Ibex Chromatic Aberration and Updates

Checked in update for the Mac version to support the Chromatic Aberration parameters provided by the Rift. This should make the view a bit sharper and more readable, especially once the HD Rift comes out.

An update on what else I’ve been doing for ibex. I’ve written two different plugins to share your desktop, one for Unity3D and one for Cryengine 3 using their free SDK. These both fit in with my goal of eventually running ibex on a AAA engine so that you are immersed in the most beautiful world possible. There are numerous issues getting them to work though.

The Unity plugin for the Mac works up to the point of getting you your desktop integrated in a beautiful world, however due to the way it captures the desktop I haven’t found a single way to pass the mouse input through or keyboard so you can interact with the Desktop. This is a shame since this version also supports seeing your hands using the Razer Hydra and would have allowed interacting with the world this way.

The Cryengine plugin is the most beautiful of them but it too has its own issues. First off, it is Windows-only and requires a very powerful graphics card. On the flip-side it offers a graphics experience parallel to none. Instantly rendering gorgeous trees with shadows, clouds and flowing rivers as and a beautiful ocean. They also offer a slew of critters to drop in so you can have frogs hopping about and Eagles soaring overhead. The only drawback is that after getting everything rendering through their Engine I discovered that they were a little bit too trigger-happy announcing their Rift support. In short, it doesn’t work. Someone on their end must have gotten it working and they announced support, but as it stands not I nor anyone else on their forums has been successful at getting it to work sadly. It is a shame since that is a truly gorgeous experience!

UDK turned out to be a dead-end, they have no support for replacing textures or accessing the underlying windows so you can do anything below the level of their scripting language. UDK does look great and for another project I played around with it would have been awesome, but sadly it is not for ibex. My only hope is that once they release UDK 4 at some distant point in the future their C++ support will expose much more than purely shaders and strictly game-related functionality.