Chris Roberts, the director of the space simulation "Star Citizen," discussed his plans for including virtual reality support for the game.
According to the director and CEO of Cloud Imperium Games, this gameplay feature could arrive sometime this year.
The executive talked about the status of VR integration during a recent livestream by Roberts Space Industries which was transcribed by RoadtoVR.
Running "Star Citizen" with virtual reality technology shouldn't be too hard for the company since parts of it already feature support for this platform. Back in 2012, during the earlier development phases of the game, Cloud Imperium Games unveiled that it will utilize the previous development kit for the Oculus Rift, dubbed as DK1, for the game.
But, for the new generation of VR headsets, Roberts noted that the studio will have to carry out some tweaks to the game's feature. Specifically, it will have to work on the CryEngine running the game to include VR support.
In addition, another thing that's keeping Cloud Imperium Games from working on this feature is the development of Alpha 2.0 and Alpha 2.1, which will most likely arrive early this year.
"The status of VR integration is that we've been pretty busy with getting [Alpha] 2.0 out and we're trying to get 2.1 so I would say we still have some stuff to integrate from the most recent CryEngine drops," Roberts said. "They're been actually doing quite a lot of VR, I'm pretty sure you guys have noticed that they've completely doubled down and they're all VR now."
"So there are some updates on VR that we need to integrate in," he added. "It's a little more complicated because we've changed the engine so much, we've changed the rendering pipeline to enable us to do a lot of things that we need to do so it's not very easy."
The complicated process of VR integration will of course, require most likely require additional funding. But, in terms of money, Cloud Imperium Games is pretty well-off since before 2015 ended, the crowdfunding campaign for the game has surpassed the $100 million mark, according to IGN. This could probably go up due to the fact that the developers are planning on launching the game with virtual reality technology.
Currently, "Star Citizen" is only available through its various alpha and beta versions but the final iteration of the game is expected to launch sometime this year.
