And standing in the middle of an empty room pointing at invisible things doesn't look stupid at all
VR support 'not at launch' for Odyssey
- Thread starter Lordxenu
- Start date
You should see me playing the new 90 degree levels in Beat Saber - I look like I’m being attacked by a swarm of invisible wasps. I could look like the biggest berk in the Cosmos and I wouldn’t care, it’s only my family who can see me and more importantly, I’m having fun.
That said, I’m not a fan of voice software and would rather take a virtual flicky clicky cockpit any time.
I’d also take motion controllers over normal control methods in any non-vehicle game, without hesitation - Lone Echo + HL: Alyx being the poster children for them.
If EDO was only controllable in VR using current methods (like the Alien: Isolation mod, or SubnauticaVR) I don’t think there’d such a huge wailing and pulling at hair
That said, I’m not a fan of voice software and would rather take a virtual flicky clicky cockpit any time.
I’d also take motion controllers over normal control methods in any non-vehicle game, without hesitation - Lone Echo + HL: Alyx being the poster children for them.
If EDO was only controllable in VR using current methods (like the Alien: Isolation mod, or SubnauticaVR) I don’t think there’d such a huge wailing and pulling at hair
I don't begrudge anyone their motion controllers, I just wish more VR developers would support my gamepad because again I'm not prepared to turn my already small living room into a home office nor am I willing to compromize my gaming setup to somewhat preserve the "living room" part of my living room and I suspect I'm far from alone in this.
The Serious Sam games can be played with KB+M I believe. I'm not sure why anyone would want to, but they can.
Protonwar has a non-motion controller mode. Nobody plays it.
With some tweaking you can still activate the VR mode for Half-life 2 that was developed for the Oculus dev kit and make it work with modern headsets. There's a guide for it somewhere on Reddit.
And VorpX opens up a whole world of flat games playable in VR using the same controls you would normally play them. It's not a great experience, but it's liked by people who are willing to settle for half immersion.
Sure, it wouldn’t be difficult.
The main issue is that FDev would have to include motion controller support as well, for all the reasons harped on about (IE nausea reduction, broad popularity for immersion / interaction etc, making them the current industry norm etc).
And that would be less easy, and take more time...
They don’t remove it, but by offering alternatives to smooth turning, they remove a major component of it. And that’s part of the appeal to game makers. Motion controller locomotion systems (particularly controller-relative) offer a lower nausea route into their game.
For me it’s light fitting massacres. It’s like a poltergeist has visited.
(Genuinely just realised yesterday that my desk lamp is bent at the top and crackles, due to an old Echo Arena incident I think
)
I going to kickstart this thing:
Its about the cost of a mid range VR headset and solves a bunch of issues with FPS gameplay in VR. We'll see what transpires in Odyssey regarding VR, but after 80+ pages of this thread I still don't find any "devil's advocate" argument for not retaining VR in the expansion compelling.
We've had "it's too expensive to implement" - well unless David Braben was outright lying in 2014, it took somewhere around 1-3 man days to implement.
Given Odyssey's 2 year dev cycle with 100 people working on it and let's say 30 of those being actual devs/coders then that's 200 x 2 x 30 = 12,000 man days available. Even ten times the original effort to just get the seated experience back i.e. 30 man days out of 12,000 doesn't seem expensive to me. Triple that cost for basic legs VR functionality and that's still only 90 man days out of 12,000.
As for the argument that "VR gives players nausea and especially when walking" - well there's this neat trick in games development where you put a menu option in to turn off VR and go back to 2D gaming, if your physiology can't do VR. Its that simple.
To argue somehow that players will go out and spend £1,500 on a GPU and HMD and then force themselves to play VR Odyssey whilst continually throwing up, is just plain delusional.
The real reason for cutting VR, I suspect, is that the Odyssey project is in trouble and everything not absolutely necessary for release on 31st March 2021 is being thrown in the bin to save it. We've seen recent public facing changes in staff (the CMs), what I would call "core development" staff changes (Dr Ross) and what looks like a very recent leadership change (Director), during a mid way period in the dev cycle. You would expect a smoothly running project at this point to be just grafting/grinding out the core changes and assets required from an earlier period of feature setting and tryouts to see what works, not making cuts to existing functionality and what looks like parachuting in "white knight, subject matter experts" to "help" develop the title's headline feature (FPS play)...
Throw in a culture transition from HQ office based working practises to remote working and I'm frankly surprised the end of March deadline still stands and further than that, unless video evidence starts to emerge soon to the contrary, the likelihood is that legs might be yet another half developed feature like powerplay, multi-crew, volcanism, SRVs etc. etc.
Oh and then there is the spiritual successor to x-wing vs. tie fighter coming in October with VR and HOTAS support out of the box, even if it is from one of the most reviled companies in the business...(its worth listening carefully to the narration in that trailer).
We've had "it's too expensive to implement" - well unless David Braben was outright lying in 2014, it took somewhere around 1-3 man days to implement.
Given Odyssey's 2 year dev cycle with 100 people working on it and let's say 30 of those being actual devs/coders then that's 200 x 2 x 30 = 12,000 man days available. Even ten times the original effort to just get the seated experience back i.e. 30 man days out of 12,000 doesn't seem expensive to me. Triple that cost for basic legs VR functionality and that's still only 90 man days out of 12,000.
As for the argument that "VR gives players nausea and especially when walking" - well there's this neat trick in games development where you put a menu option in to turn off VR and go back to 2D gaming, if your physiology can't do VR. Its that simple.
To argue somehow that players will go out and spend £1,500 on a GPU and HMD and then force themselves to play VR Odyssey whilst continually throwing up, is just plain delusional.
The real reason for cutting VR, I suspect, is that the Odyssey project is in trouble and everything not absolutely necessary for release on 31st March 2021 is being thrown in the bin to save it. We've seen recent public facing changes in staff (the CMs), what I would call "core development" staff changes (Dr Ross) and what looks like a very recent leadership change (Director), during a mid way period in the dev cycle. You would expect a smoothly running project at this point to be just grafting/grinding out the core changes and assets required from an earlier period of feature setting and tryouts to see what works, not making cuts to existing functionality and what looks like parachuting in "white knight, subject matter experts" to "help" develop the title's headline feature (FPS play)...
Throw in a culture transition from HQ office based working practises to remote working and I'm frankly surprised the end of March deadline still stands and further than that, unless video evidence starts to emerge soon to the contrary, the likelihood is that legs might be yet another half developed feature like powerplay, multi-crew, volcanism, SRVs etc. etc.
Oh and then there is the spiritual successor to x-wing vs. tie fighter coming in October with VR and HOTAS support out of the box, even if it is from one of the most reviled companies in the business...(its worth listening carefully to the narration in that trailer).
Last edited:
The Odyssey-DLC is basically non-existent as far as i am concerned as long as it does not support vr.
Because the market share is so low compared to pancake, most of devs won't bother until there's a VR zealot among them in the company. It's simply not profitable now to build AAA games for VR from scratch.
If you want comparison, look at RTX availability. Now, would you code your game for RTX now? Not many companies do that, same with VR. Those who do, have agreements with Nvidia for pushing support further. And while raytracing is the absolute bomb and revolution when it comes to computer graphics, you don't see much support for it YET.
I am not buying it till it is in VR if it never is then I never will.
Our wild napkin math on this stuff should include a ballpark for dev cost. The best available measure for that is the US rule of thumb of 10k per dev per month [1],[2],[3].
Although it may not be the best fit for the UK, it’s still suggestive of dev costs that can run into the millions in various 'meaningful dev' scenarios. (Such as significant R&D, and/or permanent staffing for long-term upkeep).
Given the lower expected unit sales to VR players, '10x the cost of prior dev efforts', or comparable dev investment, can become significant on an ROI front.
No modern first-person games offers this though. (The last one to do it might have been the Minecraft port in 2016, which only had nausea-inducing locomotion options).
To argue that a software company will put out a game that offers that as a primary experience is delusional
Not when there are industry standard solutions (controller-relative, HMD-relative etc). Which just happen to take time to implement. (And come with some corollary dev demands. IE once you have hands represented in the game, you have to accommodate them to some extent).
This is all possible. But it begs the question of: What can we do about such situations as fans?
The chances are that only a successful Odyssey launch would free up the finances & resources to tackle VR legs etc in earnest.
The only options I can see in the meantime are to lobby for:
- Odyssey tech to be shared with Horizons wherever possible
- An experimental branch featuring VR support for flight + whatever basic support for Legs is possible
- Endorsement of solo mods if the above is not possible
- A VR-priced Odyssey variant which could help fund dedicated dev
If you’ve got some other suggestions throw them in the ring
Last edited:
![[VR] DDM_Reaper20](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/44/44021.jpg?1588332101){kind=avatar}
Last edited:
You've got a point, a small, struggling indie dev like Frontier couldn't possible afford the cost of VR developement after all it's the big publishers that release the best VR titles out there. Indies just can't compete.
When a while back Nvidia experience inflicted itself onto me I noticed that "A plague tale" had screen space reflections turned on and was surprised the game even supported that. I'm currently playing through Detroit: become human and I noticed it too uses screen space reflections.
RTX is slowly making it's way into more and more games.
FDev haven’t launched a monetised ED product since 2017. It’s reasonable to assume that the franchise is running on fumes, and potentially even in the red for the project as a whole:
Against that backdrop, and with them having put all their eggs for the franchise into an 'all in one' DLC, it’s understandable if they’re particularly risk adverse at this moment in time.
That may change if Odyssey has a decent release. (And/or if new revenue streams bed in, such as PSVR2).
—
Or if you want the sarcastic answer: It’s a good thing you’re not running the company. Because it would probably go bust
Last edited:
Don't know if this has been mentioned as I've only skimmed the last couple of pages, but I have a question. How does VR do FPS style movement?....I ask because traditional Mouse+WASD is incredibly unrealistic with how the human body really moves. In an FPS I can instantly turn 180 and sprint full pelt then instantly turn 90 degrees and jump up in the air, etc etc, all stuff the real human body cannot do. I presume good VR devs take all that into account?
Because you get what you pay for.
It depends on the control scheme. Think of simply using a gamepad, same principle applies. That said I prefer mix of both, having a possiblity to turn by the controller (usually to realign myself with the room, for example facing away from a TV in a boxing game ;-) ) and full head turning. There's also a method called "Onward locomotion" as it was pioneered by the game Onward. It uses position of your controller as a heading in which you move, allowing you to move and shoot in different directions at the same time.
How To Join Jean-Michel Jarre's Live VR Gig Today
, Leak, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality, VR, AR, MR, film, 360, festival, info, new, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Oculus Go, Windows MR, Samsung Gear, PSVR, entertainment, games, trends, tech, business
www.vrroom.buzz
LIVE NOW
Jean Michel Jarre in VR