After a couple month hiatus from Elite: Dangerous to play other games, Monday I received something long anticipated... my HTC Vive. I'd been lurking on this forum for a while, and it was some trepidation tonight that I donned my Vive, loaded the Engineers Beta, and entered my Cobra via the third dimension.
I was expecting problems. I was expecting to be underwhelmed.
I wasn't expecting to come under fire from some damn pirate on the surface of the little rock ball where I'd left my ship parked. [woah]
After dealing with the situation at hand (via a jump to supercruise), I finally took the time to reset my head position so I didn't feel like I was back seat driving, and took my first good look around my trusty Slave of the Empire.
The Good
I was thrilled to see that things looked good. The text on the screen was readable, and as I looked around the cockpit, I finally got a true sense of the scale of my ship, and the cockpit wasn't the huge waste of space I'd expected it to be. It seemed just right. The two chairs seemed the right size when I got up and walked around the cockpit, though I did feel like I was walking on air, given the raised pilot seat. When I was seated, my hands and feet on the controls, it felt like they were right where I was seeing them. By coincidence, my HOTAS stand puts the controls exactly where they should be. I may put my keyboard where I see it in the cockpit as well.
The Bad
Tuesday when I was playing around in the Steam Lab, I got so comfortable in VR space that I forgot nothing was real, and I leaned against a virtual table to reach for something. Needless to say, I nearly did a face plant. Oops.
Besides that little derp moment, the only bad thing I can say about my experience in Elite so far is the system map. The cursor moves WAY too slow to be useful. Thankfully, I know my way around the Cemiess system well enough that I didn't really need it. But if Frontier ever decides to support room VR for navigation, I would love to have a system map like the Solar System model in the Lab. THAT was cool. I think I spent an hour just playing around with the planets, and sticking my head into the Sun.
Thankfully, the Galaxy map worked well, and it was a lot larger than I was used to, making it easier to navigate than I remember it being.
The Awesome
Have I mentioned the sense of scale? The stations truly seem huge now. I flew near the Hab rings of MacKenzie station, and the supports seemed massive. And I love the fact that the outfitting screen isn't a static image, but one I could look around in.
I was expecting problems. I was expecting to be underwhelmed.
I wasn't expecting to come under fire from some damn pirate on the surface of the little rock ball where I'd left my ship parked. [woah]
After dealing with the situation at hand (via a jump to supercruise), I finally took the time to reset my head position so I didn't feel like I was back seat driving, and took my first good look around my trusty Slave of the Empire.
The Good
I was thrilled to see that things looked good. The text on the screen was readable, and as I looked around the cockpit, I finally got a true sense of the scale of my ship, and the cockpit wasn't the huge waste of space I'd expected it to be. It seemed just right. The two chairs seemed the right size when I got up and walked around the cockpit, though I did feel like I was walking on air, given the raised pilot seat. When I was seated, my hands and feet on the controls, it felt like they were right where I was seeing them. By coincidence, my HOTAS stand puts the controls exactly where they should be. I may put my keyboard where I see it in the cockpit as well.
The Bad
Tuesday when I was playing around in the Steam Lab, I got so comfortable in VR space that I forgot nothing was real, and I leaned against a virtual table to reach for something. Needless to say, I nearly did a face plant. Oops.
Besides that little derp moment, the only bad thing I can say about my experience in Elite so far is the system map. The cursor moves WAY too slow to be useful. Thankfully, I know my way around the Cemiess system well enough that I didn't really need it. But if Frontier ever decides to support room VR for navigation, I would love to have a system map like the Solar System model in the Lab. THAT was cool. I think I spent an hour just playing around with the planets, and sticking my head into the Sun.
Thankfully, the Galaxy map worked well, and it was a lot larger than I was used to, making it easier to navigate than I remember it being.
The Awesome
Have I mentioned the sense of scale? The stations truly seem huge now. I flew near the Hab rings of MacKenzie station, and the supports seemed massive. And I love the fact that the outfitting screen isn't a static image, but one I could look around in.
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