Support
    It doesn’t exist, the menus (atleast on the vive/index) are totally broken and don’t let you select anything.
  3. Chat
    Was a feature, got removed.
  4. Index Support
    This one frustrates me a ton but is more a issue with valve rather than Roblox. When you play a non-Index supported game, Valve automatically maps the controller to the Vive wand layout instead of Oculus Touch layouts. Basically, you can’t play at all on the index because most games just don’t support the Vive wands at all and don’t have the code to map for them. All Roblox needs to do to fix this is support the Index natively and if there are no controls for it, make the code think it’s a touch controller.

If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because I have been feeling to make a lengthy VR only game on Roblox and the support on Roblox has been the only issue with doing this. / it would improve other developers as the VR scene is coming back in style.

44 Likes

I wish there was Oculus Quest VR support.

An issue with the Quest OS is that there aren’t enough good free games, which sucks for somebody new to it. This is where Roblox can step in.

If Roblox was available on the quest, developers and players alike could share these advantages:

  • More selection to VR games, due to the exclusive controls of the platform influencing devs.
  • More PC/Mobile/Xbox to VR crossplay games
  • A plethora of free experiences at the player’s disposal.
  • An expanded market and an easy opportunity to expand the Roblox community.
  • Room for developers to allow more unique games by having experiences that can’t be done with a keyboard or touch input.

I’m 100% sure that if Roblox launched on the Quest, it would be an instant success, like the Xbox launch. In addition, allowing more possibilities for control and input will give Roblox a better reputation and will hopefully fight off uncreative experiences we see a lot.

Because the Quest runs on Android, I can imagine it would not be hard to make for the platform.

14 Likes

Roblox on Quest is probably FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR out because while it does run android, the quest store is locked down super hard and roblox being on there would basically be considered a second store. They need to get some kind of partnership if they want to launch on quest.

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I agree with everything you said, but I think the biggest flaw is not being able to chat besides the platform being supported. As of now the only reason to play on vr is because it’s ”cool”. Then the player will g back to PC because it was a bad experience.

1 Like

The developer of Bus Simulator actually added a chat to your wrist (it was actually a pretty good way to do it) but I actually forgot to add a very important thing. The UI Viewport is TINY and square, Most games are broken from this. The way the chat worked in Bus Simulator is it used a local SurfaceGUI on a brick that followed your camera.

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Be nice if we had an API for the finger tracking. Just got my Index not too long ago and can’t wait to start making VR games!

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Would probably require basic moderation (blocking the finger) before they could even think about implementing it.

Roblox doesn’t have a VR team, it was silently disbanded and that’s why nothing VR related has been done for a while.

https://devforum.roblox.com/t/popular-in-vr-sort-removed/123524

3 Likes

There’s really not enough people using VR to justify it. I’m not sure why they spent the R&D to get it working to begin with.

Well that was 2016, this is now. The VR player base has skyrocketed through the quest.
Half-Life: Alyx really made VR mainstream since it’s such a huge franchise.

5 Likes

VR being popular in the media doesn’t quite mean its userbase is high enough to justify it. Thats just the media doing its work. In actuality we are probably only looking at 250k of Steam users who has a headset. 0.26% of the Steam ecosystem.

The number of Roblox users who have a VR headset that isn’t Google cardboard is going to be a LOT lower especially since the main age demographic is much younger.

This might be a good idea later down the line when Roblox is much further in appealing to an older demographic, but I wouldn’t bet on any further VR support soon.

1 Like

Just would like to note: that number isn’t very accurate as most people unplug their headsets (including me) and aren’t counted in the Steam Hardware Survey.

11 Likes

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