Rollbacks and roll forwards - Life on the bleeding edge

I'm taking a moment away from my GUI shenanigans to write a small update.

In short, I might have jumped the gun with regards to my rollback. A few weeks ago I spent some time looking at how to use the new Unity 4.6 GUI with Oculus rift. I kept coming back to this topic here.

Without the hardware to test this out, I grew increasingly concerned that I would develop the simulation on a version of the engine that was not fully supported yet. From what I gathered some people were having trouble seeing their applications output to the actual Rift device.

What I should have done was investigate this issue in more depth but as I was so distracted with the development (and a bit of team management) I didn't do this.

From the very beginning of the project, I have had to keep an eye on monthly (even weekly) updates from Oculus and Unity as they are very active on the development of their products.

For example when our module started Unity Free Oculus support didn't exist. A month later it was up and running and being used by many people, and updates have been whizzing by.

It is with this mentality in mind that I thought I would rollback to build 4.5.5. My thoughts about this was that once 4.6 was fully ready I would be able to update my project to 4.6 pretty quickly and just create a new UI.

However if I created the simulation on 4.6 and it turned out to not work properly on the Oculus Rift, I would not be able to quickly rollback to 4.5. In fact it took me a full day to get my 4.6 content running on 4.5 as I had to manually import all assets and re-add them to scenes.

Without the hardware I was running on assumptions. That is until I read deeper into things. It seems from what I can tell the user in the above post was using the Direct to Drive option on Oculus Rift rather than the extended mode. This is still an issue with the DK2 when developing and is a minor annoyance rather than a deal breaker.

On the 23rd of December the following post was made on the Unity blog. Stating "The Unity Free integration for Oculus gives you access to the exact same Oculus features as users of Unity Pro. You can use Unity 4.6 and the Oculus integration package to deploy any sort of VR content imaginable to the Rift!"

So what does this mean? Basically I am now rolling all the work I did today in 4.5 to 4.6 and then I will be merging it with my previous work I had already done in 4.6. A bit of time wasted, but it's my own fault for not spending the time reading up on things more.

At least now I can get a UI up and running on the Rift. See my previous post titled "Minigame work cont. - Looking into new Unity 4.6 UI with the Oculus Rift" for more on this.

Cheers,

Rob