Dawn of Jets

Dawn of Jets is the most advanced and graphically impressive flight simulation game on the Quest. It quickly set the bar for sims on standalone VR. Our multiplayer update is about to take off!

Comment

Inspiration

The inspiration for the project initially came when, after porting some of our previous game to the Quest on a whim, we realized that the Quest was far more powerful than most developers were making use of. We immediately felt that with our experience optimizing for embedded systems like the Nintendo 3DS, we would be able to create a flying game that looked far superior to anything else on the market, while also providing the best “feeling of flight” available.

The inspiration for this update actually came from our customers who continually begged us to add multiplayer to the game.

What it does

This update integrates multiplayer, a feature our loyal audience has been clamouring for since our initial release.

How we built it

The game is built on Unity 3D with the OVR library. Our multiplayer update, finalized during this period, was built using Photon Fusion 2 as a networking framework, along with support for several Horizon OS features including Presence, Destinations, Invites and Deep Linking.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into 3 major challenges implementing this update.

First, we needed to synchronize extremely fast-moving objects. A first-person shooter may deal with objects moving 10mph. A racing game may involve speeds of up to 180mph. But we must contend with speeds up to 4 times that. And unlike most of our competition, we do not “fake” our speeds. Thus, at 600mph a latency of even 100ms could cause positional errors of up to 30 meters! This required both technical and design considerations to minimize world-state discrepancies.

Second, our game world is far larger than the single-precision limits of the Unity game engine typically allow. We need to render near-filed objects with millimeter precision while also rendering objects 50,000 meters away. We had to develop a networkable floating-origin system with no discontinuities when players’ origins are adjusted on clients.

Third, because we had already pushed the Quest to near its performance limits, we had precious little CPU/GPU left to support these multiplayer features.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of being the fastest, best looking and most authentic feeling flight simulator on the Quest. For this update, we are proud that we didn’t need to “dumb down” the game to support multiplayer and to get around the challenges that it presents. 600mph dogfights are real 600mph dogfights!

What we learned

Like everybody else, we learned that multiplayer is hard. There are 10 times the failure points of single-player, and testing for them is 10 times as hard.

What's next for Dawn of Jets

We expect to continue adding content in the form of new jets, missions and bigger, more detailed worlds to push the limits of Quest 3 and beyond. For our multiplayer update, we will be adding new game modes and session types as we move forward.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates