How to get an idea of what it SHOULD look like?
I'm curious—not having had the opportunity to play on a consumer Oculus Rift (I played on a DK2, and i just disagree that the Vive looks objectively worse—it looks better in some ways, and different in others, but certainly not "oh my god my it's trying to reach through the headset and gouge out my eyes" which is the sort of reaction I'm hearing)—what's a good game to look at to get an idea of the expected quality of a well-implemented Elite: Dangerous on Vive?
The Lab is gorgeous, but if you pay attention to an area where there's stuff more than about 100m away—which I think is basically just the lobby area and the Core slingshot game—there's lots of atmospheric effects, so the level of detail is no better than a nearby ship in Elite: Dangerous—if we had haze in space, it might give me an idea, but we don't so it doesn't. Most of the other games are very light in color or are cartoonish in rendering. ("The Abyss" section of theBlu is dark background with photorealistic objects, but you're surrounded by seawater, so again, there are haze effects.) The only game I know of that has a spacelike background with detailed light-colored objects moving in front of you is Space Pirate Trainer, but if you look at it more closely, you see that the background isn't actually space-black, it's more like a couple hours past sundown at the height of summer. Universe Sandbox, probably the closest thing in overall look, looks surprisingly awful to me (not to mention its inability to keep the frame rate high enough to prevent very visible stuttering).
Playing Engineers and lowering down into those crevasses and pulling up past those spires, I've found the quality on the Vive to be quite good. The text sucks, but it's also about a quarter or less the effective size of any text I've seen in any other light-on-dark game.
