Should we ask Meta for help ?

[BL1P]

As frontier cannot afford to supply updates and improvements to Elite in the area of VR.
Do you think it would help if we as a group (the VR players), Put forward a request for help in develoment from Meta Devs for frontier ?
I wouldnt be supprised if meta would offer the help or finalcial help to Frontier if its based around the improvement and increased devlopment around VR in Elite Dangeous.

I mean its the best VR game alongside Alyx.

 

[Arioch]

As frontier cannot afford to supply updates and improvements to Elite in the area of VR.
Do you think it would help if we as a group (the VR players), Put forward a request for help in develoment from Meta Devs for frontier ?
I wouldnt be supprised if meta would offer the help or finalcial help to Frontier if its based around the improvement and increased devlopment around VR in Elite Dangeous.

I mean its the best VR game alongside Alyx.

I should imagine sales of ED on the Meta store would be a prime motivator there - and I should also imagine that they are not enough to prompt Meta to help out.

I think a group like Team Beef / Flat2VR would be a better outsourcing group - they’ve shown excellent work bringing old flatscreen fps games to stand-alone & PCVR and are looking to partner with studios to bring games to VR, so could be keen to get a “flagship” game to champion. Their work on id’s back catalogue has been superb - Doom3 in particular is amazing on the Quest 3 and should be released on the Meta store, imo.

 

[aXeL]

Interesting, where is it published that FDev can't afford VR development?

Anyone except Meta in my own highly partisan view. Any Facebook entity I steer well clear of and they are the last people I would go to for help. If I had to use a 'Meta' headset to play ED, it would really be 50:50 as to whether I played ED at all. If you said, "Steam", I might agree although I can't see how that would work commercially - tonnes of Steam Ad's in game, to what end, I suspect the player base is small for Steam(?)

Howabout we all create a list of what we want to see fixed/updated in VR and see if FDev have an idea of indicative threshold funding for which we start another Kickstarter campaign? I'd put money in if all parties agreed the goals and funding commitment was reasonable. People here could commit to Alpha/Beta testing on different headsets and commit to a certain amount of time to help ED resolve issues, to take the sting out of costs ( although contractually agreeing that could be interesting ).

I've not bought a Meta headset and I know people like them. I presume they don't make you have a Facebook account to use it.

 

[Arioch]

I presume they don't make you have a Facebook account to use it.

You presume correctly.

 

[jojon]

I expect Meta would require it to be for standalone headsets, and exclusive to Meta products and marketplace. They also have a tendency to absorb studios, chew all the flavour out of them, and then shut them down.

There are a few concerns regarding inviting somebody like Flat2VR to partner on the matter:

• Custom engine. Do these studios have the resources to spend on becoming familiar with Cobra?
• Long term committment. Elite Dangerous is a "live" game - not a one-shot job. Can they afford to keep up with constant updates?
• Protectiveness and liabilites. Would Frontier be ok with allowing an outside entity into their repositories and decision making processes in the first place?
• Code integrity. Things like bug regressions makes you wonder how difficult it is to keep track of the large project, as it is; What would a new fork under a separate team, and an endless stream of mergers do to this?

I had a few more (the though had struck me previously), but can't think of them at the moment. :7

 

[thistle]

I don't think fdev need "help".

It's unlikely that expertise or lack of funds are preventing fdev developing VR, more likely just not seeing it as important to the company.

 

[Skylee]

I don't think this is simply a matter of needing help; I strongly believe it's an issue of prioritization.

The pace of VR development will likely accelerate as the number of VR users grows, pushing VR higher on the list of priorities. This is a reasonable approach for a company.

We can only partly criticize Frontier’s approach with Elite for not being as "cutting-edge" in gaming technology as it once claimed to be regarding VR. While the current VR player base isn’t the majority, it’s reasonable to expect that it will grow significantly in the coming years as the technology becomes more affordable and accessible to a wider audience.

When that happens, Elite could stand out as the first solid AAA game built around VR in every aspect, setting a new standard for the industry.

 

[GroG79]

it’s reasonable to expect that it will grow significantly in the coming years as the technology becomes more affordable and accessible to a wider audience.

Just like this will finally be the year of Linux on the desktop. We have been hearing this for years

Why dont people play in VR? Costs; various types of costs. Not only the headset. But the beefy GPU, Sticks, Throttles, Desk real estate/dedicated gaming setup etc, you are prone to physical discomfort. There is a long list.


The VR community reads like a large echo chamber.
Even a company like Fdev with a game like ED which has VR written all over it. Made the financial decision to stop developing VR for ED. And still this does not ring a bell among the VR users?

 

[thistle]

What GroG79 said.

The pace of VR development will likely accelerate as the number of VR users grows, pushing VR higher on the list of priorities. This is a reasonable approach for a company.

It won't accelerate as they aren't doing any VR development.

The number of VR users worldwide may grow ... maybe? dunno ... but in Elite Dangerous? Fdev will know what the numbers actually are, and I imagine they are delighted with what appears to be renewed interest in ED over the last year, mostly returning players I would guess. But will they be seeing an uptick in VR users, enough to reverse their previous decision?

 

[Sweet&Dandy]

Now that the quest is of a cost and standard that VR is once again feasible for the unwashed masses, it would be nuts for both Meta and Frontier not to revisit.

It’s such an amazing experience, beaten out only by Half Life Alyx IMO

 

[Skylee]

Elite Dangerous in VR is so immersive that I keep on staring at the landscape of a moon I landed on or a planet ring and just doing nothing for few minutes while i listen to some ambient music
It's another level of immersion. And I think it is the key for a long life of this game if and when every aspect of the game will be integrated in the VR experience.
This could really be a "second life" on space to play with friends at the end of a day at work just to totally escape through the stars ;-)

 

[jojon]

...
Even a company like Fdev with a game like ED which has VR written all over it. Made the financial decision to stop developing VR for ED. And still this does not ring a bell among the VR users?

Oh no! The all-knowing bellringer has come. I must now burn my VR headset and repent!

 

[Skylee]

Even a company like Fdev with a game like ED which has VR written all over it. Made the financial decision to stop developing VR for ED. And still this does not ring a bell among the VR users?

Has Frontier decided to quit VR develop? I didn't know it, are you sure?

 

[aXeL]

Has Frontier decided to quit VR develop? I didn't know it, are you sure?

I agree, where have they published the decision not to continue developing VR?

 

[Robert Maynard]

Forum timeline:

VR support 'not at launch' for Odyssey

The Horizons DLC page has VR headsets listed https://store.steampowered.com/app/441340/Elite_Dangerous_Horizons_Season_Pass/ whereas oddysey doesn't https://store.steampowered.com/app/1336350/Elite_Dangerous_Odyssey/

forums.frontier.co.uk

ANNOUNCEMENT - Odyssey: Update on VR and Ship Interiors

Greetings Commanders! We hope you enjoyed our first dev diary release and stream. It was our pleasure to bring you the latest news on Odyssey and needless to say we can't wait to share more info around further locations, missions, combat and more in further episodes over the coming months. We...

forums.frontier.co.uk

2018 interview with DBOBE:

Braben has seen the evolution of computing and gaming technologies over nearly four decades in the industry. He’s still not a big believer in VR or what many see as the future in cloud gaming.

“I have never believed [VR] would take off. Right from day one, I said it would be niche,” he noted. “And it’s a great niche, but it’s still quite niche. We were, I think, the first people to support [VR] with a AAA game, with Elite: Dangerous in December 2013. It’s a wonderful experience, it is really wonderful. But it puts quite a high bar on the hardware, so my personal view is you can’t run any slower than about 90 frames a second, and the resolution you really want to be 4K per eye. [Currently] it is a bit blurry, it’s quite hard on the eyes for a long time. And the other problem is, trying to use it in a family environment, it’s really divisive. Because no one can see or hear what you’re seeing.”

David Braben: Why The Industry Needs 'The Return of the Publisher' - GameDaily.biz | We Make Games Our Business

The Frontier Developments CEO and British games icon talks Jurassic World and licensing, getting into publishing and why VR and cloud gaming will never be huge.

www.gamedaily.biz

 

[krazmuze]

As frontier cannot afford to supply updates and improvements to Elite in the area of VR.
Do you think it would help if we as a group (the VR players), Put forward a request for help in develoment from Meta Devs for frontier ?
I wouldnt be supprised if meta would offer the help or finalcial help to Frontier if its based around the improvement and increased devlopment around VR in Elite Dangeous.

I mean its the best VR game alongside Alyx.

Meta does not care about Half Life Alyx or any other PCVR game. They only care about games that are on their Quest App store - why would they fund a game that makes steam/epic stores more money? They do not care about even their own Oculus store on PC anymore. But with their cutbacks last few years - they got rid of their best space game series (Lone Echo) they did not even care about their own success - even though that game spawned a multiplayer esport game that their CTO loved.

Given how badly performing the PCVR edition of the game is - do you really think that porting to cellphone CPU/GPUs that are in the Meta Quest is going to solve the performance problems despite those platforms being a decade behind desktops? Given that Frontier already dropped far superior console hardware - because they could not sustain Odyssey performance on those platforms?

The only way that the PCVR marketplace can save itself and get more corporate investment - is to hope Valve makes HL3 exclusive to their new upcoming PCVR headset and it becomes a raging success so that other games are doing the numbers that Quest Apps are doing. Given the layoffs happening in the videogame industry, I doubt that niche markets such as PCVR will be sustainable otherwise.

 

[aXeL]

If I won the lottery, I would soo buy this company out from under them if I could get DB to part with his majority shareholding.

Every Dev's pay related bonus would have at least one VR objective tied in. I don't care if their job is to code the accounting spreadsheets.
FSR and DLSS would HAVE to be updated ( although is it me or is FSR actually not too bad now? ).
Foveated rendering would be mandatory
And, obviously, VR space legs.
Orbit lines will appear in both eyes.

 

[krazmuze]

But the beefy GPU, Sticks, Throttles, Desk real estate/dedicated gaming setup etc

That pretty much is the recommended requirements to play desktop - it has nothing to do with PCVR. If you got a system that can play the latest games you can play PCVR. If you can blind touch type and use a mouse blind or have an xbox controller and can use it blind you can play PCVR. Of course it is more immersive if you got a good HOTAS and the best GPU you can barely afford as recommended requirements just like with desktop, but that certainly is not minimum requirement you can always turn down gfx - just like you can in desktop.

 

[aXeL]

Thank you Mr Maynard. That's informative, although I think DB is being a little short sighted. It's like saying in the 80s, Mobile phones will be niche and, before then, no-one would ever need more than 640k of RAM. VR is now sufficiently popular that it's on the shelf in retail stores ( which I didn't expect so soon ). Also remember, we're talking about the chap who admitted to coding Elite Frontier for 8086 back when 386 was the norm. He's a super bright Dev no doubt but I would respectfully submit that extrapolating tech trends has never been his strong suit. Innovating with current technology beyond what others thought was possible, is his strength IMO.

 

[Dragsham]

Had to read Op twice just to let it sink in.. Facebook!! Really!!
Anyone but.. EA even is a better option. Hell even apple!
But defo not FB.
Sorry no !