even better, just an undocumented option in the configuration xml. so it can look like an accident!
Odyssey Alpha - let us try VR 3D stereoscopic headlook on foot and alpha test its nausea trigger / gameplay
- Thread starter VR Jay Le Chardon
- Start date
even better, just an undocumented option in the configuration xml. so it can look like an accident!
The expanded quote by him there starts: "I've done a couple of VR things", so seems he’s done some. His whole take there could be his CM supposition, or a line, rather than the internal dev view though, sure.
A & B are doubtless things they’d need to take on. And VR being a niche market too. (Which is what Braben mainly discussed, iirc, rather than being personally unenthused by it. Certainly back at Horizon’s launch he was still talking enthusiastically about the SRVs in VR. I doubt that personal feeling about VR has gone away).
Last edited:
if you heat up your ship and then tilt your head you'll see the smoke tilting along with it. this means that the smoke isn't even there, it is a rendering artifact tied not to the 3d world but to your view. your 2d view, which in a 2d monitor is not allowed to tilt.
if you simply reproduce that in stereo the effect becomes apparent. maybe you don't even notice it because you can't move from your single point of view and tilting your head is an uncommon move. it is fake, but it does the job.
now, these assumptions don't necessarily hold true if you can freely move your point of view and are throwing objects around. then all kinds of screw ups of reality are possible ... and that's even assuming that all major elements of the world are actually rendered 3d objects where computing stereoscopy is possible, and not some kind of shader trick intended solely for 2d projection.
i'm still in favor of having the option of just raw rendering of whatever it is in vr and letting the user decide, though.
This drives me nuts! Actually, the entire smoke-filled cockpit when it reaches 70% drives me crazy. But the locked-to-your-perspective smoke is definitely bizarre-looking!
You profess to have a good understanding of processes which scream "don't oversimplify and don't make assumptions about other peoples projects" (and I`m sure you do) and then you go ahead and just do it anyway.
Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
Others have - and it seems opinions are divided on whether, or not, they'd be a good addition to the game in terms of what they would offer to VR players in FPS mode (should an on-foot VR experience ever be offered).
It's not just smoke, and it doesn't just "break" in VR, on a flatscreen, headlook sometimes shows a couple of gotchas like the smoke, IIRC the sprite based rendering fo the elements in hyperspace transits also show up as 2D when you look out of the side of the cockpit using headtrack or mouselook. But, these were things developed 7 years ago, 3 generations of GPU's ago, I can understand them taking certain shrotcuts for performance issues back then, but nowadays gaming PC's have so much grunt available it seems nonsensical to expose yourself to getting caught for such shortcuts. Espescially as those sprites look to have been flattened renders of a volumetric smoke, as do most of the other gotcha's I've detected. I'd also like to point out that there is a lot of equisite details in the game that cannot be seen without VR, like the iridescent opalescent nature of the chitin on the surface protrusions on the outsides of the thargoid structures, this simply doesn't show up as clearly on even a 4k monitor at ultra ++ settings maxxed out with Dr.Kaii's app as it does on VR high on a gen 1 oculus rift.
I was just responding to your aspersion that I was yet another armchair dev, by stamping out some credentials as I wanted to put some distance between me and the stereotypical armchair dev, that being someone who has read three issues of pc gamer, and thinks they know more than even the best, most experienced, and legendary developers. I freely admit I'm not a games developer, but I have had software engineering project and systems management experience, and we have all seen the video clip where David Braben explains how the VR integration I'm asking for on foot was originally added to the game by one guy in one day...
How hard can it be!!!!
Well that's a plus one from me!
I really wish there was a definitive reason for the lack of on foot VR in the first place.
As I've said b4, I reckon it's down to certain visual effects being rendered at screen depth, without any z buffer-like information. No shader hacker in the world can fix those kinds of affected effects. Those effects can only be disabled.
But then again, surely you would notice similar effects in the cockpit?
I wonder if it might be a balancing issue with regard to FPS combat? Xbox controller users have a significant advantage over VR users and K&M will simply roflstomp them!
But why can't the VR player who wants to be competitive in the arena, just play 2D mode and use K&M? Or take the losses and play with motion controllers? IDK
I really wish there was a definitive reason for the lack of on foot VR in the first place.
As I've said b4, I reckon it's down to certain visual effects being rendered at screen depth, without any z buffer-like information. No shader hacker in the world can fix those kinds of affected effects. Those effects can only be disabled.
But then again, surely you would notice similar effects in the cockpit?
I wonder if it might be a balancing issue with regard to FPS combat? Xbox controller users have a significant advantage over VR users and K&M will simply roflstomp them!
But why can't the VR player who wants to be competitive in the arena, just play 2D mode and use K&M? Or take the losses and play with motion controllers? IDK
I love how that comment - itself almost certainly completely untrue - is used to justify ANY vr related development demands.
I honestly thought we were way beyond the bargaining phase of the five stages.
I’ve accepted there will be disengaged trolling. Will that do?
I still mind you going off on one at me months before they announced there would be no VR Odyssey when I dared to suggest that would be the case.
Eh? I figured no VR was pretty possible for any Legs DLC, so you may be confusing me for someone else dear chap.
Although I do harangue people, so maybe not
Enjoy your glass of schadenfreude either way eh
![[Cancelled Consoleer] boppa_](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/159/159397.jpg?1610496247){kind=avatar}
If it's such a trivial matter, then I'd like to stipulate they also bring VR to the PS5 at the same time.
Putting "balancing issue" in any sentence pertaining to FDev always puts a wide smile on my face. So unless you're talking about balancing a pint of ale in a crowded bar, I think we can put that argument to rest. Alongside my other favourite one "2,8% of VR players will have unfair advantage because they will physically crouch/poke head in walls/reset view/whatever, pay 2 win!!!"
A hard-bean-counting company like FDev will never invest in something Sony itself as much as "abandoned".
That one always surprises me.
Either:
- they're trolling or
- think people can shoot as accurately irl as people do in shooters / superhero movies so people must be able to do it in VR or
- forget one of the main roles of grenades in shooters is to flush out prone people behind cover
But yes, there is absolutely a mathematical probability that you can fire blind behind a crate and it hit someone. There's probably even a tictok showing someone doing it somewhere irl too. You can also walk through walls if you have a big enough play space.
Who cares if it's trivial or not. FD have had a popular VR game for the last 7 years. They did VR day 0. If anyone can do something in VR then a large company who have been doing it for that long at such high quality is going to be it.
We are their customers. It's down to us to let them know what we want and not them to dictate what they want to sell us. They need our custom to pay bills while we can always move on and play other games.
To be honest I don't want the "on foot" update. I only play in VR and so I want more space content, but I don't want to be locked out of content I've already paid for either. Moaning about it on a forum is the only way to get the message across it seems.
I would dearly love for them to add VR support for the playstation, but that is a bigger undertaking than extending the existing VR functionality in Odyssey. What I'm lobbying for is for them to replicate the existing cockpit VR head look in the on foot sections of the game, whereas PSVR will be a whole different set of API's, so it would literally be adding VR from scratch to that platform of the game.
You forgot the fourth option, they forget we are geeky gamers not actual action heroes, meaning we are unlikely to adapt to the increased exertion of actually swinging arms around rather than twiddling the thumbsticks or merely moving mice across our desks for an entire play session.
Hi. I'm an unwashed software developer.
Nothing in software development is "easy", particularly given the process around even minor changes. Changes are just relatively difficult to varying degrees.
I think though that the idea being expressed in relation to barebones VR support for on-foot play is that the difficulty is relatively lower than what some have made it out to be, and the basis for that estimate, if true, has some validity. If for example it's true that Frontier's decision not to include VR support at launch was due to their own testing, it would mean that they've at least got barebones support for it already, if not something a little bit more fleshed out for testing purposes.
If that's not the case, then the fact that the game already has VR support is a factor that realistically reduces the relative difficulty of extending the feature to on-foot play, at least in a very barebones sort of way. As an example, I just modified an API client for a legacy system based on the same type of modification done to an API client with the same endpoints, which was being used by a different product suite (and so had different function calls from the application). It would have taken me a little longer to do, and involved a little more reading of the API documentation if I hadn't have examined the other client first.
I think it would be beneficial to both Frontier and the Elite player base if there were an option in a configuration file that allowed basic VR support for on-foot play to be enabled, as then it would make a subset of players happier, and they could provide free testing and feedback to the developers, without the feature ever being advertised or even being available to switch on inside the game menus.