The HTC Vive head-mounted display (HMD) has some truly weird and wonderful titles in its library, as developers experiment with what virtual reality (VR) can and can’t do. Launching today on Steam Early Access is an experimental project from indie developer Luke Lannini called Rumpus.
As the developer describes it “Rumpus is a live-coding playground for room-scale VR.” Users can play around with pre-made options to design various objects whilst being able to see the code that goes into making it. The code can then be directly altered with additional keyboard that appears either side of the coding window itself.
Lannini details in his Steam posting: “A fully functional livecoding environment with an entity system, rendering, physics, realtime sound synthesis with positional audio, animation, teleportation, knobs, code editors, an object palette, a scene switching system, timers, and more. Each of these is a very rough draft and will be evolving significantly.”
Rumpus will be in early access for around a year in which time additional features to be added include: multiplayer, shareable object libraries, a much, much friendlier VR-native language (no typing), in-world audio synth-graph building, in-world shader and geometry editing, built-in materials, transparency, refraction & shadows and customizable render pipeline.
For those interested in this type of software Rumpus is currently on offer until 11th July 2016. You can pick it up for £9.34 GBP rather than £10.99, giving a 15 percent discount off the regular price.
VRFocus will continue to cover all the latest VR releases on Steam, as and when content is added.
