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Have FD announced that full VR isn't coming to EDO?
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
They have said they'd like to add VR at a quality level, but won't confirm conclusively or put a timescale on it. IE:
From what I gather, I asked on here, that is almost a carbon copy of the nondescript answer console players received. No timescale, just hopes and wishes.
No it's pretty distinct. There's no delivery estimate there, nor even a commitment to start work in earnest on it.
Whereas for console EDO they've said:
And underlined that in their report to the stock market:
Console EDO is definitely roadmapped.
Thanks for that, it is not really the answer I got when I asked elsewhere.
Hi Leo, if it wasn't that easy, or at least in that ball part, I wouldn't be asking for it as I wouldn't want the acquiescense of our request to delay the game for the rest of the playerbase. The VR headlook in the pilots seat that we currently have was, according to David Braben, added by one dev in one day, we just want that replicated in the new on foot gameplay mode. Given VR headlook will be in Odyssey for the cockpit sections, and how many manhours went into the original, it seems plausible that it would be as easy as I suggest, in which case if it is going to be as easy as those points suggest, thanks for the support.
You know the negotiation tactic, ask for the moon, settle on a continent, when you only really wanted an acre... Maybe we should use this as a bargaining chip, DEMAND in forum toys out of prams fashion that it become a VR only title - replete with reasons like "look how muhc publicity Alyx brought to the venerable halflife franchise etc, then "settle for" a full VR implementation, when all we really wanted was VR headlook?Lol the difference is the VR only crowd are not looking to change the game for others.... I don't think even the most committed VR fanboy would suggest making the game VR only......
Mate, you've missed the jist of the OP nevermind the thread, it would be optional to use the VR headlook on foot. At the bottom of the second paragraph of the OP I specifically said "give us the ability to select as an option in graphics settings "VR on foot: 3D headlook / Virtual flat screen"."
Nausea sensitivity was considered, hence asking for the VR headlook to be optional, allowing those of a more sensitive disposition who could find VR headlook on foot to continue to use the virtual flatscreen, while allowing those of us with more robust "VR legs" to go into the more immersive and more natural so possibly less nauseating* VR headlook mode.
* I've been in VR for four and a half years now, so I've got pretty stour VR legs, but the odd time a game freezes on me while I am in a headset, and the movement of my head doesn't correlate to what my eyes see, as will happen with a virtual flat screen, my stomach flips faster than an DD5 FDL on four pips eng full stick and boost.
Photosensitivity is a good point, but my answer to this point was going to be that:
"Removing / inhibiting VR headlook on foot to accomodate the people with VR motion sickness sensitivity issues would be tantamount to making the game monochrome, without option to revert to colour, to accomodate the needs/sensitivities of colour blind people. This proposal leaves the VR virtual flatscreen as an option, possibly even as the default option, with the VR headlook being optional, enabled in settings with warning screens."
Just for clarity, I'm not for one minute suggesting any accessibility features be removed, the more that can be done on that front the better... But it makes sense that the accessibility features remain optional, available for those who need them without being forced upon those who dont need them and would have their experience diminished by them, and to an extent to an extent forcing virtual flat as the ONLY vr on foot option to accomodate people who get VR sickness, would be doing just that, needlessly diminishing the experience of the people without that condition in an effort to accomodate the needs of those who do.
So would I, and do you know what the community at large, including the majority of the flat screen players would love? The fact we'd be too busy dancing our jigs to be creating VR threadnaughts
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Maybe they should. Maybe they shouldn't.
The pivotal question is - in those examples - who gets to decide - the players or the developers?
The answer of course is that the party who is responsible and accountable for the outcome gets to make the decision.
Still thinking its a negotiation.
I only just spotted this. Pure comedy gold.
*I do appreciate there are some other much more sensible conversations on the topic happening in parallel on this same thread
There was some supporting evidence explaining why I think it would be that easy that you failed to quote:
I've explained why I think it would be as easy as I say it would be, citing fact and deductions based on those observable facts, you're just taking unsubstantiated popshots people or their opinions.
Everyone is entitled to an opinion, but when that opinion is dressed up as fact, and the stated position relies - in whole or in part - on that "fact" then things become problematic.
I hope you do get VR in a form that satisfies you but making things up to try and push that agenda forward isn't helpful. Just lobby for what you want and leave it at that.
That is pretty fair, and got a plus one from me.
Obviously I want to see this happen so will be more will want to believe the things the company has said that support my argument, but I have no way of fact-checking comments I'm citing or building my case on. For example, going back to the initial pushback against the plan to have NO form of VR in Odyssey whatsoever, the "all hail greg" trope was banded about quite a bit, ciring an interview where David said something along the lines of "one developer, a guy called greg, wanted to put VR into elite, and within 24hrs he had something working", on the basis of that one interview line I'm saying one guy one day to give us VR head-look. So I am chosing to take that quote at face value and believe him.
However, it is distinctly possible that DB might have been understating the effort that went into adding that feature to make the company look better? Subtext of such a move being, that in a throwaway comment he plants the seed that the company must be uber-mega-supremo-top-notch-developers as it only took Frontier a couple of hours to add the then bleeding-edge technology of VR to one of their games, I mean if they can do that they must be pretty awesome, right? But in actual fact it might have taken them a couple of weeks of a good few people working on it, but "what the rest of the industry doesn't know won't hurt their perception of the company."? I've personally pulled that move, artificially inflating my client's perception of my company's capabilities by underplaying the effort that went into the successful completion of a reasonably challenging deliverable.
People could go the other way, and manipulate quotes that contradict the plausibility of VR headlook in odyssey being an "easy" feature to deliver. For example, someone could take something Sandro said in 2015 or 2016 about, "yeah, we want to do legs, but that would be a whole other game inside the game" and cite that as a reason for not pursuing this. I mean it wouldn't take much more effort to argue that quote was evidence that the space legs part of Odyssey is indeed a whole other package and could NOT, therefore "borrow" the VR head look feature from cockpit mode, than I am exerting to draw the "Greg did VR in one day" comment into this as evidence that it can be done "easily".
I have tried to be reasonably impartial and done the empath canvas both for and against this, my conclusion is that it is, albeit in my opinion, doable. It might incur a bit more effort than the one man one day I cite, but I don't necessarily think it would knock the game's launch any further back. However, I do want to try and steer this such that it doesn't eliminate the VR irtual flatscreen, as that might be better suited to some folks than this VR head look. I also want to make sure that it is uderstood that we do not want this to be added if it is going to incur delays to the release, but from what I've watched, read, listened to and deduced, I reckon even a very basic form of VR headlook could be added at Alpha, and polished through Alpha and into Beta testing programmes and taken into launch. And if we get this, I will shut up about VR, VR headlook is what I've always been asking for, I don't need "Full VR" with handcotnrollers etc.
Dude, you don't get to steer anything.
Its an important point – this is all rampant speculation. Were both outsiders with no specific knowledge of the project. None. Years of experience has taught me that when outsiders look at a problem which they are invested in, but which they have no part in solving, human behaviour always leads people to oversimplify. I guarantee you are over simplifying this, and I`ll try to explain at least partly and at a high level why.
Okay, so this seems to be the central crux of your position. Let's pull this apart, and I`ll share what I know about this stuff from my software career.
When a team want to implement something, it's common when the complexity and risks are high to first do a proof of concept. This means that the desired technical approach is tested out to see if it holds water. The outcome of this POC is then used to decide whether to commit to that approach, or whether to abandon that idea (either altogether, or to try something else). But there’s no guarantee that any of the work put into the POC is fit to be rolled into the final solution – you are literally lashing something together to test an idea. In most cases, the POC won't really resemble the “finished article” at all – simply the important technical aspects of it you’ve chosen to prove actually work. You may well choose (or be forced) to re-code the actual solution from the ground up once the POC is done.
What this also means is that – in terms of the output from that POC exercise – it almost certainly is nowhere near the bar in terms of either quality or completeness. So in other words ignoring that fact this is an anecdote from Braben, forgetting it was years ago, forgetting it was from a completely different part of the game, that “1-day” job has pretty much nothing to do with the actual effort involved in deploying VR – however rudimentary - into something customers could play.
So as I`ve said extrapolating an anecdote from years ago in the way you have to present as “evidence” of the work required to implement something profoundly different just doesn’t work on any level.
But there's something else to consider - that as part of the effort required to make the change, there is a quality bar to meet. What do I mean by that? What I mean is that anything that a player can get their hands on and play, whether it be a core part of the game or something that can be turned on by an ini change or any other kind of “hack”, will have to meet certain quality standards before it would be made available. Why? Well, that is simple – Frontier are accountable for what they put out.
You might say “it doesn’t matter – its experimental” – but you would be thinking in artificially narrow terms about what “quality” can mean. We're talking here about any adverse event, not simply nausea, but profound control issues (e.g. I can look around but I can't move), the game crashing constantly, corrupting game saves, instancing and multiplayer not working, experimental player sessions having an impact on other instanced players who are not even using with this experimental “feature” , UI considerations, exploits, - all manner of myriad adverse effects you probably couldn’t even think of which literally and fundamentally stop critical functionality from working or otherwise profoundly screw things up.
The point here is that when you think about it properly - what’s is being made available to players to play – even experimentally - does have to meet a certain quality bar. That requires work. A lot of work. Work you are not even considering at all.
I know its been proposed to see this stuff hidden behind an ini file change as a kind of “insurance policy” against this, but the truth is if it doesn’t work well enough – for example, if Frontier deem it completely unplayable if it makes the game unstable, or other fundamental issues Ive eluded to earlier , then that option is off the table completely. And that decision firmly lies with Frontier and with them alone. You can`t negotiate on that.
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Everything is doable. But everything takes time, and needs to be planned for.
BTW, adding VR to a static headlook was likely not too complicated. It's why so many flight sims and driving sims (seated sims generally) often have VR. Adding VR to the completely new first person component, not the same. Which is why so many first person shooters do NOT have VR.
Without expending a lot of effort and time.
This is absolutely true, for sure.
(Just off the top of my head there's stuff like cockpit UI panel design shared with the core game, QoL touches like gaze detection being an option for panel activation, UI curvature for menus, performance presets and all that entailed. And doubtless so much more behind the scenes.)
And then we could add the maintenance and expansion aspects that support implies, shown in downstream additions like further UI curvature updates, the Hyperspace effects being made fit for VR, support for new HMD models, horizon-lock nausea solutions for the SRV on introduction, etc etc.
The other side of this coin however, is that at minimum they're maintaining VR support into EDO now. And that has certain implications for any 'alpha test'...
These are all great points, and any of them could very well prove to be the case.
I think the risks for some of them are lowered by the existing VR support though, which will be tried and tested regarding EDO gameplay environments with regards to ships & SRVs. (Which might involve comparable working environments to some Legs aspects. IE planetary surfaces, docking bays, etc.)
Having the same control schemes being used as flatscreen players also limits gameplay outliers somewhat. (Although head-clipping does seem an obvious potential exploit. More for 'what's behind that spoiler wall?' aspects potentially than combat gameplay I would have thought. I suspect the UI horror-show and other impediments would balance things out on that front
)The aspects such as UI, performance, and even stability (IE impacts that primarily affect the client / player) seem to me ones that could be signed off under 'player beware'. In an alpha environment certainly, or as part of an obscure 'mod'. (Crashes would certainly be concerning, but it's not like FDev have to meet console stability thresholds here to keep the product on the market. If we could live with it, perhaps they could too.)
The TLDR is though: It's still worth an ask
If any of the serious issues you float there were to prove to be the case, then that's fine. It's a no-go.
But on the off-chance that there is an experience to be had there, which FDev could facilitate at relatively low cost in the meantime, I reckon VR heads will keep asking the question
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Re: head-peeking-through-wall it is really not hard to prevent, many games did. Onward pushes you from the wall for example if you try to clip into it. Raw data fades you to black and kills you if you continue etc. It's nothing that hasn't been solved before. In 2017.
Yeah it’s no big thing. But focus there was to imagine a 'low dev' scenario where stereoscopic render was retained in Legs modes, with no other changes made. What would that look like etc?
IE could it provide a basic, rustic experience that VR vets could find some value in, and that FDev could live with
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I think it's performance related and they simply can't do it in VR. Current engine struggled in stations on a 1080Ti, so...