Indeed it would, but how is this any different than me running "manually" and getting sniped? As a VR player, I accept this risk, or more likely I would just do my twitch FPS gameplay in 2D and save VR legs for exploring. At least I'd have option, which is all the OP is asking for.
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
I’ve seen other VR games do it this way - it looks like the player standing still interspaced with little dashes. I’ve also seen third-person teleport, where the player directs their avatar into a new position then immediately snaps to the fresh viewpoint. Sounds a bit weird but actually works very well.
I don't think actual teleport is a solution in the ED universe. It does not need to be anything "weird" from the person observing the sprint - just play the regular sprinting animation as if the player were pushing forward on their controller. Use the NPC AI even to get the player from point A to point B. You could give the FPV player different options (fade to black, reduced FOV, etc) to compensate for nausea, but the end goal is to make sure the VR player doesn't have an advantage over the non-VR player by using gimmicks like actual teleporting.
I'm sorry, but I find it a bit funny that people keep talking about parity with KBAM players in relation to this. What I am asking for here is VR headlook, not hand controllers, and there are some major factors that are being overlooked:
- VR headlook offers better ability to look around
- VR only compares to trackir / facetracknoir
- VR has a narrower field of vision than can be achieved with large monitors or multi monitor setups so there is more need to move the head around to maintain the same situational awareness
- typically monitors have better visual accuity than most of the headsets out in the wild making it easier for on screen players to see details
- sometimes VR by virtue of rendered and viewed in stereoscopic 3D offers better representation of terrain / topography
- VR motion controllers - this thread is not about VR motion controllers, only VR headlook, however, there are a few tropes about hand controllers getting repeated that need addressing:
- Hand controllers and the inverse kinematics (deduction of where the wrists and elbows must be as a result of the hand positions, then rendering them in game) is a whole area that frontier won't have developed yet, and it would be unreasonable to expect them to embark on it now.
- Full Hand controllers also requires the developer to put in at least some "physics", often associated with the IK above, for example
- door handles need to be made to move through a range of motion in unison with the players hand
- if the player throws a grenade, rather than just a cursor over the target area and a cutscene with the grenade following the indicated arc, now with hand controllers the developers need to inverse kinematically work out where it will land, if the grenade weight this much, was thrown this fast, released at this angle of arc, its trajectory will be..... and land????
- VR headlook can be thought of as being similar to track ir / facetracknoir on a 3D TV so hand controllers won't give the player immense jedi like powers of super accuracy flying through walls and such like
- the "looking through walls" SHOULD be addressed by the base game having a collision detection algorithm detecting when a player hits a wall a,d stopping them there, rather than following part of the player's avatar's body and allowing the head to progress beyond that and through walls
- Short version, any looking through walls reports of V games is a bug in the game not a superpower from the VR equipment, and needs patched out.
- the "looking through walls" SHOULD be addressed by the base game having a collision detection algorithm detecting when a player hits a wall a,d stopping them there, rather than following part of the player's avatar's body and allowing the head to progress beyond that and through walls
- Hand controllers will let players shoot around corners etc
- I'm pretty sure FDev would be aware of "combat lean" used in games like Modern Warfare (2020) and Cyberpunk 2077 which offers basically the same functionality but with the ability to see where you are shooting
- assuming the inverse kinematics for the hand controllers allowed the weapons to be held aloft or at arms length around a corner, short of having a periscope as your gunsight you'd be rendered totally entrenched in "spray and pray" most likely just wasting ammo
- if you really want to clear out some forces around the corner from you, lobbing a couple of grenades at them is a much more efficient tactic
- VR hand controllers gets tiring, even if they did add superpowers to their users gameplay, they do so at the cost of exertion
- Don't believe me? We agree tha a typical play session lasts for a few hours? Of which which say 50% is in combat, so, lets call it an hour of combat, and say half that time the weapon is up and you are looking down the sights, and a quarter of that cobat time will be melee or reloading?
- So go and get a couple of the cans of red bull, hold one in each hand to emulate the weight of the hand controllers, and:
- do fifteen minutes tai-chi / yoga - while holding a can of redbull in each hand
- rest for five minutes - while holding a can of redbull in each hand
- shadowboxing / shadow-fighting for fifteen minutes - while holding a can of redbull in each hand
- do another fifteen minutes of taichi / yoga - while holding a can of redbull in each hand
- do another ten minutes tai-chi / yoga - while holding a can of redbull in each hand
- That approximates an hour of combat in VR with hand controllers
- So go and get a couple of the cans of red bull, hold one in each hand to emulate the weight of the hand controllers, and:
- Don't believe me? We agree tha a typical play session lasts for a few hours? Of which which say 50% is in combat, so, lets call it an hour of combat, and say half that time the weapon is up and you are looking down the sights, and a quarter of that cobat time will be melee or reloading?
- VR headlook target lock? - No.
- Sure, Eve Valkyrie does use headlook for target lock, but it has no such function in Elite
- There is no reason to think VR head look will mean target lock on foot
- The game has never had any aim assists other than the target select buttons for next / previous: ship / target / hostile
- if it were made that looking at a target obtained a lock on it, this new aim assistance would most likely originate in the flatscreen version of the game and trickle down to the VR version
- Sure VR was virtually made for looking with you head and would benefit immensely from this were it added
- Facetrack NOIR / TrackIR / Tobii users would also benefit from this syntergy between their deatmovement controller and the new targetting mechanism, so it wouldn't be an advantage / benefit exclusive to VR users
I might not have described it very well, but the third-person teleport actually moves your avatar from your present spot using all the normal animations and speeds (and being vulnerable to enemy fire), until you stop moving it - at which point you immediately snap to the avatar’s position.
With “standard” teleport, the distances involved are usually fairly small, so a short dash animation would happily fit into the brief blackness experienced by the player. I’m not sure it’d give the VR player much of an advantage even if they didn’t do a transition - from games I’ve played that mix the different styles, the teleporting players tend to stay still for a second or so before moving again, as they are choosing the next spot to jump to. Plenty of time to snap off a shot.
Teleportation is the bane of all evil, I just use the VR controller like any other controller.
Up to move forward, Down to move backwards, press the d-pad for to sneak mode.
you get the gist, all this from sitting on my bed.
Anyhoo: this is added towards the forum.
What's all this M&K advantage, from what I gather its AI Vs Human, no PvP.
Coming from a PG/Offline gamer.
I just hope the AI will be smart in taking cover, flanking and that Military goodness.
And No AI John Rambo`s.
They’ve confirmed PvP as well. There’s some form of CQC arena on foot, and players can meet / fight in the main world on foot etc.
I’d say go for it (as long as it doesn’t impact dev time). I would probably try it out, but it would be a total barf fest for me. But for those that can do it, great!
I wonder how this would change the current VR implementation? As it stands you have 6 DoF and can move the “camera” with the headset. I would imagine this would have to change to lock the camera to the player’s body (to prevent leaning and walking away from your body). I imagine it would be VR head look only with locomotion coming from control input.
I wonder how this would change the current VR implementation? As it stands you have 6 DoF and can move the “camera” with the headset. I would imagine this would have to change to lock the camera to the player’s body (to prevent leaning and walking away from your body). I imagine it would be VR head look only with locomotion coming from control input.
Battlefront on the PS2 - now that had some shoddy AI! They would endlessly run towards you, and on splitscreen, would only go after player 1
Cheers for the support mate, and what you've said above is exactly what I'm asking for keyboard and mouse or game pad for movement, with headlook being done with the VR headset. Essentially it would just using the VR headset as an overly-fangled ED-Tracker/TrackIR kind of gig, with no arm wavy hand controllers as I reckon adding them to the game, well more specifically adding the physics galaxy and the inverse kinematics to track the arms would add significant work oto Odyssey and would likely end up causing further delays to it's release.
How would teleportation work in a competitive multiplayer game?
![[VR] Mad Mike](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/27/27910.jpg?1553527108){kind=avatar}
Elite D won't have teleportation..I would bet money on it..... But there are plenty of ways to mitigate nausea other than that.. but even if not that would be what a flat screen option is for if you can't take part of the game in VR use a virtual screen
Tracking woudn't likely delay the release, it would definitely delay it, and would result in fdev trying to code for both a flatscreen Half-Life Alyx, and a VR Half-Life Alyx, with entirely different control systems.
But what I still don't think you see is your own proposal would "likely end up causing further delays" to the release. You still seem to think it's just flick the VR switch for VR headlook. I'll bet it isn't.
The existing game - in cockpit/srv - have VR, it's likely simple for EDO to just continue the same way. Basically no changes. But the first person additions are completely new, and it would appear were not planned/designed/coded for VR.
Changing it now on the hoof? Its how IT projects end up a mess.
Not that I've been involved in IT disasters
no siree...
Are we back at denial?
Tracking woudn't likely delay the release, it would definitely delay it, and would result in fdev trying to code for both a flatscreen Half-Life Alyx, and a VR Half-Life Alyx, with entirely different control systems.
But what I still don't think you see is your own proposal would "likely end up causing further delays" to the release. You still seem to think it's just flick the VR switch for VR headlook. I'll bet it isn't.
The existing game - in cockpit/srv - have VR, it's likely simple for EDO to just continue the same way. Basically no changes. But the first person additions are completely new, and it would appear were not planned/designed/coded for VR.
Changing it now on the hoof? Its how IT projects end up a mess.
Not that I've been involved in IT disasters
Both of our opinions on whether to proceed with adding VR headlook to alpha are based on conflicting suppositions, and both are perfectly plausible outcomes, given the correct underpinnings. However, we, and I do include both you and I in this we, don't know everything needed to enable us to crack out our calibrate crystal balls* and accurately predict whether or not it is possible and whether or not pursuing it would incur significant delays. If I colour something in the list below in green it's supporting the idea that on foot VR head look can be smashed in for little additional dev sources and if its in red, its suggesting doing this could need extra resourcing and thus delay the game, and blue is neutral, and will primarily be the question or supposition with red and green points below denoting the evidence for or against it:
*The idea of us cracking out our crystal balls will probably have bottomhat sniggering away in a corner of this thread
- Elite was designed for VR from day 1
- VR has been baked into Elite since Alpha, not just as Virtual flat screen, but proper head look VR like I am asking for here, and David Braben has made much hay bragging about how Elite was built for VR and 4k, including those points being headline features on the webpage for Elite, and that only changed after Odyssey's announcement.
- Many features are a nightmare in VR, like the FSS is clustraphobic and disorienting, using the keyboard to chat / system map in VR is a challenge that ought to have been addressed with an onscreen keyboard were the game really built for VR so the comments above could be marketing hyperbole.
- Adding stereo VR, as opposed to virtual flatscreen, to the on foot parts of Odyssey will need significant remodelling of the assets, including HUD, buildings / people / vehicle assets being introduced in Odyssey.
- Some things in Elite are done in surprising detail, like the exquisite details in the chitin on the tharoid structures, in VR you can really see the iridescence is layered into the chitin, different colour changes occur at different depths. Those details lend credence to something David said in an interview at a games conference about how all the assets for Elite were modelled in such a way as to support up to 16k resolution. [youtube clip available] If the modelling supports 16k res before looking janky, I'm sure it will stand up to even the 4k in current or next-gen top tier headsets, let alone the ~1080 in lots of headsets that are already out in the wild.
- Some stuff in Elite as it stands today was so clearly jankily put together that it already gets caught out with middle-mouse-button-operated headlook or at the very least TrackIR/FacetrackNOIR, never mind VR, such as the smoke sprites in a cockpit. If they cop out and sprite things like that, what is to stop them copping out on other vital aspects of the new assets to save time and or increase games performance? There could already be lots of gotcha's in the odyssey content that they would get away with on flat-screen or virtual flat screen, but stereo headlock would draw attention to them.
- I'm cheekily adlibbing in my own opinion here, if they are still spriting assets in late 2018 into 2019 through 2020 and onto 2021, then they deserve to get caught with their pants down, and spanked for the spriting while they are in that bare exposed position, especially given how braggadocious they are about their asset creation supporting ultra-high resolutions.
- The Odyssey HUD will have been designed to work in 2d screens, not 3d headsets.
- HUD elements are the simplest of the graphics elements to fix, and in real money, we only need the HUD elements to be in a position where we can see them, and in a large/clear enough font and colour combination that they can be read in VR. They don't need to be ultra-detailed volumetric masterpieces. Sure the ships scanner really "pops" in 3d in VR, but left, right crotch and comms panels are plain 2d rasters rendered as a virtual flat-panel suspended in 3d space, even in VR. if there is any gotcha's to the HUD, it is something we could snag in alpha, and it would be one of the easiest bugs to fix as it wouldn't need an investigation to see why it's happening, simply listening to feedback would give the graphics artists the instructions.
- Being designed and coded for 2d will require significant work to bring it into 3d, for example, the HUD might currently be a simple overlay on the CMDR's viewpoint, now it needs to become an entity in 3-dimensional space. Where will it be rendered? How far out will it be from the CMDR? What happens when there is an object between the hud render distance and the CMDR? Would it then be obfuscated? Or would it be projected onto the surface of the offending item? How will it interact with other lighting/atmospheric effects such as fog or smoke or bright sunlight? These are all things that will need to be considered at a design level, implemented at a graphics asset and coding level, tested and internally reviewed, and that's just the hud, there is a whole game to consider.
- Scope creep is always bad for projects, especially when they are already behind schedule, so this isn't a good idea.
- It's not a major new feature being added, it's a change of parameters in a feature they pledged to add to the game last year. It's also something that is already in other parts of the game, we just want it added to the on-foot part of the game.
- To draw an analogy, if we were talking about a word processor application, that had the basic text formatting, bold / italics / underscore etc, and this update was adding columns and tables to the mix, but was only going to be plain text in tables and or columns, what we are asking for is the equivalent of replicating the bold / italics / underscore from the existing text editing part of the application, and add that existing functionality into the new tables and columns.
- Only we aren't talking about text formatting on plain page vs in columns, we are talking about VR rendering in cockpits vs on foot.
- Even with that hopefully not too patronising analogy there are potential gotchas that may arise, such as italic text might clip the frame of the table, so margins would need tweaking, similarly certain graphics elements, like the much-vaunted HUD might not work as well in VR, but those would, under m proposal, be caught early in alpha, and would be wholly inconsequential compared to some of the bugs that big games releases encounter, such as the ongoing T-Poses in Cyberpunk 2077.
- In the middle of a pandemic, on a software project that is already long overdue, you want to add more features to be designed created and tested, and cannot see the potential for delays. Surely it doesn't take a sigma 7 blackbelt to see this not ending well? Basic project management says never add deliverables, truncate your deadline, or yield resources if you want to succeed. Covid has effectively reduced resourcing by virtue of the fact it forced working at home which will understandably, but undoubtedly slowed the team's productivity. Ergo this features addition to the project at this time could most likely have adverse consequences because it would exacerbate the covid related virtual reduction in resourcing Odyssey has experienced already.
- It's not a major new feature being added, it's a change of parameters in a feature they pledged to add to the game last year. It's also something that is already in other parts of the game, we just want it added to the on-foot part of the game.
- Odyssey is a completely new game, recreating the VR experience from Elite into it would be like writing a completely new VR compatible game.
- EVERYTHING frontier does is done in its in house developed Cobra engine, that engine has had VR functionality since December 2013 as a result of Elite having VR in alpha back then. The VR implementation currently in elite was, according to comments by David Braben in an interview, put into the game in one day by one guy, we aren't asking to Oddyssey:Alyx, we just want the same one guy one day VR headlook we have had for over seven years. That VR head look functionality already exists in certain parts of Odyssey, it will be present when in the cockpit, so surely the same game can borrow features from one mode to the next? Even if Odyssey is a completely separate game from Elite, and they effectively alt-tab in the background during the fade to black transition from pilots seat to on your feet, 7 years ago VR was super niche, totally cutting edge, and lacking resourcing, it is now a relatively mature, and very well documented technology with newer, more polished API's available and oodles of code examples.
- It's not a "reinvent the wheel" undertaking to add VR head look to Odyssey, so we aren't asking them to design, then mould the tyre, design and make the wheel, fit the tyre to the wheel, jack up the vehicle and fit the wheel to it, it's more akin to topping up the air pressure at a petrol station than a full-on reinventing the wheel.
- Seven years is an eternity in games development, the code for the VR headlook this proposal is referring to is probably about as relevant to todays efforts at Frontier and the current spec of Cobra engine as books explaining the geocentric model would be to current day NASA engineers. Featurewise the current VR model this proposal is centred on may, to an extent, sound compatible with the upcoming Odyssee, however a ford model t is, to an extent, also feature compatible with modern cars, but noone daily drives one, and for good reason.
- EVERYTHING frontier does is done in its in house developed Cobra engine, that engine has had VR functionality since December 2013 as a result of Elite having VR in alpha back then. The VR implementation currently in elite was, according to comments by David Braben in an interview, put into the game in one day by one guy, we aren't asking to Oddyssey:Alyx, we just want the same one guy one day VR headlook we have had for over seven years. That VR head look functionality already exists in certain parts of Odyssey, it will be present when in the cockpit, so surely the same game can borrow features from one mode to the next? Even if Odyssey is a completely separate game from Elite, and they effectively alt-tab in the background during the fade to black transition from pilots seat to on your feet, 7 years ago VR was super niche, totally cutting edge, and lacking resourcing, it is now a relatively mature, and very well documented technology with newer, more polished API's available and oodles of code examples.
I'm genuinely not trying to strawman anyone here, however, as a human, specifically an engineer and manager, rather than a judicial professional, my own desires and inclinations may cloud my attempted impartiality when reviewing some of the points above. I could keep going thrashing out an extensive point; positive and negative evidence list, but I feel this post is already too long, hence stopping now rather than rambling onto other areas such as hardware availability etc...
May?
You want something. That's fine. You go ahead and ask for it.
But stop trying to fabricate situations and arguments which suggest that its simple or straightforward to have what you ask for, delivered when you want it. That's disingenuous.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: I wish FD would say why they won't allow VR on foot.
Nausea concerns are a different issue compared to technical ones.
Nausea concerns are a different issue compared to technical ones.
Ita naive to think that Frontier would agree an open conversation about the technical state and related project decisions for their project.
Why? Well if you are the kind of person who doesn't know already - then you probably won't accept this explanation either - but the reason why is becuase to accept such an open discussion is, in effect, to cede control (and of course waste time).