Hello everyone. I am going to make a VR game for my thesis (master's degree). The thing is that i have 0 experience in vr. In the past i have experimented with many mini games in unreal but never on VR. Does anyone knows tutorials for making VR games with unreal? And secondly is it necessary to have a strong pc to play a vr game made in unreal? I am a bit confused with wether u need a good pc or the headset handles the game itself.

As always, it depends. Most major VR tech is just another output device for the game. They're linked to a PC with a strong GPU and the PC is running the game and doing anything. There are two devices I know which don't rely on a PC but one of them, I think it was the Samsung Gear VR, isn't developed anymore and so you just have the chance to go for Oculus Quest. If you don't have the strong PC yet, a Quest could be an alternative but you have to quit using Unreal for that.

Unreal might be a powerful tool for doing games on PC but Unity 3D has way better mobile capabilities and all portable VR devices have one major similarity, they're running on Android!

Developing VR games is an unexplored market, so you won't find much tutorials I guess. The major difference between VR and usual game development is that you have to take way more effort into immersive game design, good controller and movement handling and performance than for traditional hardware, or your game will fail hard on a wide user base. The problem is more often sick movement, so a user gets sick from the game not behaving as the brain expects the “real world” to behave and this is the trick of good VR games vs. just VR games

Shaarigan said:
If you don't have the strong PC yet, a Quest could be an alternative but you have to quit using Unreal for that.

After having done one complete Quest 2 project on Unreal, I have to 100% disagree. Unreal works perfectly fine on Android and with the Quest, and many of the features that Unreal provides (in-editor launch; automatic install-bat-files …) make working with it much easier than Unity. You have to be more careful with performance than your usual PC game even in Unreal, even thoughI also found Unreal much more responsive to optimization than Unity.

Thank you both for the respones. I want to make clear something for you to understand better my situation. I have a very strong pc to work with, But i want to know if i can make vr games with unreal that can be playable in standalone headsets like oculus quest 2. The reason is simple. After i finish it, the game is going to be playable in a museum. There they have one oculus quest 2 but no strong pc's.

So to sum up. For the development of the game i have a very strong pc to work with. But i want to make sure that i can make a vr game in unreal that will be playable in oculus quest which is a standalone headset and can work without a strong pc.

From what you say and from what i found out on google it's probably possible to do what i am asking. I have some other questions as well. Is it possible to make the game multiplarfom? to work with other headsets (not standalone like quest)? Or in order to do this i have to do the project from the start for each platform?

VoTheGreat said:
Thank you both for the respones. I want to make clear something for you to understand better my situation. I have a very strong pc to work with, But i want to know if i can make vr games with unreal that can be playable in standalone headsets like oculus quest 2. The reason is simple. After i finish it, the game is going to be playable in a museum. There they have one oculus quest 2 but no strong pc's.

Yes, you can do that. Thats very similar to the project we did - it was multiplayer in a museum-like setting, where two players, each with one Quest 2 would play the game.

VoTheGreat said:
From what you say and from what i found out on google it's probably possible to do what i am asking. I have some other questions as well. Is it possible to make the game multiplarfom? to work with other headsets (not standalone like quest)? Or in order to do this i have to do the project from the start for each platform?

Yes, this is also possible with Unreal. If you have the basic VR-setup running, there is not that much that you have to do to make it run on other platforms, ie. both Android and PC. The most important difference is that you'll have to make sure the game runs performant on the quest, meaning you'll have to sacrifice some visual fidelity (or effectively design every scene twice). Unreal has good support for both a mobile and PC-renderer in the same project which will make the PC version look better, there are just problems with content (mostly in regards to alpha/overdraw) that you won't be able to ignore if the project is ever so run on a quest. Also you need to make sure to eigther design the scenes with LDR-lighting in mind, or enable "Mobile HDR" very early on (which still is not fully supported on Quest, but we got it to work nevertheless).

Ok thank you very much! U went little too deep with the details there and i am not sure i got what u mean but i will when i start grinding to make this game. Now i am still at searching and planning. Anyway thank you both for the help!

From what you say and from what i found out on google it's probably possible to do what i am asking. I have some other questions as well. Is it possible to make the game multiplarfom? to work with other headsets (not standalone like quest)? Or in order to do this i have to do the project from the start for each platform?

- facts and tips

Juliean said:
Unreal works perfectly fine on Android and with the Quest

Maybe but from my experience, Unity has the better mobile capabilities, especially on Quest. My employer is doing a AAA VR project and validation happened to come to the conclusion that Unity works better on Quest and Quest 2 from a technical standpoint

batman6914 said:
to work with other headsets (not standalone like quest)? Or in order to do this i have to do the project from the start for each platform?

You have to perform some extra work. Oculus requires some specific behavior for their platform, especially startup and shutdown are more similar to a mobile game instead of a PC title. They also provide some API features other headsets might not have, like the 2D canvas you can render to. On the other hand, there exists OpenXR which is a utility library like OpenGL but for VR and AR devices to unify APIs and driver things