Freelancer

VR flight sim using cockpit motion controls

Freelancer is a VR flight sim game, developed in Unity for the Quest 2. Through developing Freelancer, I've gained experience in AI (including pathfinding and flight navigation), VR controls and optimisation for running on mobile platforms. Freelancer has an ambitious scale, allowing players to walk around space stations and explore a large solar system. This required a precise balance between the size of environments and performance on a standalone platform. Development was defined by 2 key constraints; it had to run standalone on the Quest 2 and would be playable without needing peripheral hardware (joysticks, keyboards, etc.).

Technologies: C#, Unity, VR, Android

AI Ships Custom Path finding

Implemented a custom path finding system to guide AI ships. The path network provides a route to the ships based on the A* path finding network and then uses a stage based flight process to navigate to that next node in the network. This is well optimised such that hundreds of ships can be in the scene at one time and not cause any performance issues running on a Quest 2.

Unity VR Rig and Motion Controls

I used the Unity built-in VR rig to develop for the Quest 2. This allowed me to implement all the flight and ship controls for the VR motion controls! This was partly inspired by VTOL VR which had a similar fully implemented cockpit, including joystick.

Optimised for VR

Developing to run standalone on the quest 2 required me to learn about optimisation for the platform; limiting poly counts, baking lighting, screen space occlusion. This lead me to choosing an art style and level of detail that would let me achieve big scales and still run smoothly on a mobile platform.