Unreal Engine 4 Virtual Reality Projects: Build immersive, real-world VR applications using UE4, C++, and Unreal Blueprints

If you're planning to develop for desktop VR hardware, such as the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive, we're going to assume here that you've already set up your headset and ensured that it's working. If you haven't, now's a good time. Head on over to https://www.vive.com/eu/setup/ or https://www.oculus.com/setup/, and run through the guided installation and setup operations there.

Remember that your VR headset driver software, Oculus Home or Steam VR, needs to be running when you use the headset.

If you're going to be developing for mobile standalone VR, your setup process will involve a few other steps, which we'll walk you through after we get Unreal Engine installed. We do recommend even for those developing for mobile VR that you have a desktop VR headset available as well. It dramatically speeds up debugging to be able to launch your software right into the headset without having to cook it and deploy it to the device every time. It's not required, but you will find it...

If you're going to develop VR applications using Unreal Engine, the first thing you'll need, of course, is the engine. Let's walk through the process of setting it up.

Mobile VR headsets such as Samsung Gear and Oculus Go are separate devices from your PC, so you can't simply launch into a VR preview the way you can with a desktop headset. Instead, you need to package the project and deploy it to the device so you can run it directly on the headset. You'll have to set up a few things to make this possible.

Before we go too much further, let's take a look at the Epic Games launcher—there's a ton of useful material here, and this should be a starting place for much of your learning. It's worth it to take some time to look around and see what resources are available to you. It's easy to overlook these resources, but if you get used to understanding where you can learn and find information when you need it, you'll get much further, much faster.

The launcher's Unreal Engine tab is broken into four major sections:

Let's take a look at each of them.

The Unreal Engine Tab

The Unreal Engine tab displays featured content and projects, which are definitely worth exploring, but they'll become more relevant to you as you use the engine longer. As a new user, pay particular attention to that row of icons right under the main banner. These are valuable resources:

The Unreal Engine tab as of Unreal 4.22

• The News link is a great way to keep up with...

This section is entirely optional. None of the projects in this book will require you to develop in C++, but we will occasionally highlight items in native code for those interested in going deeper. If you don't anticipate working in code, or if pages of code give you the screaming heebie-jeebies, it's completely fine to jump over this section and the one that follows it.

Still here? Excellent. The first thing you'll need if you plan to develop in C++ is an editor and compiler with which to build...

This next section is even more optional than the previous. You'll only ever need to do this if you intend to modify the behavior of the engine itself, or if you want to work with a feature that's so new that it hasn't yet been bundled into one of the releases. That's another part of the beauty of this engine though—if you really need it to do something it doesn't already do, you can make the changes yourself. Also, if you make changes that improve the engine or might be useful to other developers, you can use GitHub to contribute your changes to Epic. Lots of developers do, and the net effect of it is...

Before we move on from this chapter, let's take a quick moment to talk about other tools you may want to set up to work with Unreal. None of these will be required by the projects in this book, but they're worth knowing about, so you need to know where to look when you need them.

In this chapter, we installed the Unreal Engine and learned about the various options we have available to us when setting it up. We created and launched a simple test project to verify that everything was working. Additionally, for those developing for mobile VR, we learned how to set up the required drivers and software development kits, and set up a mobile test project that we deployed to our device.

Along the way, we learned how to use the Epic Games launcher—not just as a way of keeping engine versions up to date and launching projects, but also as a vital learning and support resource. Through our exploration of the launcher, we learned how to get answers to questions from the Community tab and where to find documentation and video tutorials from the Learn tab. We explored the incredibly useful Content Examples project and looked at other projects we can use to explore specific topics in the engine. We saw that the Marketplace offers a huge range of free and paid content that...