Who said oculus dropped support for BoS? They dropped support for Dx9....
Jason William did right here in the post Dakpilot quoted:
The whole Oculus thing really is old news, the thread bongo was referencing was over a year old..the answers have already been given
"Guys,
I know it's fun to ridicule us, but you have no idea how Oculus operates and our experience with them. Loft has every reason to not be thrilled with his experience with Oculus. I'm not too happy with them either. Google translating his words from Russian is not going to tell you the whole story either.
We tried very hard to support their devices as they grew and introduced new units and we did build support for them to the best of our ability (it wasn't perfect but it worked) when we probably should have been focusing on other stuff. They also seemed interested in working with us as I live not far from their offices, but the harder we tried to support and work with Oculus the more difficult it got. This was even before Facebook and before them dropping DX9. I can't say too much in detail due to NDAs, but basically they tried to tell us how we should make our game and unless we made it how they wanted it, they wouldn't work with us. Essentially, their hardware could not run a hardcore sim like ours in 3D with what they deemed acceptable framerates (their level of acceptability, not ours). And the Oculus team seemed puzzled why we had built a custom engine or why we needed a custom sim engine that requires large environments which does not run at a constant 100 FPS like a shooter. Our customers also do not want to necessarily see a human body in our cockpits as they demanded. So we decided to wait a bit until their hardware and software was a bit more mature before we spent any more man hours supporting something that is not even a final product.
However, based on the vibe from Oculus we felt that the final retail Oculus product (or at least their first retail unit) was imminent and their would be no real hurdles to using it with BOS since we had already built initial support. This is why Loft made such comments about our planned support. But then a few things happened - 1. They got bought by Facebook and they no longer cared to talk to us about technical issues. 2. Something changed in their software concerning 32 bit vs. 64 bit which broke our implementation. But we were hopeful a solution could eventually be found. 3. They simply dropped support for DX9 games which ours is one.
So that's the progression from initial support to none. Not our fault and now we are in a tough spot because we do not have the right requirements since they changed them and we don't have the budget to build such support at the moment. There was zero intention by us to not have support. Just a string of unfortunate events. It has nothing to do with us not willfully supporting our users or any other motive.
Oculus seems to work really well with off the shelf engines that most other developers use for shooters and whatnot. We have a custom engine and huge environments and complex physics that suck frames so this is a difficult situation for us developmentally because Oculus is 3D and everything needs to be drawn twice. There seems to be two kinds of developers who have success supporting Oculus. The first is large mega-teams like you find at EA or Valve who can stick a team of people on the implementation task. Then there are tiny teams with super talented individuals who make super niche games that use some off the shelf engine that already works well with Oculus and where meeting budgets or deadlines is not a huge priority for them. We are in a different situation entirely. We are a small team with a super complex product, small budgets, a custom engine and a plan we are in the middle of implementing. Any deviation from that causes major disruptions to planned updates.
Oculus also really seems to want to "change the gaming industry" with VR by changing the requirements for gaming such as only supporting DX10 and above. This puts smaller teams like us in a bind. Oculus is not the cute little startup it once was, they are aiming to be THE VR company and with it comes big corporate policies and choices that affects teams like ours. You can argue coulda, woulda, shoulda all day long, but Oculus has not made it easy on us to support their product and they pulled support for BOS, not us. It's disappointing, but that is the situation.
I am hopeful something can change in the future where we have enough money to build new support for Oculus and make whatever changes necessary to get there. That of course requires more sales.
The VR revolution looks promising and many companies are now involved in this space. It's got a long way to go before it completely supplants your monitor. Maybe it will come fast, maybe not. Time will tell. We have nothing personal against VR and we did give it a go, but when it becomes simpler to add it to our titles I am sure we will support it. VR does not need sims to make it big and whether we need OR support today or tomorrow as some here claim to make it remains to be seen. People have counted us out more than once before and we're still here creating stuff. There are other things I'd like to work on before we worry about OR support again.
The perils of being a sim developer never ceases to amaze me.
Jason"
Cheers Dakpilot
Good enough for you? literally from your esteemed leaders own keyboard.
