Tuesday 10 March 2015

Unreal Engine 4 Tip: Setting viewport resolution

When you first get started with Unreal Engine 4 you'll want to get your layout defined so you can get used to where everything is and start to speed up your workflow. During this set up, one thing you may want to do is know the resolution of your main viewport, for example to capture screenshots, and you may only want to capture at a specific resolution. So how do you know what the current viewport size is?

After doing a little googling I was unable to find a way to show the current viewport resolution within the UE4 interface, but it is possible to capture what you can currently see in the viewport, at the resolution you are currently using through the shortcut key F9. You will see a popup detailing the location of where the screenshot was saved to, and clicking the location will automatically open it in Windows Explorer.



By looking at the details of the images you will be able to see the dimensions of the image captured. If it is not to the size you require then adjust the panels surrounding the viewport in UE4 and capture a new screenshot. Repeat this until the screenshot is captured at the resolution you require.



Once you have the layout you desire, it should now be saved for future, but to ensure that your layout is saved go to Window > Save Layout.

Thursday 5 March 2015

VR headsets @ GDC 2015 [Updated]

There's been alot of talk about VR headsets recently from many companies, Sony, Razor, Samsung and Oculus, and it seems that the Oculus Rift has taken the limelight so far, but after hearing talk about what Valve have been up to such as the QR code room, Oculus needs to be watching their back.

One of the big talking points around VR headsets is how we are actually going to control the environment we are immersed in while wearing whatever headset we choose, but it looks like Valve have been able to take their work on the Steam Controller and made it work with the headset. I think we are going to hear much more about this system and it's going to be interesting to see where the people's interest falls as we get closer to all of these systems releasing final versions.



Perhaps Oculus need a partnership to bundle a contorller system with their headset



Razor had some minor updates to their modular approach for developers, but I don't see this as a major competitor to Valve or Oculus as it will take a developer with a large budget to come along with something above and beyond what is almost ready to ship from the aforementioned.



And of course there's still plently of scope in the VR headset world for accessories



Update

After seeing some coverage of Sony's Morpheus demo too (see below), I really think the race to these products coming to market is going to be exciting. Again it looks like because Sony have their own controller support, they are in a really strong position to deliver interesting experiences. Maybe Oculus got out there too early with an unfinished project, or maybe it was important for people to learn at this stage, so we could get to where we are today.





Also check out Will and Norm's takeaway from what they saw at GDC 2015.