Devs keep coming out with VR games like this I might have to buy a Oculus very soon because I could be missing out. Added this one to the frontpage and a few others as well. I would hope there is other things to do other than co-op combat, there is a spaceship component that seems interesting and it will be interesting to see how it is used in the game.

They have hit their half way mark to the goal but have yet to post a single update, it may only be a modest goal but they still have to do some work if the want to achieve it.

at Last an update and it's a good one.

 

Hey Folks,

thanks to your help, we have reached 51% with 22 days left!

New Prototype

Today, we are releasing our Prototype2, which is an updated version of our original prototype. It has massive performance improvements and allows you to fight even more enemy ships. You can download the new prototype here:

http://www.darkfield-vr.com/prototype/

CO-OP Explained

If you are unsure about how our co-op missions will work in the final game, listen to Mark explaining our gameplay:

update.

 

We are now at $5778 and 209 backers with 17 days to go!

Daniel talks Darkfield

Daniel will be at the Cologne VR Meetup on Saturday and will give a talk about the beginnings and development of Darkfield. The event will be streamed on Twitch and the talk will be in English.

When:  7:00 PM CEST Saturday, 11 October 2014 - More time zones here:   http://goo.gl/f7B7NJ

Stream:  http://www.twitch.tv/vrmeetupsgermany

Prototype2 now on Oculus Share

You can also download our Prototype2 from Oculus Share:

https://share.oculusvr.com/app/darkfield-vr---kickstarter-tdm-prototype2

They have finally decided to grace us backers with another update.

 

CO-OP Prototype Sneak Peak

We are also hard at work on our co-op prototype. You and your friend will be flying in our dual-seat heavy bomber, either as a pilot or gunner, while blasting waves of enemy fighters!

View from the gunner seat in the AF-99 "Blackforest" heavy bomber

Help us spread the word!

Ten days left and about 3 and half thousand to go.

 Darkfield has hit it target and still has 3 days to run.

Latest update from Kickstarter.

 

As you guys already know, we have currently three game modes planned:

• CO-OP PvE Missions
• Team Death Match
• Holodeck Singleplayer Experience

When we reach $12.000, we will add another action-filled game mode: Escape!

This game mode will feature 4 players in one ship, escaping from the enemy forces. Internally, we call it the "Trench Run" mode ;).

Your team has to break out a maximum security prison in a heavily guarded sector but all you can find is a slow freighter class vessel. To successfully escape, one of you has to pilot this rust bucket, while the other three will use the laser cannons to try to hold of the enemy forces! How far will you make it until you are caught?

This game mode is heavily inspired by our favorite movies and TV shows. We love rail shooters, the A-Team and Star Wars and that's why we are mashing them up in an awesome game mode!

Very short video about global illumination.

New version of this out as well for Kickstarter backers.

 

We are still waiting on some Unity5 improvements/bugfixes and instead of waiting until Alpha5, we decided on releasing an updated Alpha4.7b with the new Oculus runtime. This Alpha4.8 release has the same features as Alpha4.7b, but can be run without rolling back the runtime to 0.4.2.

This is not the Unity5 update. We will release the Unity5 builds as Alpha5.

Some minor features appear to be broken:

– F2 does not open the Oculus debug menu (fixed in upcoming  Alpha5)

– UI buttons do not get properly highlighted

Think I will hold off downloading until they complete the move

Spring newsletter from Darkfield.

 

Hey folks, it is time for another dev update. We have been busy finalizing our Unity5 port and working on new features. We have decided to focus less on Alpha builds in favor of speedier development. However, this doesn't mean you have to wait until the very end of the development progress to play Darkfield! We will release new pre-release versions of the game modes as soon as they are ready.

Voice File, Description and Picture Submission

If you have backed the Enemy Contact! tier or higher on our Kickstarter campaign or through our website, you are eligible for sending in a 2 second voice clip that will be played when the player encounters an enemy ship. We would like to give you a bit more information about the scenario: Players will be hearing the voice clip in two possible situations. The first is during the co-op mode, when a NPC ship is shot down or critically damaged. The second situation is during the Escape game mode, where up to 4 people try to escape a prison station and are followed by NPC ships. Please note that players can turn off user-submitted NPC voices. The content of the voice clips could be something in the lines of "You can't get away with this" or similar. Definitely more on the serious side.

If you have backed the "Be a Legend" tier, we will use the image* and description you submit in a database with service records of past pilots. We will provide further information very soon about past wars, historic battles and landmarks that you can use in your description.

*Our campaign mentioned 3d scanned Kinect data. If you happen to have a Kinect you can use Kinect Fusion to 3d scan your head. Depending on how many models we receive, we might not use them in the final game, so please submit a picture as well.

Content has to be "within good taste" and we will make all content publicly available before release to ensure nothing offensive makes the way into the game.

While we are still preparing an automated submission system, you can start thinking about what to say or write. If you have any questions or want to talk about specific ideas, don't hesitate to send us an email!

 

Steam Integration 

We are also working on the Steam integration of Darkfield. As soon as this is ready, you will be able to get the latest pre-release version of Darkfield via Steam.

 

SteamVR, Morpheus and other Hardware

We have had a chance to try the HTC Vive at GDC and the Morpheus at the Sony Computer Entertainment America headquarters. Since we don't have dev kits yet, we can't announce official support at this time, but we are super excited about these devices. In case we get dev kits, we will almost certainly create a Darkfield game for these platforms :).

 

 

Video showing people playing the game from last years Gamescon which is a bit odd, maybe they intend to do an update this week to show the difference between the two.?

New version out for backer of the game. http://www.darkfield-vr.com/ apparenty it contains an early version of the single player game and cockpit.

Big long update with lots of interesting news about the game I have reposted a couple of bits but check the site for full details, first up more VR platform support.

 

When we first launched Darkfield, the Rift was the only game in town, but we understand that people have now a choice and might not be getting a Rift anymore. We are happy to announce that Darkfield will support the Rift and Vive (and a 3rd platform we are not quite ready to announce right now, keep an eye out during the GDC announcements for our name 😉 ).

We have all the devkits here, and are literally fighting time to have versions for all of them ready.

We will release the Rift build first, and then quickly port over to the Vive.

When we redesigned Darkfield, we made sure to be as independent from the device as possible, which makes porting a lot easier. Also, by using our own networking solution and not falling back onto the matchmaking services provided by any VR platform, we will support crossplay between Rift and Vive (and maybe the 3rd, unannounced platform).

No matter which VR headset you will get, you will be able to play with your friends :).

Now on the Vive, we won't be making much use of roomscale (yet), but we are planning on supporting hand tracked controllers (including Oculus Touch) as an additional input for the gunners:

And Steam keys on the way.

 

Steam Keys and Oculus Keys

We will add Steam keys to your Sendowl downloads (please make sure you have access to them or send us an email if you have problems) once the new version is available. This will allow you to play on the Rift and Vive (as soon as we release the Vive build). However, we understand that it makes sense to have all Oculus games in one place and we will give you an additional Oculus key as soon as possible. This means you can own up to two copies of Darkfield. But if you want to share one of the keys with your friend, that is fine by us as well.

And they have a new video out and I'm just amazed at how 3D the cockpit looks in a 2D video if that makes any sense, normally these VR videos don't look any different to standard ones.

Turret test and they should be a new version of the game soon.

Update from Kickstarter.

 

This is another quick update to let you folks know that we haven't forgotten about you!

We got a bit sidelined by some other work (that pays for bills and food), but we made some further progress on the networking code and controller support.

Building Robust Networking

The main goal of our networking code is to make sure players can play together from all over the world, even with high latency. Actually, we are the best test case for it, since half of the team is based in Australia, the other half in Germany. We usually have a ping of 300ms but our networking code can cope with that (I bet if you were a Counterstrike player back in the day, your head just exploded).

Fortunately, our ships have very, very predictable physics and slow turn rates. This makes prediction much easier.

We use a mix of interpolation and extrapolation to sync up ship positions as much as possible. In our current play testing, 300ms and 10% packet loss (one team member was using a mobile hotspot) ship movement was accurate. There was a slight jitter from the packet loss, but overall it worked great!

We are not saying 300ms ping is ideal, but with very few VR headsets out in the wild, we want players to play together from all over the world!

Controller Support

We have now fully replaced the input manager we used in earlier builds. This means we will support most current gamepads, flight sticks, hotas systems and flight pedals out of the box. If you have an unsupported device, you can create a profile for it as well. We have successfully tested the game with a Saitek X52 and Saitek Pro Flight Rudder Pedals and a Xbox controller on top for First Person Movement inside space stations.

That's it for now. Again, we are sorry we couldn't meet the previously stated deadline, but progress on Darkfield at least continues :).

Cheers,

Mark

First person movement in the station. 😎 😎