My ED play time has dropped off significantly mainly because of my disappointment with the 2d FPS mode, it has killed the immersion for me and is not fun in VR. Headlook VR would be enough to make the game very enjoyable, I have been playing Valheim with the VR mod sitting with mouse -keyboard and its awesome, Odyssey could do the same but I guess we'll have to wait.
Allow the VR '2D screen' to be disabled?
- Thread starter VR Golgot
- Start date
I am only recently acquainted with VR and I spent a good hour just chilling looking at all the detail in my AspX cockpit, and relishing the ability to just get up and walk around it. Something that FPS was supposed to bring eventually. But I see a problem here. The VR works very well with the ship cockpit static around you that is clear. And it would be great to walk around a little static area outside the ship.
But although I forced myself to get used to the motion disturbance in the SRV turret for example, where the motion makes your static frame rotate - when I tried Obduction (Myst type open world puzzle/mystery) because the environments are awesome like a sci-fi book cover from the '70s and I wasn't disappointed to see everything at scale and stereoscopic 3D but;
Quite quickly FPS controls become a little weird. Sure I can get over the nausea of the now dynamic frame sliding around with key/controller presses but other things become apparent. There's a disconnect between this frame shift (pardon the pun) movement and normal movement, which are now both possible at the same time. Also FPS standards mandate that when the forward control is engaged, thou shalt slide inexorably into the scene, in whatever direction you view is facing. For VR this means as you turn your head you change your direction of movement. In short it's weird and I don't see how any sort of open world FPS can really work comforatably with VR. There's always the actual walls in your room, so you have to choose betweeen some sort of teleport or a sliding frame that is prone to inducing motion sickness, that sort of undermines the ability to actually walk around the scene.
Teleport makes more sense to me, as then real movement is still the focus. walk around, interact with objects then teleport to the next static frame etc. But the way Odyssey is marketed as FPS combat obviously that won't work.
Does anyone have any experience playing FPS in VR? how do you deal with these issues?
But although I forced myself to get used to the motion disturbance in the SRV turret for example, where the motion makes your static frame rotate - when I tried Obduction (Myst type open world puzzle/mystery) because the environments are awesome like a sci-fi book cover from the '70s and I wasn't disappointed to see everything at scale and stereoscopic 3D but;
Quite quickly FPS controls become a little weird. Sure I can get over the nausea of the now dynamic frame sliding around with key/controller presses but other things become apparent. There's a disconnect between this frame shift (pardon the pun) movement and normal movement, which are now both possible at the same time. Also FPS standards mandate that when the forward control is engaged, thou shalt slide inexorably into the scene, in whatever direction you view is facing. For VR this means as you turn your head you change your direction of movement. In short it's weird and I don't see how any sort of open world FPS can really work comforatably with VR. There's always the actual walls in your room, so you have to choose betweeen some sort of teleport or a sliding frame that is prone to inducing motion sickness, that sort of undermines the ability to actually walk around the scene.
Teleport makes more sense to me, as then real movement is still the focus. walk around, interact with objects then teleport to the next static frame etc. But the way Odyssey is marketed as FPS combat obviously that won't work.
Does anyone have any experience playing FPS in VR? how do you deal with these issues?
the 2D screen is temporary the Devs want on foot VR to be proper VR like H3VR or boneworks physically manipulating and aiming the gun they said they wont implement any kind of on foot 3d until they have achieved this
As far as i know following their progress this is still some time off the VR tracking is hard coded into the game people have had some bugs where their player will contort in weird ways however VR players will know this as full body tracking loss it looks exactly the same
So they do intend to implement it by the looks of things but don't expect it at launch
As far as i know following their progress this is still some time off the VR tracking is hard coded into the game people have had some bugs where their player will contort in weird ways however VR players will know this as full body tracking loss it looks exactly the same
So they do intend to implement it by the looks of things but don't expect it at launch
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That’s a locomotion system normally known as 'HMD relative'. It’s not my favourite either. If you check the options you’ll normally find alternatives like 'controller relative', teleport, & classic controls ('smooth turning' etc).
Players who are starting out and experiencing nausea are normally best off using teleport to find their feet, then using whichever of HMD/controller relative works better for them. (Controller relative involves essentially gesturing where you want to go). And finally trying classic controls if they’re up for it
You’ll find that first person character gameplay is a staple of VR (just check the top selling VR titles on Steam
). It can just take a while to find a control scheme that works for you at first.Are you talking about stuff like this?
That looks more like IK rigging for the legs (useful on planetary surfaces / stairs etc) going nuts
I wouldn’t assume that stuff signifies current VR work by FDev.
Aside from anything else, leg tracking is super homebrew niche in the VR world. That’d be the last thing on FDev’s mind I’d think.
(If you’ve seen examples of arms doing the same that could be more significant though. Would be interested in any footage you could send this way
)
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I'm with you there, I'm staunchly opposed to this ViRtual flatscreen malarky, it kills the immersion and in my opinion actually diminishes from the gameplay's enjoyment.
As Golgot said,, "Like" the opening post, and you can also contribute by "bumping" the thread by continuing to participate in the discussion. "Bumping" the thread to the top of its forum subsection, keeping it alive and in the eyeline of other CMDR's who might want to contribute to the conversation, and or decision makers at Frontier who will see us discussing / begging for VR and do something about it.
I'm hoping that VR on foot becomes a case of Headlookin VR, with head orientation separate from character orientation, which would totally sidestep the issues you've described there,
Not everyone necessarily wants Elite:Boneworks, nor being honest, are we likely to get that any time soon as that is a much larger undertaking than VR-Head-Look-On-Foot. SO, in the interim, rather than wait for a couple of years to get that sort of "VR Port", the current movement is pressing for VR headlook on foot, which is something we believe to be a reasonable compromise interms of development work required and impact/improvement on player experience.
In addition to Golgot's thread here, BTW congrats on becoming the 2nd most popular suggestion of all time, I've got a request thread in the Odyssey discussion thread, basically asking them to let us try VR headlook on foot during the alpha, to see how good or bad it it. That is a slightly different ask from Golgot's suggestion here, where he's asking for us to be able to turn it on via a backdoor accessible through manually altering a parameter contained within in the graphics settings file(s). So, at the risk of sounding like a streamer begging for likes and subscriptions, I'm not asking for likes on the thread, but I'd be very grateful if you guys wouldn't mind chiming in with replies on that thread as well, it will help keep the topic of VR in the limelight in that section of the forum as well.
[REQUEST] Please make VR headlook (same as cockpit mode) available on foot in alpha for testing
A lot of VR players dislike the ViRtual flatscreen, and this spoils alpha for us, many have taken to hacking together something approximating VR headlook on foot using the vanity cam, either playing the game in VR third person, or putting the vanity cam as close to their CMDR's visor as is...
First let me begin with a brief mention that as far as I recall from my playthroughs, teleportation is the default mode of moving around in Obduction in VR mode (possibly, it was even the fixed-node variety, rather than the free-aim-destination one), to the point some persistent bug makes it so it is still what you get when starting a new game, even if you have specifically asked for free locomotion at the inital prompt. The game has also had a number of visual and player orientation related bugs coming and going throughout its support lifetime - often breaking things that had previously worked just fine (I'm looking at you, mine cart swivel chair). Don't know if Cyan ever did address the thing from one of the later updates, where some past-frame buffer, from various post effect passes, became stuck to your face, and came along with you, as a perpetual overlay on your view...
Personally, for me, in my opinion, disclaimer, disclaimer; "Facegun", where you move and fire in the direction that you are looking, and head facing direction is straight-up combined with mouse/thumbstick input, is the only control method that kind of works for a hybrid 2D/3D game, because it is direct, motion-proportional (as opposed to steering-proportional - same thing as the significant difference between playing a game with mouse, or with gamepad), and require minimal forms of input, and no "ghost body" awareness from the player - your view is your frame of reference. Otherwise you inevitably get tangled up with things like detestable "tank controls" (without any indication what is forward, other than the optical flow whilst in motion), and cursors that you move around your view, as if the world was one giant desktop screen / shooting gallery, in front of you.
My opinion on this has not been given reason to change, since back in early days, when Valve added experimental VR for the Rift DK1, to Half Life 2, and Team Fortress 2, offering a selection of input modes, with the simple one being the only one with half a merit to its enumeration.
Many of us have become completely accustomed to free locomotion, and have thoroughly dulled the negative response of our senses, to discrepancy between what the eyes see, and what the inner ear registers - at least as long as everything is directly responding to our input. -I am running and strafing, and jumping all over the hilly land of Skyrim, without so much as a hiccup, even when frame rates drop low, and also find it perfectly natural that the camera stops moving abruptly when I hit a wall, just like it would if I ran into a wall in real life - I'll take that over things like fade-to-black-as-you-phase-into-the-wall, any day of the week.
Others are not so fortunate, and may never be able to get over their apparent-motion nausea, even for the most minute and gentle of camera motion, but that is no reason to take away the option to move freely for everybody else -- the least common denominator must be accomodated, but... Options are good. :7
Something you may want to look into, is a little go-between application called "Natural Locomotion" (It's available on Steam, and has a demo, as I recall). It sends a game spoof joystick input, based on the motion of your room-tracked devices; So as you swing your arms back and forth, just like when walking casually in real life (...and only whilst the arms move (...as long as you rest your thumb on your designated "permit walking button" spot on the hand controller)), you are translated in game at a speed that is proportional to the intensity of the swinging (amplitude, height, and rate), and in a direction that aligns with the plane on which the real-life swinging occurs, wholly independent from which direction you are looking.
This direct and proportional body input works surprisingly acceptably well (albeit may not be suitable to action, where you may want your hands for other things (thumbsticks are still passed through, alongside the injected input, mind), despite the blindness- and ambiguity of the data the developers have to work with, even when locomoting using a single arm. It is really much easier to take in one's surroundings when "moving" through them, rather than being "driven" through them, to the point there is less of a feeling of frames seeming to "strobe" by. -Again: to my findings, at least.
Elite Dangerous appears to do a whole bunch of strange things with its tracking. Its initial VR implementation was made in Oculus Rift DK1 days, before the whole "room scale" concept was a thing, and was never really updated since (heck, the openvr.dll (SteamVR) included with the game files is from 2015 - the API has been updated "once or twice" since then, but FDev has apparently never found any need for updated functionality or data structures).
-Yes, positional (...so not just rotational) tracking was added, which enables our walking around the bridges of our ships, but it does not seem to be "anchored" to your playspace, and will lose orientation to some degree if you pause the game, or just have a moment of performance issues, necessitating another f12 press to recenter the camera -- it is my impression FDev does some sort of tracking of their own, from the raw data from the HMD, instead of querying the API function that would do the work for them, and that their thingummy is not always keeping up, or predicting properly. This includes a lot of frame-bound motion-to-photon lag, which can make it look like the world is "swelling", and "withdrawing", and "stretching", and "contracting", as one move around, and the camera takes a while to catch up -- especially in a low framerate scenario, which we have quite a bit more of in Odyssely alpha, than previously.
That looks to me like an inordinate amount of wishful-thinking-y reading between the lines, there.
There is a ton of things in Odyssey that absolutely begs to be interacted with using your hands in-world, and sometimes just about look designed for that purpose (hell, the big screens with large touch-friendly buttons alone...), but the actual staticity of in-world objects and interactions with them are as "console-y" as ever, requiring a lot of rework that could have been avioded had there been a sliver of intention and forethought...
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I’m not sure if I’ve followed this correctly, but if we’re doing opinions...
Do you not find that standing play, turning in real life, can provide orientation? (With just smooth or snap turning to rejig when cables etc don’t allow for perpetual free turning). Essentially wherever you’re body is facing is forward. (With controller relative motion you can then manoeuvre relative to that orientation pretty naturally).
I find it a workable system, and having free look while you move just adds to the immersion etc. (Who doesn’t like to gawp around while trekking through Fallout’s wastelands or whatever
)A fun corollary to this, useful when first climbing the nausea hill, is to step / ‘jog’ lightly in place when moving forward, if using standing play & standard locomotions. Just adds that extra convincer for your brain
That’s really interesting. I guess they haven’t really had to move beyond their early homebrew solutions while still only handling vehicles.
At a guess, we won’t ever see interactible objects in that sense (picking them up etc). They just make too little sense for the classic 2D version.
The large interaction screens in bases could possibly accommodate hand interaction, in a VR port world. But that’s kinda the height of dual-use VR/2D interaction I’d ever really expect from a port. And we probably should think of EDO as a 2D game that might get ported to VR.
(Though lord knows I’d love to be wrong, and be batting debris out of the way with my gun in some EVA DLC down the line
. Love all those physics interaction touches in full VR games )
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I’m not sure if I’ve followed this correctly, but if we’re doing opinions...
Do you not find that standing play, turning in real life, can provide orientation? (With just smooth or snap turning to rejig when cables etc don’t allow for perpetual free turning). Essentially wherever you’re body is facing is forward.
Absolutely!
However: How does the game know which way your body is facing, if you do not have a tracker on say your chest, or hip, or feet, or something like a Kinect, that can approximate your pose? ...and how do you know which way the game belives your body is facing?
It can make a "guess", based on the spatial relationship between your head and hands, as well as how they move over time, possibly stirring a bit of IK into the brew, but it remains a best-estimation by an algorithm imbued with certain assumptions.
We have something like Half Life: Alyx, which everybody laud as the end-all-be-all, but really mostly makes a play-it--the-safest-way-possible selection from the pool of previously tried interaction methods, and is kind of held back by this, in my opinion. Its facing direction during contigous locomotion is simply the yaw of either the HMD, or one of the player's hands, as per the player's preferences, with thumbstick strafing and rotation added on top.
Even were one knowing of a lot of the player body parts mentioned before the last paragraph; How does the game know that you mean to walk effectively half-profile, torso twisted to fire your t-shirt cannon perpendicular to your vector of motion, moving your weight diagonally across your foot pads? -This is an aspect to consider, that is entirely missed by a lot of people who get excited by the idea of having some device that can make a game translate you in the direction your chest or hip is facing - a human body is not a tank, and bends and rotates in quite a few places. :7
Do we need more to deal with this than the strafe axis on your thumbstick? Maybe not, but personally I can't wait to wave goodbye to devices that you need to hold in your hands, and to abstract control organs that you need to use to "drive" your character around. :7
Now: I was mostly talking a seated, keyboard-and-mouse experience before (which is all I ever expect from FDev - stereo vision or no), but a great deal of the same things that apply there do indeed remain relevant with room tracking - agreed. :7
Yes. The exact same game as in 2D, only transposed to 3D, is what we can hope to pry out of FDev, and I'm not really holding their feet to the fire for more. What it will need beyond PC controls is stereo vision and UIs not locking the camera (it needs to collide with geometry though - we should be able to move around in our playspaces, and have this translation added to the avatar, but under the terrain, physics, and other rules of the game world, so no walking/peeking/reaching through walls - just bump the avatar up against the wall right there, just as with WASD, and let the player suffer (if they do), for their behaviour
). The ship panels do not lock the camera, and things like station terminals do not need to either.Whilst interaction with objects and characters is minimal and "stilted" to begin with, weapon/tool aiming should be a nice and relatively simple bonus to add, even with things like the obvious path-bound aim-assist of the arc cutter. If I'm not fabulating here, we do have things like holographic ammo counters floating next to weapons already, so some diegetics are in as it is. :7
...but yeah - I'd love full Boneworks/Lone Echo, too, especially if we eventually get zero g. :7
Man, I tend to get hung up on the tiniest things...
I guess, e.g, the routine that draws ellipses in supercruise has had an optimisation pass or replacement for Odyssey; And the way in which the segments of a circle where the spline is drawn 45° diagonal on the bitmap, appear as if their line weight is thinner (an effect well familiar to pixel artists), kind of cuts like a razor blade into my eye, every time I see those four darker-appearing corners.
Yep there isn't great feedback there for the game to know explicitly which way your body is facing. (I presume avatars are orientated primarily by last forward motion in those cases?)
In most 'FPS' games it seems to work out fine though. (Primarily because the avatars don't have collision as a rule I guess, so orientation is just cosmetic). Online play can naturally look... peculiar though
(I guess in theory the dual motion controllers could give the game enough info on likely orientation in concert, but obviously it's going to suck up some headroom, and be prone to glitchiness).
Yep hand aiming for weapons and tools seems totally do-able, and would add a lot just on their own.
That's a good point on the ammo counters. I've got a feeling they weren't showing in 3rd person so likely aren't diegetic, but I'll have a proper check
EDIT: Did a quick check and it looks like a nope :/
Classic view (via 2D panel)
VR view (via vanity cam)
I guess the vanity cam might cull out diegetic UI too, but seems more likely it's just a HUD overlay etc.
Still, the design would totally work as a VR / diegetic version. So there's that
Ay, these are the future dreams
. (That and virtual cockpits for me )
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So just to confirm, the thread is now 
the second most upvoted on record (out of 30,000+ suggestions)
Thanks to everyone who has helped push for basic VR Legs. (Here are some reasons why a prominent Suggestion thread might be useful).
I'm pretty surprised that we managed to power past the previous call for VR, given how many Cmdrs were mollified by continued vehicle support. But it shows there's still strong desire for some basic VR Legs access in the community
I'll keep checking for any helpful additions to the graphics folder throughout the alpha, just in case. Never know, might find something like this works one of these days ¯\(ツ)/¯
<StereoscopicMode>7</StereoscopicMode>
<CinematicScreen>false</CinematicScreen>
the second most upvoted on record (out of 30,000+ suggestions)
Thanks to everyone who has helped push for basic VR Legs
. (Here are some reasons why a prominent Suggestion thread might be useful).I'm pretty surprised that we managed to power past the previous call for VR, given how many Cmdrs were mollified by continued vehicle support. But it shows there's still strong desire for some basic VR Legs access in the community
I'll keep checking for any helpful additions to the graphics folder throughout the alpha, just in case. Never know, might find something like this works one of these days ¯\(ツ)/¯
<StereoscopicMode>7</StereoscopicMode>
<CinematicScreen>false</CinematicScreen>
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I agree, and I think once Odyssey is out of alpha and more general VR players find the lack of VR support for the new content, hopefully they too will raise their voices here and elsewhere, and Frontier does something to address them.
I guess the vanity cam might cull out diegetic UI too, but seems more likely it's just a HUD overlay etc.
Still, the design would totally work as a VR / diegetic version. So there's that
Yes, the way the digits staunchly line up with the bitmap orientation and scale, and the way they lag behind the sway on the guns a little, does indeed make them look like a quite possible 2D overlay.
On the other hand; If you sprint whilst hugging that laser rifle, the holofac element does both translate and rotate to the left, along with the weapon, so I hold out some hope still, and expect there to be a quad for each HUD element -- rendered in a separate pass of their own, and composited into the frame; But none the less with that render pass being in a space, that could-, or could be made- to align with the world space and camera set. :7
I am assuming the visor refractions are a screen-space effect (...although could be drawing the envmap), but that could still work fine in VR I believe, mapped to a visor-shape mesh, and in this case I'm thinking it should probably be quite correct that they follow one's head, unlike many of our current bitmap-locked screenspace effects, such as the CRT scan line effect on holograms, and the night vision filter, etc... :7
That'd be great if so. A system that's set up to be expanded if needed etc.
I think it's kind of pleasing that we're not seeing obvious blockers to VR in the design decisions, and decisions which look like they could be dual use. I suspect they are designing with a weather eye on VR, as they say.
How revealing would the headlook stuff (TrackIR etc) be on this front?
It seems that the current system is still a bit wonky for on foot FPS. I hope they can nail that down a bit more before launch. (Does seem like our best option to nuance any basic access to the stereo view that we can get).
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I'm a gnats genital away from making animated forum avatars for VR-headlook-on foot, with or without hand controllers it'd still be at least eleventeen times betterererer than that infernal ViRtual flatscreen!
[waiting for someone like thistle to come in and misquote me out of context as saying that "I'm a gnats genital" without the rest of the sentence]
[waiting for someone like thistle to come in and misquote me out of context as saying that "I'm a gnats genital" without the rest of the sentence]
I think I said it before but I absolutely have to have head look direction not coupled to movement direction; the few times I've tried that I've ended up feeling bad very quickly indeed. I'm fine with controller-controlled direction (whether it's a thumbstick and controller in an FPS or controlling the SRV with a joystick, no problem there, can fling myself around all over the place in games like Skyrim or Fallout 4 without much of a problem).
If we were able to piggyback on the TrackIR FPS settings then we might be able to achieve this. IE something like this from the OP:
The good news is that EDO TrackIR does have specific FPS settings
. They do have some buggy aspects currently in the alpha though. Hopefully they’ll get another pass.
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What exactly do you mean by 'tried the VR on Odyssey'? Is there some setting we're not aware of to enable VR?