That looks like a solution. I had my joystick and throttle attached to my chair arms, using a hack someone posted a few years ago, using two monitor stand brackets. Then I bought a fancy gaming chair and it needs some added engineering to make it work. I was going to get it all sorted for my new headset and Odyssey. But...Most virtual sticks lend themselves to resting your wrist on an armrest etc.
ED would be a challenge to comfortable use though for sure. (Some guys jerry-rig a magnet ball + cup affair for prolonged use)
E: Stuff like this:
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/cvd2f0/my_solution_to_flying_in_nms_using_the_rift_s/
VR support 'not at launch' for Odyssey
- Thread starter Lordxenu
- Start date
Most virtual sticks lend themselves to resting your wrist on an armrest etc.
ED would be a challenge to comfortable use though for sure. (Some guys jerry-rig a magnet ball + cup affair for prolonged use
E: Stuff like this:
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/cvd2f0/my_solution_to_flying_in_nms_using_the_rift_s/
Thats ghetto as Eff - but brilliant. Just a pity there would be naff all buttons on that compared to a decent hotas.
Beats looking like a wacky waving arm-flailing tubeman.
I love how all these gamers are suddenly experts on VR coding and implementation.
Unless you've personally worked on a VR game, you really have no place to be criticizing what is and is not possible in terms of game dev implementations.
Unless you've personally worked on a VR game, you really have no place to be criticizing what is and is not possible in terms of game dev implementations.
![[VR]m335](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/156/156512.jpg?1592093295){kind=avatar}
There is precisely zero chance of that on the PC platform. FDev's FPS experience, if it can be called that, will basically be equivalent to playing early incarnations of Halo on a gamepad. Untuned jittery mouse control, basically uncompetitive gamepad controls, wide open areas, and maybe some 'architecture' to fight around like the bases we currently drive around with SRVs.
Slick mouse/desktop FPS stuff is actually much harder to do than similar things for VR, where at least everything is kept at 1:1 scaling.
FDev does not credibly have...
- Game engine support for the nonlinear control optimizations required that are provided with the likes of CryEngine/Unreal/Unity.
- Experience building the current industry standard quality of FPS, or knowledge of signal processing theory, to add this to their own game engine quickly.
- A sufficiently capable game engine to spend most of their time working on such things as dense mixtures of catastrophically beautiful ruins overgrown by lush vegetation (ie. Crysis3 stuff).
- Willingness to commit tens of millions (what Crysis3 cost just in game/graphics design) to polishing such things even if they had the prerequisites.
Even by tapping the console market for all it's worth, there is just no way FDev has the experience to pull off an FPS that is anything more than a neat little minigame for the larger Elite Dangerous experience. Kind of like combat zones, or CQC, or something like that. You need more than that to attract FPS players, even the casual players, to buy into the FPS itself just for its own sake.
So no, there is no way killing off the VR playerbase is going to be a net win for FDev. A breakeven maybe, but even that will ultimately reduce the profitable lifespan of the game.
No matter how you look at it, FDev is just carelessly throwing away 20% of their userbase by eliminating VR, and ED will decline faster than it would have as a result.
By the way, I have addressed the need for testing and dev work to support VR. It is trivial compared to the other things FDev have done, and IIRC, you agreed as much. This is about FDev's gross neglect, not about legitimate tradeoffs. If I ever 'tilt at a windmill', it will be to prove the case that the very things this community has wrongly taken a false economy perception of, VR and desktop, PvP and PvE, can indeed share one universe. And I will not be proving that point by dropping a few idle comments in a forum debate when I could be writing code.
Just look at my sig.
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A few people who have chimed in on the debate have experience of working with VR and explained the process as basically putting hooks to call the VR API (Oculus/SteamVR). Others have cited a video from way back when in which David Braben explains that it only took "a guy called Greg" a handful of day to put Oculus Rift support into the initial Alpha in 2013. Other people have cited VR mods created by players for other games such as the GTA-V VR mod, or the Alien Isolation VR mod. So this isn't some blindly biased unscientific guestimate, the research we have done suggests that adding VR to a modern game isn't a moonshot, its more like a Monday afternoons work.
Equally so, while we've gathered evidence to support our assertion that it is reasonably practicable to retrofit/reinstate VR in Odyssey, most of our opponents are not producing the facts to substantiate their arguments and are instead referring to hyperbole and toxicity. I have yet to see a quote/interview in which a developer states "Adding VR killed our game and flushed the company down the pan and my career with it, don't try this at home kids", but I've seen plenty of forum posts insulting VR players saying adding VR to Odyssey will put at least another year on the release date and we are all [hyperbolic insults here] for demanding* this.
*We are not making demands, we are politely asking for one current feature to not be removed from / reinstated into the next big release. And all the evidence we have seen so far suggests that this is an eminently "doable" request.
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Lol
They appear to be going for an RPG-lite addition with FPS & 'full spectrum' multi-vehicle combat.
It could well be way above their ability to deliver (or focused on too many things at once, as they often are
). But the plus side is, the FPS doesn't have to be as tight as an FPS specialist game (as you're making out), so long as the overall 'space adventure' chaining works for people.It's way too early to tell if it'll work out, or to know what kind of reception it will get. For most people anyway
You recall incorrectly
. I agreed that the dev needed to tackle the above additions is a ton of work. And that the VR requirements pale in comparison. But that doesn't mean that the VR additions can't be weighty.Oo yes you're right. A Pimax 8KX purchaser. Fair point...
On that note; I am sure every VR player have longed for an option to jack up the terrain LOD/Mipmap bias a notch or two. -What looks acceptable on a monitor, that shrinks a 100° field of view game camera view down to 40, becomes horrifically low frequency when the viewing FOV matches the rendered. :7
...of course; If one assume powers of two, that would mean four times as much work per detail level (...although I am not convinced the procgen workload necessarily scales up in direct correspondence with the density) -- don't know how much more terrain-patch pop-in that might entail, but still; This is with what we have now, before adding further layers of terrain generation on top, as well as new fancy shaders on the rendering side. :7
On a monitor, depending on the angular motion grosseness, it can be fairly acceptable to drop framerates really quite low, in the pursuit of shinier visuals - in VR, as we know, not quite so much... :7
(Quite a few GPU cycles could of course be freed up, if FDev had ever done any optimising that matches shading density to the distortion of HMD lenses, and renders canted views for HMDs that ask for them, but ho-hum. :7)
I wonder how many who would remain gone, just to not teach the lesson: "You can kick us as much as you want - we'll always come crawling back".
I do wonder, actually, whether VR users might have been a more than proportionally large channel of word-of-mouth, and whether that channel could now turn to warning friends off DFev as unreliable. :/
No, I actually have a Pimax 8kX RIGHT NOW, directly from Pimax themselves. I helped them quite a lot at CES and the NYC roadshow, so I have had very early access.Oo yes you're right. A Pimax 8KX purchaser. Fair point...
However, that was not the point of referencing sig. I was actually pointing out the banner I include in it.
Anyway, weighty or not, the fact is FDev clearly doesn't give proportional priority to saving 20% of their established customer base. On that I think we agree. Where I think we are not on the same page is that this sort of behavior is, grossly neglecting the interests of their backers, customers, and shareholders. Basically, FDev is showing very bad management.
RPG, full spectrum, whatever, the FPS component is going to be comparable to what was mediocre by industry standards even a decade and a half ago, if not further. The FPS minigame will be about as 'slick' as something halfway between the original Doom/Doom2 and the original DukeNukem 3D. Which to be fair isn't too low a bar in absolute terms, but it is not enough to drive large numbers of customers.
Mark my words. FDev is making a huge mistake, promising something else they can't deliver, while abandoning one of the few things they have (VR).
I wonder how many who would remain gone, just to not teach the lesson: "You can kick us as much as you want - we'll always come crawling back".
I do wonder, actually, whether VR users might have been a more than proportionally large channel of word-of-mouth, and whether that channel could now turn to warning friends off DFev as unreliable. :/
VR heads have definitely been passionate ambassadors for ED, and this will reverse that for lots of us. No doubt.
I suspect on a lot of this FDev are hoping that by attracting new types of players, from different interest areas, they'll dodge some of that negative fallout. (But honestly I think their pricing is going to be the biggest stumbling block there. If the DLC is £40 like last time, how much will the whole package be for newcomers...?)
Ultimately though yeah, I do think a half-decent VR implementation would see a lot of us stashing our protest avatars and coming back to check it out ultimately.
There would be grumbling though goddamit. You can bet there'd be grumbling
I think FDev are pursuing the console market as a replacement to any possible lost VR sales. The VR market is estimated to generate 17.7 billion this year. However, the PS4 console alone generated 20 billion for Sony just in 2019, and it’s on it’s way to being replaced in less than a year. Throw the XBox and non VR PC players in the mix, and it’s easy to see FDev’s motivation to focus on potentially more lucrative platforms. Not saying VR vs non-VR development is mutually exclusive, but if resourcing is forcing a direction, it is understandable why they would drop VR and pursue more heavily the console crowd for the foreseeable future.
There would be grumbling though goddamit. You can bet there'd be grumbling
Well, now that just amounts to a barely detectable surge in the background grumbling of the universe. ;P
This is the kind of issue we're up against, yep. (And, not sure where the 17.7 bil estimate comes from, but most assessments of the VR market bundle of a lot of markets that aren't accessible to FDev too, like 'mobile phone VR' / industrial uses / VR installations etc).
Like you say, if the pinch point is resourcing, then potentially they could just shift to VR post-launch.
(My concern there though is that, if they've attracted a new crowd with Odyssey, while pivoting to a new game format, there will be a lot of pressure from those areas to focus on further support to the new additions. Plus FDev will want to be gearing up for the next DLC too. There are definitely scenarios out there where VR still doesn't get a look in... :/)
Sorry, it was 18.8 billion USD for the VR market.
got it from here: https://www.statista.com/statistics/591181/global-augmented-virtual-reality-market-size/
Elite Dangerous is still on top VR game lists for 2020, even this month!
Best VR games 2020 | TechRadar (June 2020)
Still one of the best VR games to date.. Navigating the next frontier has never felt so real and connected. Elite: Dangerous is a game best experienced online and in VR.
The best VR games on PC | PCGamesN (May 2020)
If you only ever play one game in VR, make it Elite Dangerous: it is simply one of the best VR games you can strap to your skull.
The Best HTC Vive Games for 2020 | Digital Trends (June 2020)
Elite Dangerous’ starfighter cockpit is a great way to justify a seated VR experience. Frontier planned to port the game to VR since the Oculus DK1, and that level of iteration shows in the final product’s polish.
Frontier was still on a winner..
Best VR games 2020 | TechRadar (June 2020)
Still one of the best VR games to date.. Navigating the next frontier has never felt so real and connected. Elite: Dangerous is a game best experienced online and in VR.
The best VR games on PC | PCGamesN (May 2020)
If you only ever play one game in VR, make it Elite Dangerous: it is simply one of the best VR games you can strap to your skull.
The Best HTC Vive Games for 2020 | Digital Trends (June 2020)
Elite Dangerous’ starfighter cockpit is a great way to justify a seated VR experience. Frontier planned to port the game to VR since the Oculus DK1, and that level of iteration shows in the final product’s polish.
Frontier was still on a winner..
Not at first, but your arms will get stronger and you'll get used to it.
I have used the exact same hack. It works pretty well.
That's great but doesn't fix the throttle issue.Most virtual sticks lend themselves to resting your wrist on an armrest etc.
ED would be a challenge to comfortable use though for sure. (Some guys jerry-rig a magnet ball + cup affair for prolonged use
E: Stuff like this:
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/cvd2f0/my_solution_to_flying_in_nms_using_the_rift_s/