Creating Landscapes for VR: The Importance of Balancing Visual Fidelity and Performance
At Victoria VR, we understand the importance of how well the game runs, especially when dealing with highly detailed environments and complex backgrounds. In general, high-resolution backgrounds can be a significant performance drain as they need to be constantly loaded and rendered. However, compromising on visual fidelity is not in our DNA. This commitment to quality drove us to innovate a solution that would preserve stunning details without sacrificing smooth gameplay. Our goal was to release the game natively on Oculus Quest devices, which are powerful but do not have the hardware capabilities of high-end PCs. We wanted to ensure that players could enjoy the same immersive and visually rich experience on Oculus Quest without encountering any issues. To achieve this, we carefully examined how we design and implement our game environments.
Our approach began with the fundamental design of the landscape around the PvP arena. We used modular blocks to build the basic structure and layout, ensuring a scalable and adaptable setup. This modular approach allowed us to experiment with different compositions and viewpoints, ensuring that every angle the player might see was visually appealing and coherent. We then divided the background environment into three distinct layers: foreground, mid-ground, and far-ground. This stratification helped us manage resources more efficiently by prioritizing the rendering of elements based on their proximity and relevance to the player. Objects in the foreground were given the highest level of detail and complexity, while those in the mid- and far-ground were progressively simplified. This hierarchy ensured that the most critical aspects of the scene remained detailed and immersive, while less critical elements did not unnecessarily drain system resources.
Once the scene was set up, including all the lighting effects, fog, and other visual attributes, we used Unreal Engine’s advanced capabilities to capture the scene as 360-degree cube maps. Unreal Engine’s capture component allowed us to create these massive cube maps, which serve as a highly detailed and efficient way to render backgrounds. These cube maps are essentially panoramic images that encompass the entire environment from a fixed point, providing high-resolution visuals without the need for real-time rendering of all background elements.
With this innovative approach, we were able to deliver a visually rich experience on the Oculus Quest while maintaining high graphical fidelity without compromising performance. The use of 360-degree cube maps allowed us to maintain the immersive and beautiful environments that Victoria VR is known for, while ensuring smooth and responsive gameplay even on hardware with lower capabilities compared to PCs.
By prioritizing both performance and visual quality, we have ensured that players on Oculus Quest can fully immerse themselves in Victoria VR and enjoy the details of our environment. This balance between visual fidelity and smooth gameplay is proof of our commitment to delivering the best possible experience for all of you.
About Victoria VR — www.victoriavr.com
Victoria VR is a revolutionary Blockchain-based Virtual Reality Metaverse. Powered by Unreal Engine and featuring realistic, highly detailed graphics, it combines a massively-multiplayer-online role-playing game (MMORPG) with a unique Social Experience Playground.
Like never before, players will be immersed in a virtual reality world where they get to live their digital life. Whether you want to Play games, Develop your digital real estate (VR Land), Own a business, Work up or Get some entertainment, your imagination is the only limitation.
