ED and the Oculus Rift Developers Kit 2 (DK2) Discussion Thread

[Juniper]

My Rift is usually on standby all the time except when I'm using it.

There seems to be an issue with the game if you do this - if you want to play in boring old 2D-o-vision you can't select a full screen mode for the game. It will also crash on exit.

As far as I can tell, this is new in Beta 3.

The solution is to turn the Rift OFF before you start the game. Or ON... but only if you're actually going to use it.

It's been ticketed...

 

[Bobbydylan]

Any of you guys having massive drops in frame rates at certain, apparently random, times? I go all the way down to 10-15, mostly around or in stations, but also in other more lonely areas too.

Yeah, normally I'm at about 60 in stations, but in the station menue last night it dropped to about 25. Really bad, had to stop playing.

For be , Beta 3 has brought worse performance. I'm off on holiday on Friday, for a week. Hopefully there'll be some fixes while I'm away.

 

[Zebarmy]

My Rift is usually on standby all the time except when I'm using it.

There seems to be an issue with the game if you do this - if you want to play in boring old 2D-o-vision you can't select a full screen mode for the game. It will also crash on exit.

As far as I can tell, this is new in Beta 3.

The solution is to turn the Rift OFF before you start the game. Or ON... but only if you're actually going to use it.

It's been ticketed...

Ah nice one Juniper, I hadn't put two and two together, but that full screen thing and crash at exit was annoying me

I shall turn off the Rift for when I'm not using it

Also ticketed, but I suspect with slightly less detail than yours... (It's broke and I don't know why booohooohooo).

Z

 

[Mark D]

I'm lucky to have a high end GPU which with the Graphics preset = Low is giving me 99% of the time 75 fps.

I understand this will just be personal opinions but wandered - as the DK2 has a low(ish) resolution does anyone notice much benefit of running at Mid or High? If yes I might try turning up any recommended individual settings

Thanks for your help
M


*PS slighty of topic : I don't know if I just have not been playing when this happened before, but this morning I got very nice in game messages warning me the servers were going down. 10 mins then 5/2/1 which meant I could make a quick race to my destination (avoiding an interdiction).

 

[Coolts]

Fly around the planet, the side facing the sun is in daylight.

Gahhh. Beat me to it

 

[Tankshell]

After 3 -4 hours of play I'd say there are a number of little bugs and issues that have crept into beta 3 both in general and Rift specific.

Regarding your system map issue, I had the exact same problem, but found a work around that seems to work reliably. When you want to exit the system map, use your trigger button to zoom right in, far enough that the info window on the left disappears, now zoom back out until the info window re-appears. At this point you should be able to use your d-pad down to select the exit button and press A. You may need different button presses if you've re-assigned them.

I've also noticed

1. Issues with thrusters not working, though had assumed it was due to enabling one of the UI windows, but I guess the Galaxy map might be a cause.
2. Pressing B on xbox control no longer exits out of most or any windows - e.g. station services. Instead you have to scroll down to the exit button.
3. When viewing the Station Services window, there are areas when looking to the left or right where the UI window dims and interactions (e.g. button presses) are no longer sent to the window. At first I thought it was the dk2 camera losing track, but there is a strange 'dead' area when looking left/right where the UI window is not active, yet look a bit further left/right and it comes back on again.


Thanks for all the replies regarding getting a dedicated hardware sub-forum, I'll try and remember to fire off a message next week.

You should ticket all these issues! I have had the thruster issue and ticketed that already.

 

[Mark D]

You should ticket all these issues! I have had the thruster issue and ticketed that already.

Ticketing is always good, but with Beta 3.01 out might be worth a quick retest - hopefully they fixed some?

 

[CATPAIN KIRK]

Yay - we have a VR discussion forum - thanks

 

[Sir.Tj]

Welcome to the rifts new home.

 

[Mark D]

Welcome to the rifts new home.

Nice one guys - thank you

 

[Javert]

Hello all,

I finally caved in and ordered a DK2 after hearing the starfleetcommand podcast raving about using it at EGX.

I'm sure I will be dropping by here for help once it arrives.

cheers
Patrick.

 

[Mik2121]

This is the third place where I post this but... is anyone else getting issues with the graphics while using the DK2 with the Beta 3.01? All my blacks are absolutely crushed and things look weird. I see another guy posted this as well but not sure if it's the same issue. Basically it feels like the gamma is all wrong or the textures are being displayed with a small amount of colors because the galaxy is either pure black or this medium greenish grey tone and there's no transition from the black to the normal color.
It also affects the ship sometimes (not while at a station) and the issue is present from the moment the FRONTIER logo loads with the space background (the center is black and there's an ugly 1bit-looking mask instead of a normal gradient transition).

 

[Graywolfe]

But... my main issue is that everything is so damn dark now. I spawned at Azeban and the Planet is completely black.

Beta 2 had some lighting issues which made things way too bright. These appear to have been resolved with Beta 3. So this is more the way it should be. Space is not only really, really big. It's also really, really dark unless you happen to be near a star =)

I know that some people altered the gamma setting in the options because of the lighting issues in Beta 2, if you did that then it probably needs setting back closer to the default now.

 

[NoiseCrime]

I'm lucky to have a high end GPU which with the Graphics preset = Low is giving me 99% of the time 75 fps.

I understand this will just be personal opinions but wandered - as the DK2 has a low(ish) resolution does anyone notice much benefit of running at Mid or High? If yes I might try turning up any recommended individual settings

I've been planning on writing a long post about settings, DK2 and reliable benchmarking, but RL is getting in the way.

The first decision is whether you can live with slight dips or lower than 75fps, keeping in mind that in my opinion it is likely to be near impossible to avoid occasional dips, especially in a demanding game like ED. So really the question becomes can you live with say drops to 65 fps in certain stations/ship combinations or the like? The answer to that will probably guide you more along what settings to change.

Though i've yet to perform exact tests it is my opinion that shadows, ambient occlusion and anti-aliasing are the three biggest contributers to overall performance. I've seen a large difference on my GTX970 between shadows off, low, medium and high, I think from memory at 2560x1440 screen size as much as 30 fps difference between low to high when viewing outside of a space station. The other two settings are both processor intensive (shader) and due to being full screen very dependent upon your resolution, so with running at HD they are likely to take up a good chunk of time each frame.

Myself my current settings are

Textures: High
ModelDrawDistance: High
Shadow Quality: Low/Medium
Bloom: Low ( was High)
Blur: On
AA: Off
Ambient Occlusion: Off
Environment Quality: High
FX Quality: High
Reflections Quality: High
Material Quality: Ultra

Admittedly this does not appear to provide a stable 75Hz and I suspect some tweaking will help, but I do find coming from a GTX465 where I had to have most stuff on Low that visually it looks so much nicer. I was also of the opinion that i'd rather have great visuals and occasional stuttering, but that was in the GTX465 which could never really manage 75Hz in many cases and I'm starting to wonder if being close to 75Hz but not hitting it is actually worse than being far away, as it does feel different now i'm on my GTX970.

I can't give any other recommendations other than going through each setting in turn and seeing if there is a marked difference in performance. This is something I want to do when I have time, but likely i'll do it in 2D mode as the relative differences in performance will be applicable to all uses. In other words i'm interested in seeing what settings have the greatest effect on framerate and which have minimal impact as I suspect some will have little effect to setting them to low other than spoiling the visuals.

I also want to detail about each setting trying to understand what its impacts might be. Obviously without seeing the code that is going to be easy, so will have to be educated guesses. So for example Texture Qulaity, with a 4GB GPU, and full PCI-e 3.0 x16 lanes of bandwidth I see no reason not too go below High. However whilst available memory should never be an issue, bandwidth might, especially if any 1 frame or couple of frames need to upload a large amount of asset data to the card. That will I believe result in a few frames of stutter.

For reference a x16 PCI-e 3.0 supports 16GB per second bandwidth (and I think thats both ways), which sounds like alot, but divide it by 75Hz and you are down into the 200MB per frame. Considering a 4096x4096 uncompressed texture with mipmaps is around 80Mb, it wouldn't take much to saturate that bandwidth in any one frame. If you drop to x8 lanes or are using PCI-e 2.0 then you get half that bandwidth, which is much more likely to get saturated. Of course this is mostly speculation on my part, i've never done any tests involving uploading such large amounts of data to a gpu in a single frame, but it seems logical. The only thing to consider is that if you are uploading new data to the gpu, then actually grabbing or creating that data itself may take longer than a frame and thus cause a stutter too. So while bandwidth may very occasionally cause issues, the processes that ended up need to push that amount of bandwidth themselves may be responsible for more substantial performance drop that frame.

I found this in one of the beta listings too which may be useful to know.

Added support for grouping scalable render features, so that a quality setting can be specified for the whole group and that translates automatically into per-feature quality settings. Grouped background quality and planet quality into the new 'Environment quality' setting, and also grouped light cones, lens flares and debris limit into 'FX quality'

 

[Graywolfe]

I'm lucky to have a high end GPU which with the Graphics preset = Low is giving me 99% of the time 75 fps.

I understand this will just be personal opinions but wandered - as the DK2 has a low(ish) resolution does anyone notice much benefit of running at Mid or High? If yes I might try turning up any recommended individual settings

I run on HIGH with SMAA enabled and blur disabled since I notice very little performance difference between HIGH & LOW. For me the quality difference is noticeable.
Personally I'd like to see some higher AA settings available since my general experience is that there's very little impact on my system from the higher-quality AA settings in other games and good AA can make a big difference to the quality especially at lower resolutions.

Yes, I could do a bit of minor hoop jumping to render at a higher resolution then downsample, this is what I did for the DK1 but this is a bit of a sledgehammer approach and having the options in-game to not need this would be nice.

Having said all that I am really impressed by the fact that the overall Rift experience has improved with every version since I joined at the start of Premium beta.

 

[NoiseCrime]

You should ticket all these issues! I have had the thruster issue and ticketed that already.

Yep done that already and a weird graphical defect in the Ice Asteroids that didn't seem to be affected by any quality settings.

Welcome to the rifts new home.

Thanks for that. Oh its so roomy in here

 

[Mik2121]

Ugh... tried taking screenshots of the game in the DK2 to show the crushed blacks and everything but obviously they look fine when looked at in my other monitors... the weird thing is, I have played other games and demos in the DK2 that are fairly dark and they're nothing like this. In fact, the old beta wasn't like this either. I have tried setting the gamma to the lowest and the highest, and either way still get the ugly blacks. I wonder if taking a photo through the actual lenses could help show the issue...

 

[NoiseCrime]

Ugh... tried taking screenshots of the game in the DK2 to show the crushed blacks and everything but obviously they look fine when looked at in my other monitors... the weird thing is, I have played other games and demos in the DK2 that are fairly dark and they're nothing like this. In fact, the old beta wasn't like this either. I have tried setting the gamma to the lowest and the highest, and either way still get the ugly blacks. I wonder if taking a photo through the actual lenses could help show the issue...

Have you tried using the second monitor display of the rift view available in extended mode?
Full description how to enable this can be found here http://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=43396. No idea if it will reflect the game colour/gamma as you see it in the rift though.

Have you check your colour settings in your graphics control panel? For example on nvidia you get an option to allow it to control colour/gamma or use custom values, that may be per monitor I don't recall off hand.

It might be worth posting your Elite\EDLaunch\Products\FORC-FDEV-D-1002\GraphicsConfiguration.xml here or maybe compare it to mine below. I will say though that I changed these values back in beta 2.06 after my ship was destroyed and everything became super bright. I got the settings from various threads on the forums here, though it seems Beta 3.0 has over-riden them.

Current settings

Spoiler

<HDRNode>
<KeyValue>0.500000</KeyValue>
<WhiteLevel>0.000000</WhiteLevel>
<DisplayLumScale>164.000000</DisplayLumScale>
<HistogramSampleWidth>60.500000</HistogramSampleWidth>
<ExposureThreshold>1.000000</ExposureThreshold>
<Percentiles>0.010000,0.540000,0.999000</Percentiles>
<ExposureType>0</ExposureType>
<HistogramMode>2</HistogramMode>
<ManualExposure>0.000000</ManualExposure>
<ShoulderStrength>0.491000</ShoulderStrength>
<LinearStrength>0.707000</LinearStrength>
<LinearAngle>0.704000</LinearAngle>
<ToeStrength>1.185000</ToeStrength>
<ToeNumerator>1.377000</ToeNumerator>
<ToeDenominator>1.976000</ToeDenominator>
<LinearWhite>5.242000</LinearWhite>
</HDRNode>
<HDRNode_Reference>
<KeyValue>0.500000</KeyValue>
<WhiteLevel>0.000000</WhiteLevel>
<DisplayLumScale>164.000000</DisplayLumScale>
<HistogramSampleWidth>60.500000</HistogramSampleWidth>
<ExposureThreshold>1.000000</ExposureThreshold>
<Percentiles>0.010000,0.540000,0.999000</Percentiles>
<ExposureType>0</ExposureType>
<HistogramMode>2</HistogramMode>
<ManualExposure>-0.500000</ManualExposure>
<ShoulderStrength>0.15000</ShoulderStrength>
<LinearStrength>0.5000</LinearStrength>
<LinearAngle>0.1000</LinearAngle>
<ToeStrength>0.2000</ToeStrength>
<ToeNumerator>0.02000</ToeNumerator>
<ToeDenominator>0.3000</ToeDenominator>
<LinearWhite>11.2000</LinearWhite>
</HDRNode_Reference>

My Previous settings to fix overbright issue

Spoiler

<HDRNode>
<KeyValue>0.500000</KeyValue>
<WhiteLevel>0.000000</WhiteLevel>
<DisplayLumScale>164.000000</DisplayLumScale>
<HistogramSampleWidth>60.500000</HistogramSampleWidth>
<ExposureThreshold>1.000000</ExposureThreshold>
<Percentiles>0.010000,0.540000,0.999000</Percentiles>
<ExposureType>0</ExposureType>
<HistogramMode>2</HistogramMode>
<ManualExposure>0.000000</ManualExposure>
<ShoulderStrength>0.491000</ShoulderStrength>
<LinearStrength>0.707000</LinearStrength>
<LinearAngle>0.704000</LinearAngle>
<ToeStrength>1.185000</ToeStrength>
<ToeNumerator>1.377000</ToeNumerator>
<ToeDenominator>1.976000</ToeDenominator>
<LinearWhite>5.242000</LinearWhite>
</HDRNode>
<HDRNode_Reference>
<KeyValue>0.500000</KeyValue>
<WhiteLevel>0.000000</WhiteLevel>
<DisplayLumScale>164.000000</DisplayLumScale>
<HistogramSampleWidth>60.500000</HistogramSampleWidth>
<ExposureThreshold>1.000000</ExposureThreshold>
<Percentiles>0.010000,0.540000,0.999000</Percentiles>
<ExposureType>0</ExposureType>
<HistogramMode>2</HistogramMode>
<ManualExposure>0.000000</ManualExposure>
<ShoulderStrength>0.491000</ShoulderStrength>
<LinearStrength>0.707000</LinearStrength>
<LinearAngle>0.704000</LinearAngle>
<ToeStrength>1.185000</ToeStrength>
<ToeNumerator>1.37700</ToeNumerator>
<ToeDenominator>1.976000</ToeDenominator>
<LinearWhite>5.242000</LinearWhite>
</HDRNode_Reference>

As an aside if anyone is interested in tweaking the graphics beyond those values/settings offered within ED it looks like Elite\EDLaunch\Products\FORC-FDEV-D-1002\GraphicsConfiguration.xml has a good amount of interesting stuff to mess with. I'm quite tempted to play with the Galaxy Map settings since I still find even on lowest it to be very stuttery in the Rift. Ultimately though there may be something more fundamental wrong with the Galaxy Map in terms of getting a good performance in the DK2 that these settings alone cannot fix.

 

[fenderf4i]

Exact same issue here.

I hit the 1 key accidently once and it switched my hotas and keyboard to the controls for the UI. When I exit the galaxy map, I think the controls focus on the UI b/c, when I hit 1, it goes back to normal.

Hitting '1' after exiting the Galaxy map fixes the issue.

 

[BigPickle]

Still stuttering heavily inside stations, I've tried every setting every work around etc. Latest nvidia drivers, latest driver and sdk from oculus. All graphics on low setting, oculus quality on max, vsync on, aero off.