WebVR Pong: A New Chapter

Last Month, we had the hon­or to sub­mit our new­est cre­ation We­b­VR Pong, to the Vir­tuleap Hackathon. Like the ti­tle sug­gests, it’s a We­b­VR ver­sion of the clas­sic game of the same name and an on­line mul­ti­play­er mode. Be sure to al­so check out the oth­er cool sub­mis­sions for the hackathon and vote for your favourite (It’s prob­a­bly We­b­VR Pong)!

This time around, the hackathon of­fered two tracks for con­tes­tants: “ed­u­ca­tion” and “games from the past”. Af­ter a short brain­storm­ing ses­sion with the peo­ple in­volved in the project (me, Jonathan and Andy), we de­cid­ed to make a clas­sic game in We­b­VR and quick­ly agreed on mak­ing the reimag­i­na­tion of Pong.

As this con­test was about us­ing We­b­VR tech­nol­o­gy, Uni­ty 3D or Un­re­al En­gine weren’t the right fit as they don’t sup­port We­b­VR yet (or pro­duce big bi­na­ries). Our op­tions were: A-Frame, Three.js or Mag­num com­piled to We­bAssem­bly. With each hav­ing their own perks and draw­backs, we de­cid­ed on us­ing Mag­num due to many dif­fer­ent rea­sons. If you fol­lowed our jour­ney so far, you know we have worked with Mag­num in the past and de­vel­oped the Won­der­land En­gine with it. It is light­weight, easy to use (if you know C++) and you on­ly use what you need, so the size of the project does not blow up im­me­di­ate­ly. Go­ing back to an amaz­ing frame­work like Mag­num made work­ing on this project a breeze.

https://twitter.com/VhiteRabbitVR/status/1021301132654718978

This was a re­fresh­ing ex­pe­ri­ence af­ter hav­ing al­most ex­clu­sive­ly worked on Un­re­al projects for the last year. As I was re­spon­si­ble for ren­der­ing and mod­el­ing, hav­ing the con­trol of load­ing, in­stan­ti­at­ing and draw­ing ev­ery in­di­vid­u­al mesh and be­ing able to see the big pic­ture by not hav­ing the ab­strac­tion of a huge game en­gine in the way is def­i­nite­ly an ed­u­cat­ing ex­pe­ri­ence. I feel a lot more com­fort­able with work­ing in C++ and us­ing Mag­num in the fu­ture af­ter this project and def­i­nite­ly rec­om­mend it to peo­ple in­ter­est­ed in graph­ics de­vel­op­ment with C++.

Al­so, look for­ward to a post by Jonathan on the net­work­ing side of We­b­VR Pong. He al­so delves in­to it a bit on his se­mi-dai­ly Blog.

Any­way, back to the game fea­tures. As of now, you are ei­ther matched with the next per­son in the queue in mul­ti­play­er or you can start your own room and play with your friends. The game is our first ex­per­i­ment with We­b­VR and we would like your feed­back on it. You are wel­come to con­tact us via com­ment or e-mail or di­rect mes­sages on any so­cial me­dia plat­form we’re on. We hope you en­joy play­ing the game and keep your eyes open for more We­b­VR con­tent from Vhite Rab­bit in the fu­ture, as we con­tin­ue to ex­plore this new space more from day to day. This is on­ly the be­gin­ning.

Sin­cere­ly,

Flo­ri­an of Vhite Rab­bit