NewtonVR in Multiplayer?

[lasha81]

Hi,

NewtonVR is a great product and I try to develop my first game with it.

Do you have multiplayer support for NewtonVR? I think It would be very useful.

Thanks again and good luck!

[jbroadway]

This was something that was partially addressed in this old pull request. Now that there's an abstraction of the hardware platforms, it should be relatively straight-forward to add NPC / remote abstractions too.

[jbroadway]

I just added PR #114 that adds an NVRVirtualHand component that can be used to implement NewtonVR interactions over multiplayer. Looking forward to feedback on it :)

[SmartCarrion]

Very cool, look forward to testing it out eventually!

[AndersMalmgren]

I think its a bit naive to think you can write an entire multiplayer game around an abstraction of NVRHand. Our game http://store.steampowered.com/app/517020 is a mix of NewtonVR and VRTK and its alot of effort getting the physics clientside prediction to work etc. New players also need to be synced so the items in scene have the correct state on all machines etc.

[jbroadway]

@AndersMalmgren you are 100% correct. There's a lot of complexity in client-side prediction. There may also be differences in approach depending on the type of game (whether there's a server as single source of truth or just p2p, for example), but having a virtual hand that can simulate actions of remote users and leaving the prediction up to the developer is IMO a good first step.

That said, the next step I think is to remove the dependence on PickupClosest() in my proposed NVRVirtualHand (PR #114), because that doesn't guarantee you're picking up the same object, or even that the virtual hand will collide with an object at all. So this is a starting point, and let's see how far we can take it within the NewtonVR framework :)