Frontier VR Developers -> REACT ! SIMPLE fix to double our effective solution. WHY ?!

[dementia]

I find ALL green to be actually harder to see because you are effectively switching off the other pixels. A softer/lighter green hue is much easier as it is still green but you are also using all the pixels.

This is what I run with..

<MatrixRed> 0.1, 0.71, 0.1 </MatrixRed>
<MatrixGreen> 0.5, -1, -0.26 </MatrixGreen>
<MatrixBlue> -0.51, 0.73, 1 </MatrixBlue>

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Let me attempt to address this if I may.
To begin with you must remember that the total number of DK2 users is quite low in the community.
The DK2 is not a consumer product and future changes may redress the pixel geometry issues.
Frontier chose the orange/cyan colour scheme for a lot of good reasons (colour blindness for example)
But most importantly, the decision to move to a pentile pixel display was a late change by Oculus that was a closely guarded secret they did not share with FD.

Frontier were not in the position to re-balance the entire colour palette of the game because one hardware vendor made a change to their equipment.
Suggesting they have 'failed' because of this is a little extreme.

In fact their desire to eventually include a custom colour wheel/mapping in game shows that they are still working on this for all types of user.

Indeed. It has already been stated by the devs that the way the colours are currently done was fine for the release but a better system is planned at some point.

 

[Phier]

I find ALL green to be actually harder to see because you are effectively switching off the other pixels. A softer/lighter green hue is much easier as it is still green but you are also using all the pixels.

This is what I run with..

<MatrixRed> 0.1, 0.71, 0.1 </MatrixRed>
<MatrixGreen> 0.5, -1, -0.26 </MatrixGreen>
<MatrixBlue> -0.51, 0.73, 1 </MatrixBlue>

I like this one except that friendly ships are red and hostile ones green.

 

[Lirezh]

Due to the pentile display it is not good to have any other color than green.
You can use different green brightnesses, that's fine but no other color should be mixed in.

The reason is that pixels are unevenly distributed (geometry as well as quantity).
If you add any bit of red to your green text/line then you have red dots around your green line/text. This does not make it better readable it just adds distortion dots around your actual visual information.
The same counts for blue, somehow I do not find blue as bad as red (I did not mic up the display to prevent dirt and damage but I guess the red dots are larger than the blue ones because our eyes see red wavelengths not so bright)


I researched a lot in this area for Elite to make the experience as optimal as possible, the matrix settings I posted in the first thread are the best you will find. Surprise me if you think you find better readable ones.
The difficulty was to keep red colors there but still change everything else to green. So friend/foe markers work fine and also red text in the market is there.
The only drawback is that red has no ilumination anymore, so red text on some other background becomes worse. However friend/foe is working perfectly and all the important lines and text elements are in green.

P.S.
After playing a while I did not find that green looks worse than the orange at all. It looks quite nice actually.

 

[bitset]

I've just found this thread and changed my settings. The difference in readability is great, and I think the game still looks good in green. Thanks for posting this -- hopefully being able to change this through the settings GUI will happen soon and more occulus users can experience it without having to hack a config file.

 

[CMDR W E S Fisher]

not sure were it is but there is a thread on here somewere about it. There is a file u can adjust for gui colour that does get written over on updates. Not done it my self as i just keep a link to the correct folder and copy paste what i need. Though it would be a good idea if frontier could adjust gamne so when DK2 or cv1 etc are plumbed in, setting auto change for the better.

Keep the post going guys.

We need this change

Fish

 

[adam]

Are there HUD color settings that improve the DK1 ?

 

[Khaldur]

Are there HUD color settings that improve the DK1 ?

AFAIK the screen of the DK1 doesn't have a pentile matrix as in the DK2 so the pixel density is the same for red, green and blue. So HUD color change won't improve readability on the DK1 - at least not regarding resolution.

 

[Juniper]

Let me attempt to address this if I may.
To begin with you must remember that the total number of DK2 users is quite low in the community.
The DK2 is not a consumer product and future changes may redress the pixel geometry issues.
Frontier chose the orange/cyan colour scheme for a lot of good reasons (colour blindness for example)
But most importantly, the decision to move to a pentile pixel display was a late change by Oculus that was a closely guarded secret they did not share with FD.

Frontier were not in the position to re-balance the entire colour palette of the game because one hardware vendor made a change to their equipment.
Suggesting they have 'failed' because of this is a little extreme.

In fact their desire to eventually include a custom colour wheel/mapping in game shows that they are still working on this for all types of user.

I'm in broad agreement with this I have to say.

The OP is a bit petulant. He's right in a way, but it could certainly have been phrased better. DK2 support is really a bonus aspect of the game - not a core tenet. We're lucky to have it.

However, it does surprise me that FD coded it in such a way as to not give them / us maximum flexibility when it comes to choosing colours across all aspects of the UI. I'm not a graphics programmer, so I really don't know why it was done that way.

Saying that though, they did put in a tweak in 1.1 to render HUD shadows relative to the HUD colour (rather than being hard-coded as orange like previously), so progress is slowly being made.

 

[Lirezh]

I'd give it a try.
Khaldur is right regarding the pentile matrix but I don't know about the pixel placement itself.

In your case I would go and open a simple drawing tool like gimp/paint and then draw thin lines.
Vertical, horizontal and at some angles.
Also write a sentence at a font size that is barely readable on DK1.

Use the same lines in those variations:
Green
Red
Blue
White
Yellow
Magenta
Cyan

Use pure colors at max intensity, easiest if you have a drawing tool that has those colors or allows you to enter numbers yourself.

Move the image into your rift, you can just look at it using one eye. See how well you can read the text and how nice the lines look.
You will likely find one or two of those solutions to work best with your line.
The same counts for DK2 but here the result is known already (pure green without any other color inside)


@Juniper
I am aware the tone was not the best, I feel betrayed by Frontier. They moved from a community funded game with community goals to full money-grinding.
Just look at their job offerings (at least it was like this some weeks ago), every single open position except for support staff is focused on consoles. They are not hiring a single programmer without strong xbox or ps experience.
It's the exactly same the consoles caused to PC games, the large companies like EA realized that there are 50 times more casual gamers than real gamers, the games became simple boring and easy to play and they made a lot more money through that.

Frontier does the same, they suddenly "released" a beta state game and collected 300,000 early customers that way. Suddenly their interest shifted from a high quality game approach to a high money-grinding approach (look at their investment press releases please).
I strongly doubt they have a single programmer employed who is doing any VR work for Elite since "release". If I am wrong then that programmer is doing a minimal VR solution for the paid extensions instead of fixing the open problems.
The VR experience is still good, we are lucky they did a quite good job in the beginning (well except for p2p networking and framerate-to-object-mapping).
I was expecting something else, so I am "slightly" disappointed.
Not every company lost their soul over money opportunities, for example look at CD Project red (Witcher), CCP (Eve Online).


I am aware people will also disagree with this comment (however, the tone is better ^^) because people don't like to hear that. It's against their wishes so it's better not true.

 

[Juniper]

Since the offline bombshell back in November, and consequent PR neglect & disrespect, there's little love lost between myself and Frontier so you'll get no argument there. They've lurched from disaster to disaster since then. It's a shame, because there are many good people that work there - but the problems at the company are higher up, and unfortunately the most visible to those who backed the game.

Re: consoles - it's inevitable that they are turning their eye towards that. Once the Mac version is out of the way, the next cash cow is the console market. Don't forget there are other projects on the go at Frontier besides E: D. So there's no certainty that those they are hiring are even going to be working on E: D - for console or otherwise.

E: D on the DK2 is still pretty good though. Yes, it's a bit annoying that there's no proper support for colour schemes besides the blunt instrument of setting a profile through the XML files (which is always a trade-off). I can only assume the guy who was tasked with writing this initially has very little experience of writing business software. He (or she) just wrote a solution that works, as efficiently as possible, but damn near impossible to pick apart and change. Business software is written in such a way as to expect change and evolution. Game software is closer to hacking. At least that's my experience having lived on both sides of the track for a time.

Eventually they'll get around to putting in a proper colour wheel and other goodies that we can utilise for VR. It's just a matter of being patient. As I recall, there were issues with the shadow being orange because not all of the HUD was rendered as a 3D object - it was just a backdrop. The fact that this has changed in 1.1 bodes well for future updates.

TL;DR - everything will be OK.

 

[CMDR Holycow]

The Devs will certainly include a way to change the colors in the game in future updates, because not all of us like orange, and there is already too much orange everywhere else in the game, but they are NOT (and rightfully so) going to spend any time doing this just for a developers kit. Once they have the specs of the CV1 release, they will go from there to see what is needed. DKs are developers kits, not release products.

 

[gapper4]

At least the DK2-Moneypigs have decent Rift-Support while many, many "real" Developers can't even afford buying the "development kit".
Also, there are other 3D-implementations that currently deserve higher priority attention.

Moneypigs ? Nice... Well, enjoy your Kraft Dinner while I get served fresh Beluga Caviar on the silky-smooth belly of a supermodel while I type this and chuckle...

DK2 implementation in ED is so close to perfect that it's a shame to see it downgraded by easily solvable issues. That's the OP's point. With a bit of extra effort, ED could become the Oculus poster child.

 

[fviktor]

First of all, I bought DK2 three months ago specifically to play this game the best possible way, so yes, I have high expectations. I've just tried the current version of ED again with DK2 with high hopes that they fixed the issues made it so inconvenient to play the last time. Since then I've been using all kind of games and demo apps on the DK2 with little problems. The best one was Minecrift, which is a perfect example of good HMD aware application design.

All problems are still there which would be trivial to fix:
- Font and menu sizes are generally too small
- Inability to choose text color, especially on the HUD (see the whole thread above)
- Main menu is unreadable and its position is way off to the left-top

Other annoying issues:
- In DK2's extended mode ED cannot select the Rift screen automatically, making it harder to configure this mode. => See LifeRiftView as a perfectly working example.
- Automatically configured graphics settings does not take DK2 into account, where you need supersampling for better quality. So it selects too high quality for the hardware, which you need to downgrade a lot if you don't have a very recent GPU. On a three years old gamer notebook ED cannot be played on DK2 without heavy judder. (I know, I just need to spend a fortune on buying a new machine.)

I lost all of my intent to finally start playing ED. Maybe I will try again in a few months. DK2 was a good deal, but ED turned out to be a really bad one so far...

ED developers, please listen to the people and fix at least the trivial things. Or make them configurable at least in XML files without the danger of overwriting them all the time. Thank you in advance.

 

[redmantab]

A while back I felt this way (similar to the opinion of the poster right above my reply here) and I decided to try and chime in to help.

The very best solution for me was this simple. Use the Nvidia Control Panel and turn on Dynamic Super Resolution to 1.2x or 1.5x if your card/ comp/ rig can handle it.

I have a gforce super clocked 980 gtx and just by turning on DSR to 1.2x I can see everything 80% clear with almost no issues. If I turn down settings from ultra to medium and use 1.5x + DSR ... I can read everything CRYSTAL clear in game while orange and no judder etc.

Just chiming in with my 2 cents because it works for me, solved my issues, and others helped me long ago so I wanted to help you (if this even does).

For me, ED with Oculus RIGHT NOW is 90% perfect with only minimal judder here and there and the most immersive enjoyable gaming experience I've ever had over 20+ years.

Enjoy. With the right gear/tweaks etc...it works very well for many of us and I wish you luck in getting there!

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Oh, and the main menu issue you mentioned I fixed by "hotkeying" my x52 Flight Stick 'pinky' button to do what f12 does and recent my vision etc every time I press it. So, I can quickly re center my viewpoint to see the main screen menu quite easily and then simply re tap the button in game a couple times until I get my camera/ viewpoint/ centerdness ...lol, whatever you call it just right. Man, I LOVE this setup . Buttkicker gamer 2 coming in a couple days via mail to give me some added immersion and rumbling while I play.

Dude, I lovez it.

 

[fviktor]

Thank you for all of your valuable comments and tips. I've just ended up buying a better rig, so ED runs smoothly now with minimal judder only on the most complex scenes. 1.5x DSR is near perfect, 2.0x DSR with AA turned off seems to be even better for me. Lowering shadow quality helps a lot as well. I'm going to apply the centering trick soon, which should make ED playable, finally.

 

[LordKee]

Thank you for all of your valuable comments and tips. I've just ended up buying a better rig, so ED runs smoothly now with minimal judder only on the most complex scenes. 1.5x DSR is near perfect, 2.0x DSR with AA turned off seems to be even better for me. Lowering shadow quality helps a lot as well. I'm going to apply the centering trick soon, which should make ED playable, finally.

Centering trick? What is that? (3rd day dk2 user...thought I had read up on all the tricks and tweaks there are )

 

[Liquidgands]

Centering trick? What is that? (3rd day dk2 user...thought I had read up on all the tricks and tweaks there are )

I might be wrong but I assume they talking about F12, re-centering the camera,
its possible to make menus in stations more readable by leaning back?( might be forward i do it instincivly in game now) recenter the view then sit normally so your naturally nearer the menus, makes everything much more readable. when launching recenter view again for flying in comfort. having an easy access button means you dont even think about it when you do it.

 

[Frank]

Centering trick? What is that? (3rd day dk2 user...thought I had read up on all the tricks and tweaks there are )

There's a recentering trick, but it's so simple that there isn't any need to prepare before using it. The VR recentres when you press f12. You move your head back as far as you can and recentre. When you go back to a more comfortable position you find yourself closer to the HUD and so everything is easier to read.

Is this the trick you're speaking of?

 

[Jake_blakeson]

What about people who are color blind, I am red\green color blind and a pure green display is hard for me to see. I think a nice white version of the HUD would be best.

 

[LordKee]

Thanks guys. Done that more or less, but haven't tried the lean back thing. Starting to really love my Dk2...did 7300 ly trip last night returning from a long (90 million credits worth) exploration trip. Finally elite in exploration so I can concentrate on combat...should be just awesome with dk2