Elite: Dangerous dev Frontier focuses on SteamVR
As work continues on adding official Oculus Rift support.
UPDATE: Frontier community chief Zac Antonaci has issued a follow-up statement, and said the developer continues to work with Oculus on Elite Dangerous Rift support.
In a post on the Elite Dangerous forum, Antonaci revealed Frontier's focus shifted to SteamVR in part because of an early delivery of a stable software development kit.
ORIGINAL STORY: Frontier has confirmed Elite: Dangerous does not currently officially support virtual reality headset Oculus Rift.
The developer is focusing, instead, on SteamVR.
Eurogamer was tipped off to a potential drop of support for Oculus Rift by a source who pointed to the lack of mention of the headset on the Elite: Dangerous store.
When contacted about the change, Frontier confirmed its move to focus on SteamVR.
The obvious follow-up question was whether the move was prompted by Frontier signing an exclusivity deal to release Elite: Dangerous on the HTC Vive first, but the Cambridge developer insisted this was not the case.
Frontier issued Eurogamer the following statement:
The news comes as some surprise, given Frontier has used Oculus Rift to demo Elite: Dangerous' virtual reality potential at a raft of events over the past two years.
Those within the game's community, however, might have seen this coming. Elite: Dangerous ceased to work with Oculus Rift builds post 0.6. Indeed the developer took to its own forum earlier this month to address concern about the headset ahead of pre-orders going live.
"With the news that Oculus are starting pre order of their consumer version tomorrow, I wanted to just make a quick post to confirm that we are still actively working with Oculus but currently the only SDK we are able to officially support is 0.6," community chief Zac Antonaci said.
