Considering VR is current, I'd agree. Because Fronter have for development reasons stopped supporting 32-bit Windows, and of course their Mac build once Horizons shipped. So they have previous on doing this, and I'm concerned the push to get the game out to the new generation of console (despite one of them supporting VR) is partly the reason. Our new CM has only played ED on a console I heard last night, so I'm hoping he has tried VR to empathise with our concerns should he decide to look in on his forum.
VR support 'not at launch' for Odyssey
- Thread starter Lordxenu
- Start date
Considering VR is current, I'd agree. Because Fronter have for development reasons stopped supporting 32-bit Windows, and of course their Mac build once Horizons shipped. So they have previous on doing this, and I'm concerned the push to get the game out to the new generation of console (despite one of them supporting VR) is partly the reason. Our new CM has only played ED on a console I heard last night, so I'm hoping he has tried VR to empathise with our concerns should he decide to look in on his forum.
I think ED Odyssey will release on mobile platforms only. Don't you guys have phones?
I'm afraid I have to disagree, Jay Le Chardon. The problem is that Frontier themselves currently don't know how difficult it will be to get a good VR implementation for FPS.
I don't think that will be possible in the current timeframe. Even the VR-less version Odyssey apparently wasn't possible in the original timeframe. I don't think the majority of players would be happy if Odyssey got delayed another 1-2 years to make sure it will have VR at launch.
A prediction like that isn't possible I'm afraid. As I said, the amount of work and possible problems that may arise are unknown. A cast-iron promise isn't a thing in this industry. At the very most, Frontier could say "we promise to try".
That would be a bit premature I think. It's too early to say "never ever". I think they are trying/evaluating and will add it if it's feasible. And yes, this is very much a financial question as well, as you mentioned.
I do however agree with you that currently "not at launch" should be understood as a simple "no" and to not have any expectations at all in that regard.
I don't think that will be possible in the current timeframe. Even the VR-less version Odyssey apparently wasn't possible in the original timeframe. I don't think the majority of players would be happy if Odyssey got delayed another 1-2 years to make sure it will have VR at launch.
A prediction like that isn't possible I'm afraid. As I said, the amount of work and possible problems that may arise are unknown. A cast-iron promise isn't a thing in this industry. At the very most, Frontier could say "we promise to try".
That would be a bit premature I think. It's too early to say "never ever". I think they are trying/evaluating and will add it if it's feasible. And yes, this is very much a financial question as well, as you mentioned.
I do however agree with you that currently "not at launch" should be understood as a simple "no" and to not have any expectations at all in that regard.
Despite my plans to buy a Rift S in the next few weeks, I'm a little lacking in sympathy for this cause.. Why? I think some of you have thrown very large tantrums of a not so mature type, which does nothing to help the cause with anyone.. All we know is 'not at launch' and whilst I'd certainly like some clarity, I've been here long enough now to know we are not going to get it until FDev are ready to speak.. I've also learnt enough to know that FDev are good at weasel words and 'not at launch' might really mean never - or it might mean we need to wait 6 months.
It is not entirely unlikely that PC is not supported "at launch". Just because they haven't said so explicitly does not meant that it wont be the case... lots of people are using that analogy to "comfort" the 20% VR players in this game who is loosing out.
PC is actually pretty hard to develop to. There is a ton of different hardware configs and controllers you need to support. Much easier to develop for the other 2 platforms that would comprise of 66% of the market. Would make sense for FDEV to focus on those for launch so Odyssey can be perfect, and then if sales are good on consoles are good they may consider PC.
33% PC (minority)
33% Xbox
33% Playstation.
Amidoinitrite?
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Can you link a source for that?
I am not confident that Frontier can or will make VR ready for Odyssey for launch or afterwards.
How many times have you seen a publicly listed company CEO say something about the future direction of his company (paraphrasing: "VR will always be niche") and then turn around and say "sorry dear customers I called it wrong and we're changing direction". I'm still waiting for Carmack to admit he was wrong (or that he even said it) for stating that (again paraphrasing) "single cores and higher clock speeds are the future", when anyone who was willing to listen to Intel at the time (2008-ish iirc) knew otherwise.
How many times have you seen a publicly listed company CEO say something about the future direction of his company (paraphrasing: "VR will always be niche") and then turn around and say "sorry dear customers I called it wrong and we're changing direction". I'm still waiting for Carmack to admit he was wrong (or that he even said it) for stating that (again paraphrasing) "single cores and higher clock speeds are the future", when anyone who was willing to listen to Intel at the time (2008-ish iirc) knew otherwise.
No. But I guess if you're asked to implement a feature that's not even designed yet, the default answer to how long it will take is "I don't know".
Hi
I can answer that for you! It is fine!
Mouselook or use of a controller was the only way to move prior to motion controllers which came with the Vive but after original consumer Rift was released. The OG Rift even came with XBox controller, because of the lack of motion controllersback then!
Before people were concerned with motion sickness i.e. most VR enthusiast who had invested money buying a HMD and therefore forgave it and were willing to push through it, you found ways to get around it before you got your wings. For instance, when playing FPS where there is no headlook, you just stay seated, like you would in pancake, and control headlook with the mouse.
So they havent designed Odyssey yet and need to start development? Sorry for being "that guy" but I'm not sure what you are talking about?
Obviously I wasn't talking about the whole of Odyssey, but the FPS VR implementation.
The decision to trop VR didn't just "happen". It was not something a codemonkey and a project manager decided on at the coffeemachine to shave off a few hours of developing something. This is a major business decision - most likely done in late 2018. All code and assets in Odyssey could at this point be so far away from VR that it would require major rework.
Hence why I dont understand that they are not front and center about it. This is not a new decision or an "oops" done by the dev team.
Craith
Volunteer Moderator
A minimum viable implementation is not hard to do, and won't delay Odyssey for another 1-2 years, as some people are trying to suggest.
3D rendering can be implemented quickly (won't say a few days but most likely it is that - it is rendering the same scene 2x from a slightly different angle)
allow the HMD axis as your mouse/controller input (they had that during the FSS beta but unfortunately removed it) - done. Unless their new engine does away with 3D representation of things and uses mostly 2D sprites.
It won't be the best FPS implementation that exists, but it is more or less along the lines of what we have in space (with HMD axis as headlook). And what most VR players would be happy with.
Throw in a few optional comfort modes (vignette, blackout in certain situations, like what they have for the SRV) for those that want them and you can say it has solid VR support.
It won't be Halflife Alyx or a pure VR game, but it would allow people that play Elite in VR to continue to enjoy the newest incarnation of their game and the long awaited new content, that many of us have already paid for.
Would I like to have more support? Of course, I'd love to be able to interact with the cockpit, use roomscale (as an option) in FPS. I prefer to stay realistic though.
3D rendering can be implemented quickly (won't say a few days but most likely it is that - it is rendering the same scene 2x from a slightly different angle)
allow the HMD axis as your mouse/controller input (they had that during the FSS beta but unfortunately removed it) - done. Unless their new engine does away with 3D representation of things and uses mostly 2D sprites.
It won't be the best FPS implementation that exists, but it is more or less along the lines of what we have in space (with HMD axis as headlook). And what most VR players would be happy with.
Throw in a few optional comfort modes (vignette, blackout in certain situations, like what they have for the SRV) for those that want them and you can say it has solid VR support.
It won't be Halflife Alyx or a pure VR game, but it would allow people that play Elite in VR to continue to enjoy the newest incarnation of their game and the long awaited new content, that many of us have already paid for.
Would I like to have more support? Of course, I'd love to be able to interact with the cockpit, use roomscale (as an option) in FPS. I prefer to stay realistic though.
DirectX and other API's like Vulkan make the development fairly straightforward. The issue I found myself a few years ago, even using Source, was that it was fairly easy to get things to work and look good on reasonable hardware, then getting it to run well and look good on lower end platforms was an issue. I could get it to look pretty OR have all the physics traps work nicely on lower end gear. Thankfully, networking just worked. That wouldn't be a problem for that codebase now, but I can see working from more recent code could have a similar problem - and the coding gods only know how I'd have added VR to that stack.
For those interested, I was making a game version of a book.. It had 7 main different areas, all set in a variety of 'ancient' locales, such as the temple at Halicarnassus, the Great Pyramid, these were all levels consisting of a series of traps, all of which I was modelling using in-engine physics. I'd gotten the basics of the co-op format down and had most of the first area laid out. Author wasn't interested. Shame, Aussie author, Aussie game, could have been good.. As it turns out, I understand why, this was 2006 and there are 6 books after it - 2 of which we readers are still waiting for.. Points to anyone who names the character..
You seem to have typo'd. Fixed it for you.
You're assuming that the COBRA engine is easy to use whereas I believe the opposite is the case. It must be a heap of spaghetti code with ancient development thinking underpinned by interns and a Mars bar. Whatever "new" engine is forthcoming clearly wasn't implemented in a way which would make VR "easy" to add or have from the outset. COBRA is a show.
If amateur developers at home without access to the source code for the game(s) or the engine(s) of the game's they play can make VR mods for things like GTA-V & Alien Isolation, surely a professional team, who have access to the source for the game and work in the company who makes the engine for their game, and have previously had VR in the previous & current versions of the game can "plug it in" to the new version they are working on?
I see some new faces in this thread saying why VR into Odessy cannot be done - did you know one guy - Greg - took one day to get VR running on Elite Dangerous Alpha?
I know I've posted this before, but it seems to be relevant again:
08:41 - [snip] so we released the first alpha on the
08:44 - 15th or December 2013 and the reception
08:49 - could have been better people really
08:51 - positive and excited about playing game
08:52 - and we were excited we're very proud of
08:54 - what we made to be honest but it's
08:55 - amazing one of the the clarion calls
08:58 - wouldn't this be wonderful and oculus
08:59 - rift because DK one was around a lot of
09:02 - our team had bought it personally so
09:04 - they can play around with their two home
09:05 - we had a few in the office and we be
09:09 - honest going to really resist one of the
09:11 - engineers are persuading me that a guy
09:14 - called Greg that he reckoned he could do
09:17 - it within he's initially said 24 hours
09:19 - and he said oh well three days or two
09:21 - but actually within a day he had managed
09:24 - to get it working on oculus rift it was
09:26 - just such a magical experience we
09:28 - thought we'd go for it and then so on
09:29 - twentieth of december we ship the game
09:31 - with oculus rift support for christmas
09:33 - so all the backers were amazed because
09:35 - they weren't expecting when we hadn't
09:37 - been expecting it ever [snip]
Source: https://youtu.be/vN2BWY872M8?list=PL3Ym79LECwSIkd3OyJEpy_9PwQEuHew2b&t=521
Even say that was just a day for HMD look from the pilot's seat, they have since added VR for SRV, and some creature comforts such as "SRV keep horizon" etc so say it takes "Greg" or his successor a couple of days to retrace the steps of VR in ED + Horizons into Odessy, and another couple of days to put in a Legs version of the creature comforts like a "reduce head bob" equivalent to SRV keep horizon, these would be tweaks to copies of existing "features" not all new groundbreaking code work. So we'll say give "Greg" / "Greg II" a week to do that all... one developer week in a team of 120 six to eight months from launch?
Even say the team is 60 devs + 60 "others" (design / art / sound / graphics / etc) so its one developer in a team of sixty for a week six to eight months from launch. Even going with 6 months to launch not 8, total dev team capacity is 24weeks x 60devs = 1440dev weeks, one "dev week" isn't going to make much difference to the overall launch date now is it? If VR took one dev week, there is still 1439 dev weeks left to do the rest of the game. it's less than one percent of the developer resources available.
Even giving Greg / "Greg II" a couple of colleagues to help him for the same full week, leaves 1437 dev weeks to get the rest of the game done. Go nuts, give him three colleagues, so the VR team is now one for VR in ships & SLF's much the same experience), one for VR in SRV's, one for VR on planets surfaces on foot, and one for VR in urban on foot social hubs & starports etc and you've got 4 dev weeks for VR and 1436 for the rest of the game.
I see some new faces in this thread saying why VR into Odessy cannot be done - did you know one guy - Greg - took one day to get VR running on Elite Dangerous Alpha?
I know I've posted this before, but it seems to be relevant again:
08:41 - [snip] so we released the first alpha on the
08:44 - 15th or December 2013 and the reception
08:49 - could have been better people really
08:51 - positive and excited about playing game
08:52 - and we were excited we're very proud of
08:54 - what we made to be honest but it's
08:55 - amazing one of the the clarion calls
08:58 - wouldn't this be wonderful and oculus
08:59 - rift because DK one was around a lot of
09:02 - our team had bought it personally so
09:04 - they can play around with their two home
09:05 - we had a few in the office and we be
09:09 - honest going to really resist one of the
09:11 - engineers are persuading me that a guy
09:14 - called Greg that he reckoned he could do
09:17 - it within he's initially said 24 hours
09:19 - and he said oh well three days or two
09:21 - but actually within a day he had managed
09:24 - to get it working on oculus rift it was
09:26 - just such a magical experience we
09:28 - thought we'd go for it and then so on
09:29 - twentieth of december we ship the game
09:31 - with oculus rift support for christmas
09:33 - so all the backers were amazed because
09:35 - they weren't expecting when we hadn't
09:37 - been expecting it ever [snip]
Even say that was just a day for HMD look from the pilot's seat, they have since added VR for SRV, and some creature comforts such as "SRV keep horizon" etc so say it takes "Greg" or his successor a couple of days to retrace the steps of VR in ED + Horizons into Odessy, and another couple of days to put in a Legs version of the creature comforts like a "reduce head bob" equivalent to SRV keep horizon, these would be tweaks to copies of existing "features" not all new groundbreaking code work. So we'll say give "Greg" / "Greg II" a week to do that all... one developer week in a team of 120 six to eight months from launch?
Even say the team is 60 devs + 60 "others" (design / art / sound / graphics / etc) so its one developer in a team of sixty for a week six to eight months from launch. Even going with 6 months to launch not 8, total dev team capacity is 24weeks x 60devs = 1440dev weeks, one "dev week" isn't going to make much difference to the overall launch date now is it? If VR took one dev week, there is still 1439 dev weeks left to do the rest of the game. it's less than one percent of the developer resources available.
Even giving Greg / "Greg II" a couple of colleagues to help him for the same full week, leaves 1437 dev weeks to get the rest of the game done. Go nuts, give him three colleagues, so the VR team is now one for VR in ships & SLF's much the same experience), one for VR in SRV's, one for VR on planets surfaces on foot, and one for VR in urban on foot social hubs & starports etc and you've got 4 dev weeks for VR and 1436 for the rest of the game.
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I've seen something else in this thread saying about how you have to design your assets for VR, so it would need a complete rewrite etc...
No...
VR integration consists of is interfacing with the VR API, whether it be SteamVR aka OpenVR, or Oculus VR, this API tells the game where the viewpoint is, as in what X Y Z position the head is, and its Yaw Pitch and Roll angles, and the distance between the cameras (for cameras read eyes) and asks the game for two pictures, one from XYZ+YPR & the other from the location of the other eye at its XYZ+YPR, the game renders these frames, and sends the two frames to the VR API and the VR runtimes (which host the API) deal with syncing those images with the headset. The VR API asks for its next frame to be two new viewpoints from the latest XYZ+YPR's and the process continues.
No...
VR integration consists of is interfacing with the VR API, whether it be SteamVR aka OpenVR, or Oculus VR, this API tells the game where the viewpoint is, as in what X Y Z position the head is, and its Yaw Pitch and Roll angles, and the distance between the cameras (for cameras read eyes) and asks the game for two pictures, one from XYZ+YPR & the other from the location of the other eye at its XYZ+YPR, the game renders these frames, and sends the two frames to the VR API and the VR runtimes (which host the API) deal with syncing those images with the headset. The VR API asks for its next frame to be two new viewpoints from the latest XYZ+YPR's and the process continues.
Where is Greg when you need him. Percy's already gone.
I've been trying to jedi mind trick golgot into becoming Greg II...
... but seriously I'd reckon that since it's basically an API call, and VR has became wider spread, and there will be tutorials / examples on the internet, most programmers could plug it in to elite.
... but seriously I'd reckon that since it's basically an API call, and VR has became wider spread, and there will be tutorials / examples on the internet, most programmers could plug it in to elite.