Oculus releases new SDK, adding MAC and Linux support

Designing VR games for Mac and Linux operating systems just got a whole lot easier, thanks to a new version of the Oculus SDK. It's version 0.3.2, so we're creeping steadily towards a final release, but for now it's just about getting other operating systems into the mix.

The list of official Oculus SDK changes is as follows:

• Added Mac and Linux support.
• Added Oculus Configuration Utility for Mac and Linux.
• Enabled VSync on both Mac and Linux.
• Separated ovrSensorCap_* bits from ovrHmdCaps. HMD Caps, such as low persistence, are now modified through ovrHmd_SetEnabledCaps.
• Unified format of ovrHmdCaps, ovrSensorCaps, ovrDistortionCaps.
• Unified handling of graphics state save/restore across GL and D3DX.

If like me, you found the above to have a healthy dose of techno-gibberish in it, then don't fret, this is a bit of a developer release, designed to give them early access to the upcoming improvements and APIs. It's also the reason big Devkit 2 changes, like positional tracking, aren't found in this update.

However, there are some changes to the Unity platform too:

• Added Mac support.
• Changed Tuscany Demo to use standard Unity skyboxes.
• Disabled normal rendering for DistortionCamera so it only spends performance on distortion.
• Undistorted RenderTexture uses Oculus-recommended resolution * user-defined scale.
• Made use of undistorted RenderTexture optional.
• Added ability to dynamically scale render target.
• Decoupled tracking and motion input from scale of player or camera controller, allowing for world scale.
• Flipped Y coordinate by default on D3D to account for texture addressing differences.

None of this is particularly exciting for those of us with Rift Devkits who aren't developers, especially those of us VRing away on a Windows PC. However, hopefully it will bring about better games and better support for our cousins on a different OS. There's a few bug fixes too, that should help out those on AMD systems, as well as those suffering crashes to desktop in some scenarios.

For a full change list, have a look at the Oculus release, here (forum account required).

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: Not the big game changing SDK update that many are always keeping their eye out for. Chances are we won't get that until DK2 lands sometime in July. 

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