Epic Games has officially announced support for the Oculus Rift on the Unreal Engine 4. In a release today, the company announced the members of its UE4 Integrated Partners Program, a group of companies whose technology will be tightly integrated with the latest engine. Among Autodesk, Intel, Nvidia, and other big names, you'll find Oculus VR, whose virtual reality headset has captured the imagination of many gamers and developers. As Engadget points out, Epic has said before that it was working on support for the Oculus Rift. But this announcement makes it clear that Epic will be working with Oculus to make Unreal Engine 4 work as smoothly as possible on the Rift, and that there will be an ongoing relationship between the two.

Epic isn't the only big name to express interest in supporting the Rift. EA's Frank Vitz is exploring the possibility of integrating Rift support into the new Frostbite Engine, and Valve has worked on porting several of its games for the headset. John Carmack of Id Software was also an early supporter of the project. Tailoring engines for the Rift and supporting existing games is just part of the problem Oculus faces, however. The immersion and head-tracking mechanisms of the Rift often work poorly with fast-paced shooters or other games that require deft control, meaning that developers will need to think not just about how to get games running, but what kind of experiences actually work in virtual reality.