Frontier will not be supporting oculus rift on launch?

[Beavis Tingleball]

as unfun as ED atm, I'm not walking away from it. I will continue to play CQC in my dk2 until a better option is available. I am however canceling my CV1 order as I have no use for it if it doesnt support ED. I dont know who is to blame for this mess but I had a strong feeling this was going to happen.

 

[B1ll Adama]

Since pre-ordering the Vive have to admit I am seriously considering cancelling my April CV1 preorder.

Guess it's worth leaving it a few more weeks before deciding finally. Would prefer the comfort of the CV1 but the risk of buying it then having grief getting ED to work is starting to not stack up.

 

[Logical Viking]

Bummer, glad I hadn't ordered Horizons because I was waiting until getting the Cv1 anyway. I tried going back to monitor after selling the DK2 but it wasn't a good experience so I decided to wait. Maybe Horizons will be on sale by the time they straighten it all out, LOL.

What's probably the most disappointing is how much FD harped about how great this game is in VR (it is) which is what put me onto the game and eventually bought for that reason. Now it's not even supported without crazy runtime switchers and no support at launch. Bah. At least I'll still have iRacing and the other space game.

 

[ffr]

Frontier have never promised Oculus support on launch.

This is true. When David Braben announced ED would support Rift, he did not specifically say "at launch".

Elite: Dangerous will support virtual reality headset Oculus Rift, Frontier Developments has announced.
Frontier said the Oculus Rift version of the crowd-funded space trading and combat game will be made available to all backers who have an Oculus Rift headset at no extra cost.
"We've been playing with the Oculus Rift dev kits and are excited about the potential - just glancing around your cockpit or being totally immersed in a space battle," said Frontier boss David Braben.

"Many of our backers have made it clear that they would like Oculus Rift support - and so do we! We're very pleased with the results so far."
Frontier raised £1.7 million via Kickstarter to develop Elite: Dangerous. Oculus is also the result of a Kickstarter. Oculus VR raised over $2.4 million during its campaign.

https://archive.is/IL4nN

 

[Raptoyd]

Start cancelling those Rift orders if you want to play ED in VR otherwise you are in for the long haul

 

[Arithon]

The main reason that Frontier were able to develop for the Vive, but called a temporary halt to supporting "current" Oculus drivers was that the drivers are a moving target.

The HTC Vive uses Valve' Open VR SDK and Steamworks VR API. These are (as I understand it) feature complete, so are a goal Frontier could shoot for.

Oculus had drivers (0.5 and 0.6) which operated in two modes, Direct and Extended. Extended worked as a "second monitor" - this was the mode Elite and many other games used. Direct required any application to be written to pipe the display direct to the HMD, operating at a different refresh rate and without desktop compositing. Faster, but much harder to support as it requires a dedicated hardware display mode for your application.

Many games that did "support" Oculus, such as Dying Light and Alien: Isolation, as well as Elite, stopped working when Oculus dropped Extended mode from their drivers with the 0.7 version.

The CV1 did work with Elite using Valve's OpenVR (a forum member here, ghcannon has an engineering CV1) with the latest (0.8) drivers, but despite getting it working initially, Oculus issued new firmware for the CV1 and this broke the compatibility with OpenVR. So no working solution now. Oculus keeps moving the goal-posts for everyone.

Currently Oculus does not have release drivers. As of this morning the "current" development drivers and SDK are 0.8, still. With the hardware shipping in 24 days.

My view is that Frontier are doing the best they can under these circumstances.

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

Will ED run on the Vive and if so when?
!

pretty sure the answer to that one is ...YES! & right now.

 

[catanonia]

The main reason that Frontier were able to develop for the Vive, but called a temporary halt to supporting "current" Oculus drivers was that the drivers are a moving target.

The HTC Vive uses Valve' Open VR SDK and Steamworks VR API. These are (as I understand it) feature complete, so are a goal Frontier could shoot for.

Oculus had drivers (0.5 and 0.6) which operated in two modes, Direct and Extended. Extended worked as a "second monitor" - this was the mode Elite and many other games used. Direct required any application to be written to pipe the display direct to the HMD, operating at a different refresh rate and without desktop compositing. Faster, but much harder to support as it requires a dedicated hardware display mode for your application.

Many games that did "support" Oculus, such as Dying Light and Alien: Isolation, as well as Elite, stopped working when Oculus dropped Extended mode from their drivers with the 0.7 version.

The CV1 did work with Elite using Valve's OpenVR (a forum member here, ghcannon has an engineering CV1) with the latest (0.8) drivers, but despite getting it working initially, Oculus issued new firmware for the CV1 and this broke the compatibility with OpenVR. So no working solution now. Oculus keeps moving the goal-posts for everyone.

Currently Oculus does not have release drivers. As of this morning the "current" development drivers and SDK are 0.8, still. With the hardware shipping in 24 days.

My view is that Frontier are doing the best they can under these circumstances.

Perfect Summary

 

[Distance]

TBH if Frontier hadn't been using the dk2 to sell the game at tradeshows I don't think people would be this unhappy.

To drop the ball at the launch of vr doesn't sit well to me and a lot of other people. It's not really on to have your customers have to use hacky workaround to get something working on your product.

They're missing a trick here as there's no other game like elite with the potential to play for hours in vr right now. Even if it's a minority of the customer base, those are the people going to be singing the praises of the game in vr to other people who have vr and they'll be making youtube videos and articles. Free marketing tbh.

There's going to be a market of people who have bough an hmd looking for content and willing to pay for it. Frontier should be capitalizing on that and doing right by their original customers a lot of whom bought the game solely for vr.

You never know they might sneak out a minor patch between now and June and fix everything but knowing their track record I don't have much faith.

 

[RiftFlyer]

pretty sure the answer to that one is ...YES! & right now.

I think that should read YES! & for now.

SteamVR will move to direct mode rendering. At which point Vive will be in the same boat as rift as far as ED is concerned.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

I think that should read YES! & for now.

SteamVR will move to direct mode rendering. At which point Vive will be in the same boat as rift as far as ED is concerned.

We don't know if extended mode will disappear. It may well have the option for both and we don't know how the drivers works. It maybe that direct mode is a lot easier with SteamVR than with Oculus.

 

[RiftFlyer]

Correct. My pessimistic mind wrote that statement as fact when of course it's only speculation. The preference is for direct mode on the steamvr side but we don't know for certain that they will remove extended. We also don't know if frontier have even tried to implement the steamVR direct mode yet.

Again though all we know is Vive will work for now. We don't know if that's about to change.

 

[Gray Lensman]

We don't know if extended mode will disappear. It may well have the option for both and we don't know how the drivers works. It maybe that direct mode is a lot easier with SteamVR than with Oculus.

This illustrates the very point I was making. FRONTIER can stop this endless speculation by actually telling us what they currently know. Their continuing unnecessary silence is infuriating and counter-productive. Frontier please speak to your customers.

 

[RiftFlyer]

This illustrates the very point I was making. FRONTIER can stop this endless speculation by actually telling us what they currently know. Their continuing unnecessary silence is infuriating and counter-productive. Frontier please speak to your customers.

Exactly.

A quote from Valve "The plan is to ship with direct mode enabled by default for the consumer release. We will start switching external devs over in January."

It's a little vague. "By default" might be interpreted as meaning extended will still be available. I interpret the fact they are moving devs over before consumer release to mean that extended mode is on the way out though.

So Frontier should have been switching over with everyone else before consumer release yet they tell us that there will be no more updates until June!

 

[Lestenio]

TBH if Frontier hadn't been using the dk2 to sell the game at tradeshows I don't think people would be this unhappy.

To drop the ball at the launch of vr doesn't sit well to me and a lot of other people. It's not really on to have your customers have to use hacky workaround to get something working on your product.

They're missing a trick here as there's no other game like elite with the potential to play for hours in vr right now. Even if it's a minority of the customer base, those are the people going to be singing the praises of the game in vr to other people who have vr and they'll be making youtube videos and articles. Free marketing tbh.

There's going to be a market of people who have bough an hmd looking for content and willing to pay for it. Frontier should be capitalizing on that and doing right by their original customers a lot of whom bought the game solely for vr.

You never know they might sneak out a minor patch between now and June and fix everything but knowing their track record I don't have much faith.

I don't see it as dropping the ball or missing a trick. I think the fact that they are not able to support it a launch (which would clearly be beneficial for all the reasons you and other mention) highlights the difficulty in getting it working.

 

[ZeeWolf]

This is true. When David Braben announced ED would support Rift, he did not specifically say "at launch".

https://archive.is/IL4nN

No that's EDs launch. He was saying that the game supported Oculus Rift development kits at the time. They have never categorically stated that the game would support the consumer version on launch. That article is from 2013, how can they know anything about the release version at that time.

It's really tenuous and silly to go trawling through Frontier's press releases from years ago concerning old releases to twist the argument. Anyone who has common sense will know that Frontier have since updated us to say they aren't able to support the latest versions of Oculus SDK and nothing has changed. There has been no update saying "We are committed to the consumer hardware for the official launch of the consumer kit". That just hasn't happened and old links about the dk1/dk2 hardware just don't equate into "Promises" concerning the CV1 no matter how much you want them to.

You are basically saying that any developers that produced any kind of experimental DK1/DK2 support for their game has, in effect "promised" to support all Oculus devices for the rest of time.

 

[Distance]

I don't see it as dropping the ball or missing a trick. I think the fact that they are not able to support it a launch (which would clearly be beneficial for all the reasons you and other mention) highlights the difficulty in getting it working.

It's just not good enough tbh. People have been playing on rifts since beta and vr is one of the big draws of the game.

You are basically saying that any developers that produced any kind of experimental DK1/DK2 support for their game has, in effect "promised" to support all Oculus devices for the rest of time.

There's a difference between adding support and actively marketing your game in VR at trade shows. If they suddenly dropped x52 support because saitek/madcatz updated their drivers and they couldn't get it working it would be exactly the same but just on a larger scale.

 

[Spam]

You know that feeling you get when you've just dropped something, tried to catch it and batted it back in the air for the second time and are in that frantic spazzing out stage of still trying to recover the situation before the thing hits the floor??

That's ED that is.

 

[Kvas]

I just hope they will catch it sooner than later.

I don't mind delays, just make it right this time! So far I was not impressed with Powerplay or Horizons. It looks nice but it didn't improve the gameplay. I like arena, and community goals and that they are expanding lore but if it's more enjoyable to watch someone else doing it rather that do it yourself you failed as a game.

I hope there will be more incentives to co-op in the future. I am stoked for mission revamp for the second time, please don't mess it up this time FD.

Only thing to do now is be patient. Thankfully community is realy great in this game and create content by themselves. That's what keeps me coming back.

As to VR I'll be waiting for new graphics cards that will support it, everything should be ironed out by the time.

 

[Kaare Willoch]

My pre order of the Rift is shipping in July. Do you guys believe things have sorted itself out by then?