Care to help? CaveUT is a completely open-source effort, protected under Epic Games' GPL agreement. It remains a work in progress, and the community developing CaveUT hopes that people in the Unreal community are interested in developing CaveUT further.
At some point, the CaveUT team will be ready to setup a Source Forge or equivalent project. In the meantime, we are happy to post patches and/or additions to CaveUT, and to help anyone who wants to work on them.
Among CaveUT's needs:
Develop More and Better Control Interfaces
There can never be enough testing and innovation on controls for CaveUT. Our most pressing need is to to separate firing direction from movement direction; options that have been suggested include using a head tracker, moving with a separate device (perhaps hand-held or foot-controlled), and performing weapon targeting with a third control.
Introduce a Spherical Correction
It's not readily apparent from the lovely shot of the Earth Theater, but CaveUT has a problem with that display, because the theater's screens are curved rather than flat. Currently, CaveUT works by simply carving out a section of UT's (flat) display.
01/22/04 Willem De Jonge has just completed preliminary code for a spherical correction. We hope to include it in CaveUT2004
Real Time Head Tracking
This task would require a real-time data stream from the head tracker to both VRGL and the UT2004 code. In the game code, the tracker could simply move the player as any other game peripheral would. The hacked OpenGL library (VRGL) would have to open a socket to receive the offsets from the tracker driver. Simple, in theory, but not a small amount of programming....
Stereographic Display
One of the ways we perceive depth in the real world is through the fact that each eye sees the world from a slightly different angle. Out to a distance of about eight feet, the human brain is able to calculate the distance from your eyes to any object using this disparity.
Stereographic displays effectively project both the right and left eye views onto some virtual scene. Special glasses separate the images for the viewer so that each eye sees the scene meant for it.
Marc LeRenard got preliminary stereo working for CaveUT 1.2, recently (01/15/04). Once it is debugged and doucmented we will make it available on this site.
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