A Call For Frontier To Put VR Legs On The Upcoming Road Map

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Meh. I tried the hack to do on foot mode with my Rift S; it was pretty cool but I wouldn't ask FD to divert resources to it.
I kind of do. VR is probably the future of gaming. As someone who has never been able to afford a VR capable gaming PC, the fact that I could afford a PSVR moves it to a mainstream market. As tech improves and what can be done gets better and seemingly easier, it becomes the standard. Games that were released a decade ago were rereleased in VR to tremendous financial success.

It would be nothing short of pure stupidity for Frontier to refuse further development in VR. One might even consider it financially suicidal some day
 
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Not that the costs would be very big here; the Pimax optimisation, for instance, means bypassing a chunk of redundant code...

To play the devil's advocate on this particular issue, I fear that whilst FDev's simply correcting their use of the transforms they get from OpenVR would immediately cause things to render correctly in the geometrical sense, in the native projections mode of Pimax 8k/5k, and other headsets with canted screens; Judging by the amount of things that look odd in different parts of the game, they do probably in addition have a ton of shaders and other things in Elite, that are written in such a way that they make... unfortunate assumptions that rely on both cameras facing the same way, and could produce peculiar shading, exhibiting grave binocular rivalry.

We can see effects of this even with parallel projections mode, and in almost every HMD - even the narrow FOV ones; Things like ambient occlusion, which renders differently in each eye (both viewplanes do face forward, but they reach differently far out on each side - the center of the screen is not the center of the camera's field of view (EDIT: ...or: is not its facing direction, rather - the frustum is asymmetric)), and tonemapping when next to something bright (same cause).

I mean... Apparently it is considered too unimportant/difficult even to just (...for each affected entity...) clear a z-axis rotation flag, that I have to assume the sprite/particle framework must have, which causes things like solar flares and smoke clouds to roll together with the game camera, instead of staying put in the world...
 
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Having seen how Odyssey looks on foot in VR, i can just say this is the most shameful implementation I have ever seen - a freaking screen hovering in the air, can it be anymore non-immersive than that?- FDev should be ashamed of themselves to even implement it in that way - that is absolutely appalling.
 
Personally, I think they realized early on they'd probably lose about 1/4 of their player base if they ditched VR entirely. So, they offered this compromised show with the promise of fixing it later in order to lure some of those folks. A good portion of them fell for it and gave FDev money, so they felt comfortable letting everyone know they have no intention of delivering VR.
 
Having seen how Odyssey looks on foot in VR, i can just say this is the most shameful implementation I have ever seen - a freaking screen hovering in the air, can it be anymore non-immersive than that?- FDev should be ashamed of themselves to even implement it in that way - that is absolutely appalling.
Try using the Vanity camera when on foot in VR the 3rd person with the camera behind you that looks assume and the flat screen is gone.
There is a quick key press that can switch into 1st person In VR.
 
When do you think the decision to cut VR was taken? I honestly think it was taken long before we ever heard of Odyssey, or anyone knew how much of a problem child it was going to be...
Given the level of planning in this disaster, I suspect when they realized they were staring into the abyss in terms of delivering anything.
The very premise of this thread acknowledges they are in a deep hole with Odyssey, as such what we are asking for them to make a commitment towards an improved VR implementation, but only starting work on that when they have cleared their feet.
About that... Let's be clear, Cobra is in such a bad state that we could see a real FSD invented before we get to that point. And remember, if the purpose of Odyssey was to develop Cobra, rather than further develop ED, then while VR may be relitively important for the latter's development, it is at best a 'nice to have' for the former.

Naturally, when discussing their intentions, I would also add caveats where it comes to Braben's new found (alleged) views on VR, not to mention FDev's well-documented aversion to committing to anything at all (if you asked then whether they'd save a drowning man, they'd likely respond with "we consider life to be very important, and while we are not ruling out saving that drowning man, we currently have no plans to do so"). Either way, I can't see any commitment being made in a very long time, if ever.
 
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Here we would have to agree to disagree. IMHO the decision to ax VR was taken at the same time it was taken down from the website, so 2018. Conversely it was when Odyssey went into so-called "full production". The corpospeak "no plans for further VR development" can't be more clear. Sorry. Of course, if Quest continues to explode (and we just sold @Juniper on one I think ;-) ) it might come back and bite in the arx, where they will be frantically repaying the technical debt they put themselves in now. But I doubt it. We're written off at this point, same as Mac users.
Yes, that is a perfectly reasonable deduction. I don't claim to understand their reasoning, like everyone else I'm only guessing. What I've suggested is simply that if you view Odyssey as a showcase for Cobra, rather than an expansion for ED, then VR becomes less important. Beyond that there may be other factors that may have caused them to decide to rule out VR on a future roadmap, after all even without VR support a games engine could still be placed in a successful niche for the next few years.
 
Given the level of planning in this disaster, I suspect when they realized they were staring into the abyss in terms of delivering anything.

About that... Let's be clear, Cobra is in such a bad state that we could see a real FSD invented before we get to that point. And remember, if the purpose of Odyssey was to develop Cobra, rather than further develop ED, then while VR may be relitively important for the latter's development, it is at best a 'nice to have' for the former.

Naturally, when discussing their intentions, I would also add caveats where it comes to Braben's new found (alleged) views on VR, not to mention FDev's well-documented aversion to committing to anything at all (if you asked then whether they'd save a drowning man, they'd likely respond with "we consider life to be very important, and while we are not ruling out saving that drowning man, we currently have no plans to do so"). Either way, I can't see any commitment being made in a very long time, if ever.
That DB video warning about VR was from 2016. Not new found by any means. Just saying
 
Coke 2 was made after coca cola, doesn't make it new
So what? Coke 2 is new to anyone who's never had the opportunity to try it before. And even then, what's your point?

On balance, the video putting forward reservations about VR probably is not why VR has been dropped. It's probably been dropped because while it's a significant part of ED, it's not overall for FDevs franchises and moving forward, that's what FDev is going to concentrate on. But ultimately, we don't know, which is why I included it, for completeness, because even if not a primary reason it could have influenced the final decision. But, as I said, it's speculation, navel-gazing, because FDev have really left us with little else to do in lieu of transparency.
 
My point is it's not his 'new found' views. When you say it like that it works to manipulate the naive to belive this is something new. It is not. That makes it a dishonest statement, whether intentional or not. 🤷‍♂️
 
My point is it's not his 'new found' views. When you say it like that it works to manipulate the naive to belive this is something new. It is not. That makes it a dishonest statement, whether intentional or not. 🤷‍♂️
Not really. It's new as far as VR support is concerned, because there has been no update there since it was first introduced and certainly since before he expressed those views. If you prefer we can call them newer, or updated, but to call it 'dishonest' does sound just a tad pedantic.
 
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I was a telemarketer for a while, you're taught how to word things in a certain way to lead a convo and coach a decision. You recognize these things when your trained to use them. Its how I would have approached it tbf. Ocd isn't ruled out either
I had the telemarketing experience myself when young, as well as debating in college, so I'm well aware of how to let people have my own way. In this case it was more a case of thinking like a software engineer, where you include every possible case, however unlikely, and I do think Braben's changing views on VR are unlikely to have made a significant difference (that's why I referred to it only as a caveat).

Dropping of VR support in ED is probably more likely the result of a bigger picture; I think VR is important to ED, but FDev are no longer simply considering what is good for one game but what will increase share value overall by expanding the number of franchises they can take on and there VR is much less important. And when you're short on resources, as clearly FDev has been given what they delivered, much less important tends to get culled first.

Having held the CTO role in the past, it's statigically a no brainer move, but as we can see it turned out to be an overreach that will set back their plans by at least two years. Still, as I said, tis all just speculation and navel gazing, but what else have they left us?
 
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As for Cobra as a show piece... I may be dumb, but I would have thought the more feathers in your cap the better, but what do I know -- perhaps we're talking repositioning it as a pure theme park management game creation kit... :p
Probably I didn't explain myself well enough. Put it this way, when building Odyssey, two approaches could have been taken:
  1. Build on top of the existing code base. Essentially add station interiors, much as they have been added anyway, and add new functionality to the planet rendering business logic. Naturally this would mean far less labour involved and it would probably integrate with the core game far better. It was ultimately how it was done with Horizons.
  2. Create a new engine from scratch and recreate all the pre-existing Horizons functionality using this new framework. Significantly more labour involved, not least of all requiring that sunk cost of creating a new engine to begin with.
In the end they went for the second option, because they could then reuse that new engine for future projects, rather that writing everything from the ground up (no doubt with some code reuse), each time. This would become a 'product' for the company and add value both to it's pitches for future franchises and, in turn, for the shareholders. It's a good strategy if you can pull it off.

So they're not repositioning themselves as a pure theme park management game creation company, but they are repositioning themselves as not just an Elite Dangerous game creation company, which is a reasonable commercial aim. You could argue that Covid was what killed that for them, but honestly, if it did it didn't take much to derail them. I've actually seen software companies become more productive with home office in the last year, not less. If resource management fell apart because of Covid, it wasn't because of it, it's because it was already broken and all it took was an extra nudge to expose it.
 
2. Create a new engine from scratch and recreate all the pre-existing Horizons functionality using this new framework. Significantly more labour involved, not least of all requiring that sunk cost of creating a new engine to begin with.

In the end they went for the second option...

I missed this announcement from FDev. Do you have links?
 
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