In the latest chapter of 10 for the Chairman, Chris Roberts, CEO of Cloud Imperium Games, has confirmed that Star Citizen will not only have support for Oculus Rift but will probably also support other HMDs such as HTC, Vive or even Morpheus if it were finally compatible with PC, or Magic Leap.
In the series 10 for the Chairman, in which Chris Roberts periodically answers 10 questions that users send him about the Star Citizen space simulator, currently in development, he gave more details about his intentions regarding the virtual reality support of the game. When asked if -“with the release of all those VR headsets with their SDKs, are you still only supporting Oculus Rift, or will you wait to see which of the headsets is the right one?”, Chris replied:
Star Citizen will not be exclusive to an VR viewer. That would be absurd, like being compatible with only one type of controller: they will support all kinds of VR, joysticks, HOTAS, pedals, controllers, mice, keyboards…. The idea is that we embrace as many peripherals and control methods as possible: it’s a PC game, and freedom is the most important thing on this platform. We will support the Oculus Rift and we will probably support Valve’s Vive. And if they put Morpheus on the PC we’ll probably use that. Or Magic Leap.
This has been worked on: we want and we are going to endure it. We have been researching versions of the game that we will show later, some that are 3-4 versions ahead of the one you currently have: the FPS is more advanced than yours, the social module is more advanced than the FPS, the multi-crew combat is in an even more advanced version than the social module, until we reach the version we call Main (main) in which Squadron 42 is. The previous ones are more stable branches and potentially virtual reality support would come with the version that brings the multiplayer ships.
Again, everything is a matter of time and resources, so we are now focusing on aspects of fundamental and essential: end of the Worlds Great (maps 64-bit) that you are almost and only the part rendering of the cameras on, and a basic version of the streaming content (load fund, to eliminate the loading screens) to relieve the heavy charges of this game that you have very large objects in memory. All this is much more important than supporting VR right now.
According to him, VR support is expected to come with the version that brings multiplayer ships, and as far as we know this would be in version 2.0 of Arena Commander, whose release date is not specified but it is estimated that it will be for the summer, around June-July 2015. So we will have to keep waiting a little longer to have support for our HMDs, but at least it seems that they are taking it seriously and we will be able to choose with which HMD we want to enjoy our space adventures. The advantage is that they can probably take advantage of the latest advances that CryEngine is implementing in virtual reality, such as the MultiGPU mode that renders an eye with each card and that they already have implemented internally.
From here we want to thank Frost, from the fansite www.ciudadanoestelar.com for the translation of the video and for the incredible work he does translating so much information about Star Citizen into Spanish. You can see the 10 questions and their answers translated into Spanish here.
