VR support 'not at launch' for Odyssey

[VR Mr Teatime]

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.

Having the staff costs are largely irrelevant, unless you have the expected revenue they'll generate, or you can't make a simple business case judgement (there would be other factors in any case) which is why I avoided the topic. The cost per FTE seems reasonable though, given a USD to GBP conversion and so long as that's "fully loaded" and not just salaries, as I would have doubts that FDev are paying their people £120K p.a. each. According to some raving socialist last year, £80K plus puts you in the top 5% of earners in the country (its closer to top 15% in reality).

My point was and still is that VR is a decent point feature on a box, but its implementation cost in terms of what we know has been committed (a team of 100 for two years of which a conservative estimate is that 30 are devs, but you would hope it would be higher) and a likely man day effort comparison, just doesn't stack up.

As for the "we want it to be a quality feature or it doesn't go in", I guess most of the ground buildings will be erased as well, as most don't have a foundation block on them to avoid them sticking out into thin "air" on steep slopes. They are going to need replacing and/or fixing, or they're going to look even worse on foot - if we take the same logic as VR then they should just get deleted...

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).

Sorry - I just don't follow this. Doesn't No Mans Sky offer a flat screen and VR option? Doesn't War Thunder? Doesn't a dozen other games including Elite Dangerous currently? You try it in VR, you can't get along with it, you uncheck the VR option and play normally again.

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).

Why would VR's inclusion suddenly make it a VR exclusive or even a VR primary game? VR is just a render and control option that affords a level of immersion that's just not possible on flat screens, it doesn't need to have weird leftfield solutions implemented (although you might improve to some innovative ones later on). For something like Elite Dangerous its a back of box feature, that enhances the product and makes it more saleable to a discerning and forward looking games enthusiast, it doesn't mean half the box has to have VR splashed across it along with a health warning. It just needs to have the same level of implementation there is currently to not make Odyssey look like its moving backwards technologically.

This is all possible. But it begs the question of: What can we do about such situations as fans?

Well what we are doing so far is a good start by keeping the issue alive.

Frontier have applied oil to squeaky wheels quite often and especially when its something that makes the game "easy" e.g. just after release with the friendly fire and "kill stealing" fixes, because some people can't use trigger discipline, or think the NPC's are somehow trying to deprive them of precious credits if they don't get full bounties for a single burst laser shot on a pirate with full shields.

Personally I think the seated VR experience we have now in Odyssey would be just fine, given you are going to have to have a button press (or a menu item) to get out of your chair or more likely activate FPS telepresence and spawn outside your ship. That action just needs to be tied to a "goto flatscreen render" mode if you're in VR, or at the very least just a restart to get there, if a camera switch is beyond the coding budget allotted.

Maybe Frontier just don't have the coding chops to do VR and the original rendering coder has moved on since 2014...that would be a sad admission if true...

 

[Kemo]

It has HOTAS and VR support, so I'll buy it.

It's also got single player and bots for MP, apparently.

 

[itarrow]

It's also got single player and bots for MP, apparently.

And if you want to play a multiplayer FPS in the same universe, there’s a separate game about it, without VR, that let’s you do it without forcing you to forget about VR for flying.

So if you want to have the full flying experience in VR, there is a game about it, and if you want the full FPS experience, there is a game without VR about it, and nobody enjoying just one or the other has to suffer compromises because the developer/publisher decides to have everything together.

 

[jojon]

Maybe Frontier just don't have the coding chops to do VR and the original rendering coder has moved on since 2014...that would be a sad admission if true...

Can't help but recall how, not long ago, somebody on a stream threw out a: "thanks" to the long departed Ben Parry, for having done some really fundamental work on the engine, kind of as if they had nobody else who could do it, which gave me a disturbing sense of just the sort of thing you write there.

I think it was about the deferred rendering pipeline, but can't quite remember.


EDIT:

...
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?

Depends on what one want to do with one's game, I suppose -- Whilst Valve chose to make 19 year old athletic Alyx Vance move at the speed of a geriatric with a walker (can be overridden in the console), nothing stops one from doing an extremely rapid shooter, nor having it controlled with mouse and keyboard even though it's in VR...

I'm quite surprised, frankly, nobody has yet thrown together something that scales up motion, so that you turn twice as far, or more, in game, as you do in real life. ...Ultrakill in VR would probably be "a bit" draining... :9

 

[Kelster87]

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'm sorry, but you went there and I have to respond. Ray tracing is neither new or revolutionary and, frankly, is done via kludge on RTX silicon. But, you know, those of us playing Elite in 1985 were also likely poking at raytracing.. The only modern twist is doing it realtime - but that's only really a new thing on PC hardware. Ignore the fact it's nVidia only and is not the most efficient method, it's purdy. And we can just ignore that it's YET ANOTHER API to deal with - and it's compatibilities/incompatibilities with all the others.

So 83 pages of hand wringing, whining, dummy spits, Dev praise, Dev abuse, game abuse, false comparisons, strawmen and the collected works of Tolstoy, what do we have? "VR will not be included in Odyssey at launch." which is what we started with. I've seen some people asking good questions, only to be drowned out by "DBOBE says it only took 3 days originally!" which is a load of crap I can't verify. I'm aware that VR is going to be big going forward, but clearly there is no market and no money to be made from AAA titles at this point, which means you early adopters are, as usual, overselling your own importance. And despite what some of you think, tech that makes you nauseated is not a winner with Joe Sixpack, who will not persist with it..

But really, we know nothing at this point, beyond 'Not at launch" and I suspect some of this thread was simply an opportunity to throw salt. Do FDev have a reputation about marketing releases? Sure. But some people seem to think they know better than everyone else and are 100% sure that it's all broken and will never happen. Some of you clearly hate Elite and FDev to the point I wonder why you are still here? And I wonder if some of the people here realise that the reason FDev runs the marketing plan they do, where silence is key, is partly due to them and others like them.. Much easier to take flack for nothing and let people invent the salt.. Congrats on playing their game.

 

[VR Golgot]

Having the staff costs are largely irrelevant, unless you have the expected revenue they'll generate, or you can't make a simple business case judgement (there would be other factors in any case) which is why I avoided the topic. The cost per FTE seems reasonable though, given a USD to GBP conversion and so long as that's "fully loaded" and not just salaries, as I would have doubts that FDev are paying their people £120K p.a. each. According to some raving socialist last year, £80K plus puts you in the top 5% of earners in the country (its closer to top 15% in reality).

Given we have a ballpark figure for ED's annual revenue at the moment (~12.5m pa), and that that puts them in break-even territory with 100+ devs at 120k pa, I think dev costs are still an important consideration. Especially when we're looking at the VR element apparently needing greater dev investment than prior years. (And given the general lower ROI inherent in the VR market).

And yep, the FTE estimate is 'fully loaded'. (See the first link for a general breakdown. The area where I think it may diverge the most is health insurance in the US having no parallel in the UK etc).

My point was and still is that VR is a decent point feature on a box, but its implementation cost in terms of what we know has been committed (a team of 100 for two years of which a conservative estimate is that 30 are devs, but you would hope it would be higher) and a likely man day effort comparison, just doesn't stack up.

Your estimate is off on the 'team of 100'. 'The majority' of the 100+ have been on Odyssey since the beginning of 2019. (We don't know if that's 51 devs, or 99 devs, or what ). And all of the 100 are devs (IE in the sense that it's broadly applied - game artists through to coders etc).

But even with those points firmed up, we still don't know how much dev effort would be required to make passable VR Legs gameplay, on top of the existing VR flight gameplay. We just know that it's 'more'. And that FDev have baulked at it for the time being.

One thing we can be fairly certain of though, is that VR is no longer a decent point feature on the box if it turns out to be a bad VR implementation.

As for the "we want it to be a quality feature or it doesn't go in", I guess most of the ground buildings will be erased as well, as most don't have a foundation block on them to avoid them sticking out into thin "air" on steep slopes. They are going to need replacing and/or fixing, or they're going to look even worse on foot - if we take the same logic as VR then they should just get deleted...

This is apples and oranges. The issue isn't purely about relative quality. There are some basic market expectations out there now for first-person character gameplay in VR, and motion controller support is amongst them. And it brings extra downstream considerations / extra dev. They have to at least hit that level of 'good' to not be slammed by the market. It's a baseline.

Sorry - I just don't follow this. Doesn't No Mans Sky offer a flat screen and VR option? Doesn't War Thunder? Doesn't a dozen other games including Elite Dangerous currently? You try it in VR, you can't get along with it, you uncheck the VR option and play normally again.

Ah, your reference to changing modes in the menu confused me. You can't actually flip between VR mode and flatscreen mode in most games. You have to restart.

Yes you can play those games in either mode. The initial point was about whether nausea was an important consideration though. And in the one 'character' game you referenced there, NMS, they absolutely went to town on providing a decent spread of locomotion options to minimise nausea (teleportation, controller-relative etc), alongside other considerations like vignetting etc.

So yes, going by your examples, nausea reduction is important here . And takes dev...

Why would VR's inclusion suddenly make it a VR exclusive or even a VR primary game?

I was talking about the VR experience being primarily a nauseous one. Or not.

VR is just a render and control option that affords a level of immersion that's just not possible on flat screens, it doesn't need to have weird leftfield solutions implemented (although you might improve to some innovative ones later on). For something like Elite Dangerous its a back of box feature, that enhances the product and makes it more saleable to a discerning and forward looking games enthusiast, it doesn't mean half the box has to have VR splashed across it along with a health warning. It just needs to have the same level of implementation there is currently to not make Odyssey look like its moving backwards technologically.

VR does require alternate locomotion solutions for character gameplay. The aspects you are calling 'weird' & 'leftfield' (the controller-relative, HMD-relative systems mentioned) are absolutely industry staples now for character gameplay.

This can be demonstrated by every single top-selling game which features first-person character gameplay. They all support motion controllers. They all have some of the above nausea-reducing locomotion techniques. (And even on the PS4, where motion controllers are not even bundled as standard, the top selling 'character' games are still dominated by games that support them).

To argue otherwise is to ignore the very obvious facts on the ground.

Well what we are doing so far is a good start by keeping the issue alive.

Frontier have applied oil to squeaky wheels quite often and especially when its something that makes the game "easy" e.g. just after release with the friendly fire and "kill stealing" fixes, because some people can't use trigger discipline, or think the NPC's are somehow trying to deprive them of precious credits if they don't get full bounties for a single burst laser shot on a pirate with full shields.

Sure, agreed that making noise is one thing.

I still think, given the fairly obvious hills that FDev need pushing up, some kind of coherent lines of attack would be helpful.

Personally I think the seated VR experience we have now in Odyssey would be just fine, given you are going to have to have a button press (or a menu item) to get out of your chair or more likely activate FPS telepresence and spawn outside your ship. That action just needs to be tied to a "goto flatscreen render" mode if you're in VR, or at the very least just a restart to get there, if a camera switch is beyond the coding budget allotted.

If you're talking about a dirty 'experimental' launcher option, with no VR tick on the box, then fine.

But you've been talking about keeping that VR tick on the box. And that's just dreamland. It's abundantly clear that FDev couldn't launch a majorly Legs-based update, with VR on the box, that doesn't include industry-standard VR support for said Legs...

And that's why I'm talking about clear lines of attack. If you take the first case to FDev, they may well nod. If you take the second scenario to them, they'll just shake their head at you

 

[Deleted member 121570]

Keep calm and carry on! Something's clearly afoot, since there's little real rational justification for this act of corporate stupidity, other than sheer ineptitude.
This whole thing is basically - "We're removing a feature that's been in the game for years because we can't make it work properly any more".
Well, that's a bit crap really. We should be loud in saying so.

Those who don't to hear that should go read some other threads or something. Have a cup of tea and stop getting salty about stuff that doesn't affect them anyway.

 

[GraXXoR]

@Stamford Rider - you are an absolute legend, I am very impressed with your "cool starry bra"! To not just jump on the bandwagon of criticising VR players for "whining" is one thing, but to put your hand in your pocket and rig up a VR experiment to see things from "the other person's point of view" is particularly enlightened. But even that wasn't good enough for you, you then shared the experience with others, saying "I can see their point now", ver magnanimous and genuinely impressive. I'll be pouring a stiff "dram" as a nightcap later on, and it'll be toasting your good health.


Sanderling and I both fly in VR with twinsticks with Flight assist off, and in a lot of threads we echo each others sentiments, picking up on flight assist off...

IRL I don't get car, air or other travel sick, like trains or buses, but when I used to work in Offshore Oil and Gas, certain "wave periods", tempo of the vessel bobbing up and down, wrecked me. I remember my first proper sea trip, the captain of that vessel was a nutter, a sea mongrel (worse than a sea dog), he took us out of harbour heading out into 5m swell knowing that it was forecast to pick up to 13m swell overnight. I ended up being so severely sick that I couldn't even keep water down, I got so dehydrated that I had skin peeling like sunburn, tongue splitting, the captain and XO (executive officer) contemplated having me airlifted off the vessel. Yet, a few years later, having pushed myself through mild seasickness a few times, on a totally different vessel, I had no problems with 22m+ swell?

Certain VR experiences trouble me, or the seasick part of me, most don't, but with those that do, I work towards building up the tolerance for it. It's particularly frustrating with "lone echo" as I reckon its the notched thumbstick controls that go for me?

It took me a while to learn FAoff, it may take me another while to get over Odessy Nausea (if it's implementation of VR "triggers" me), but let me be the one who gets to make that decision.

@golgot is someone who I enjoy reading their posts on the VR topic, but at times I do wish he'd stop trying to be so pragmatic, most VR players know they are messing with experimental kit, and know somethings may unexpectedly trigger nausea responses they didn't have. I know of a guy who completed a few "levels" of a scuba diving game with no problem, the third "location" / level had a deeper blue hue to the water than the previous two levels and that was them finished, they couldn't do more than 5 minutes in that shade of water, yet they could spend hours straight in the first two paler water sections.

If developers were to always take the risk averse choice at every decision, we wouldn't have 3d games, would never have gotten past the coin drop mentality of 3 lives high score of early eighties gaming, would never have developed sophisticated online gaming (games as a service / MMO etc), we'd never have had games that warranted and induced the production of specialist peripherals, such as shots, forcefeedback steering wheels etc...

Sure there have been a few clangers out there, like PS DualShock vibrating in your hand like a nineties pager? Haptic feedback on smartphones? Early force-feed back peripherals such as the laughable Play Station "official" Gran Turismo steering wheel. But those clangers paved the way for later better peripherals, such as the Logitech G29, Thrust-master TX. 15 years ago games were taglining their title with online, like LAtest Street Racer-Online, RapidCombat-Online, before that, 25 years ago, the tagline title of choice was 3d, Shoot-Em-Up-3D, etc. But nowadays online and 3d are expected in games in much the same way as twincam and injection is no longer a selling point for a "sportier" car, it is derigeur. VR will go the same way, there are a lot of crumby titles out there using it as a tagline, Tetris_Clone-VR and the peripherals will at times be janky, but get better, as we went from DK1 --> DK2 --> Oculus Rift CV1 --> Pimax (mixed) --> HP Reverb the hardware is getting better, and so does the experience it offers the player.

The VR headset hardware is getting better, the graphics cards to drive it are getting cheaper, as in you can run VR on a rtx2060 now, whereas you needed a gtx980ti before. A rift S now costs half what a CV1 did, and an rtx2060 is roughly half the price of a 980ti back in the day. More and more headline are games are coming to VR, so it would be daft to remove it now that it is starting to show signs of coming of age.

I honestly think it’s just that FDEV no longer have the resources to develop VR in ED any more.
Their best and brightest devs have likely moved on to newer, shinier, more profitable IP, leaving the erm, let’s say... “remainer” of the devs on ED.

They are most likely resource constrained so have deprioritised VR to the same level as PlayStation “not at release” VR level.
It’s a crying shame, because on both my Oculus and Pimax 5k, EDis one of the best VR environments I have ever experienced.

 

[Leper Messiah]

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.

I presume different games and devs have different ideas too? This to me is the next step for VR, with flight/space sims and raqcing sims it's easy, you have a HOTAS or wheel for full immersions. Once we get into standing up and walking/running about VR becomes so much more complicated regarding controls.

 

[Leper Messiah]

Depends on what one want to do with one's game, I suppose -- Whilst Valve chose to make 19 year old athletic Alyx Vance move at the speed of a geriatric with a walker (can be overridden in the console), nothing stops one from doing an extremely rapid shooter, nor having it controlled with mouse and keyboard even though it's in VR...

I'm quite surprised, frankly, nobody has yet thrown together something that scales up motion, so that you turn twice as far, or more, in game, as you do in real life. ...Ultrakill in VR would probably be "a bit" draining... :9

But in reality the human body only moves a certain way, there's no options. VR needs to find a way to replicate that. Only thing I've seen is that extra stand up rig someone posted (which does look brilliant), I had my own idea which was similar but had a massive ball like a track ball you moved with your feet. It's an interesting subject because as a Motorcyclist and race sim fan I have a wheel setup for cars (no VR yet), but when it comes to motorbike game there's no controller apart from expensive bespoke stuff. Even then the handlebars aren't realistic because unlike a car you use your entire body to turn a bike and that's really hard to emulate with controllers. I have similar thoughts regarding first person walking/running in VR.

Does Half Life Alyx have inertia? Or can you do unrealistic turns?

 

[Viajero]

Maybe Frontier just don't have the coding chops to do VR and the original rendering coder has moved on since 2014...that would be a sad admission if true...

Free @Greg !!!

 

[jojon]

But in reality the human body only moves a certain way, there's no options.

Ah yes; If your goal is realism, your starting point is "room scale". Your turning in game is precisely your actual turning in your play space - no more, no less, and so is your walking around, and bobbing and weaving, and the feedback from your vestibular system is true, and that is that.

...so the question becomes one of how one deal with the disparity between one's physical realities, and the game world... With a wired headset, you can only turn so far, before you have got yourself all tangled up in the cable, and have to take a moment to spin back in the opposite direction. Often you are offered ways to supplement physical turning with thumbstick turning; Either smoothly, at one rate range or other, or in discrete (and rather jarring) steps, that instantly flips you a chosen number of degrees around. The latter is mostly a concession to simulation sickness, for players who are easily nauseated. Alyx offers both these, and they are without simulated inertia (which only serves to disconnect your avatar from your physical body, anyway), but they are really not meant to be used 99% of the time - you turn for real, and only use the stick when you need to align yourself with real world constraints -- many still prefer to just stand/sit still, though, and play much as they would a console game.

For translation: Among the supplementary methods that allow you to cover extended distances, in your small room, you'll find regular smooth thumbstick control, teleport options that let you point at a spot on the ground where you want to move to, and takes you there either instantly or in a realistic time frame, with or without some form of visual representation of your traversal, and more rarely various forms of redirected walking, that has you meandering around within your play space, while your character maintains a straight course in the game world.

You can couple "forced" smooth motion with things like walking in place, or just gently swinging your arms as if walking, and make this physical motion, as detected by sensors, set the pace and phase. This can work surprisingly well, when done right.

One also need to concern oneself with limitations that exist in the game world, but not in your playspace, so that a player can not e.g. walk through a locked door, or step out onto thin air, past a cliff edge, without falling down. I prefer for this to simply take the form of the player avatar being stopped by colliders, preferably through the physics simulation, just like in any regular game, but once more in the name of fear of simulation sickness, there are many examples of games that (IMO misguidedly) instead fades out the view, and waits for you to return to a safe spot.

There is a wide range of different (usually costly) mechanical solutions of varying complexity on offer, that let you take full strides uninterrupted, without moving too far from where you started out, including the ball you suggest, although the more common of that solution has you walking inside the ball - that spares you from digging a five metre hole under your floor. :7

The slippery bowl type of contraption is one of the simplest and cheapest of these. I have zero enthusiasm for it, for a number of reasons.


Since your head and hands are tracked; Using a simple inverse kinematics model coupled with physics simulation, it should be possible to get a decent estimation of your balancing on an imagined motorcycle, for a bike driving game.

 

[Captain N]

But in reality the human body only moves a certain way, there's no options. VR needs to find a way to replicate that.

That's called roomscale. That's just tracking your movements 1:1 in your playspace. It works fine for games where the area you move in is not larger than your physical room. Obviously very restrictive for game design, but it's hands down the most realistic and immersive method of movement - as it's simply your actual physical movements translated into virtual space.

Only thing I've seen is that extra stand up rig someone posted (which does look brilliant), I had my own idea which was similar but had a massive ball like a track ball you moved with your feet.

I have difficulty seeing the treadmill approach take off, not only it's another expensive piece of hardware people need to buy and find room for, I'm skeptical of how realistic they even feel to use. Whenever I see footage of people "walking" in them it never looks quite natural. They also tend to restrict certain actions, such as going prone (which is kind of important for military shooters)

Does Half Life Alyx have inertia? Or can you do unrealistic turns?

Inertia is usually not modelled in VR games (Boneworks being a prominent exception), and neither is "head bobbing" as both tend to be severe triggers for nausea. There's a snap turning option in Alyx (which is turning in increments), which I guess would count as "unrealistic turns" but you can just leave that option off and turn physically, which means you can only turn as fast as your physical body can turn.

It's an interesting subject because as a Motorcyclist and race sim fan I have a wheel setup for cars (no VR yet), but when it comes to motorbike game there's no controller apart from expensive bespoke stuff. Even then the handlebars aren't realistic because unlike a car you use your entire body to turn a bike and that's really hard to emulate with controllers.

BTW there's a futuristic bike racer called V-Racer Hoverbike, which is controlled by tilting your body, which is measured from the position of your headset and controllers. I haven't played it so I can't speak for how well it works from a personal experience, but the reviews seem to praise the control scheme.

 

[VR Murgle]

or in discrete (and rather jarring) steps, that instantly flips you a chosen number of degrees around. The latter is mostly a concession to simulation sickness, for players who are easily nauseated.

Hilariously snap turning makes feel nauseous real quick whereas smooth turning, provided I have consistently high frame rates, is far less of an issue.

 

[VR StarLightPL]

But in reality the human body only moves a certain way, there's no options. VR needs to find a way to replicate that.

Well usually we don't need to replicate as closely tbh. Inertia etc. just would be detracting. I think CDPR tried that with early The Witcher 3 builds and it was so kludgy they removed it in subsequential updates. I'm using the mix of the two methods, thumbstick method is usually used to reorient myself in the room. I can share my last twitchy Onward PvE (bots) gameplay for lolz. (Twitch embeed doesn't seem to work so link only).
What you can observe here is the mixing of the input methods. You can see minor adjustments with the thumbstick, as well as full body turning. There's a slight lag in recorded camera movement though, inside the headset it looks like in real life. Also there's a lag behind gun movement, but that's the "penalty" for using a virtual gunstock. If I had it turned off, there would be no lag. I use to turn a lot in Onward, but I'm aware of the headset cable being there so no spinning around like a pro ice skater. If I really need fast turn I use a mix of turning with my body and thumbstick turn, but usually there's no real need. If a bot jumps you from the back you're dead anyway. For "quake3-like" strafejumping you're bound to controller inputs anyway, but I'm not aware of any game which does this.
Last thing to add to this clip - here it seems very chaotic and twitchy camera, but it's the way we look around in real life. Watch any head mounted gopro video, you'll notice the same effect. Inside the headset it looks completely normal.

I'm sorry, but you went there and I have to respond. Ray tracing is neither new or revolutionary and, frankly, is done via kludge on RTX silicon. But, you know, those of us playing Elite in 1985 were also likely poking at raytracing.. The only modern twist is doing it realtime - but that's only really a new thing on PC hardware. Ignore the fact it's nVidia only and is not the most efficient method, it's purdy. And we can just ignore that it's YET ANOTHER API to deal with - and it's compatibilities/incompatibilities with all the others.

I'm sorry but I don't know what do you mean by this post. Do I care what physics is done in the engine of my car? That it is a kludgy non-efficient combustion process most of which is lost via heat and gas transfer? Do I care whether the badge slapped on it says CarmakerA or CarmakerB? Down to practical level - not really. I care about power, handling characteristics and comfort. It might be hamsters on a wheel if that would get me from point A to point B. And with a big smile strapped to my face if it's a BMW ;-) Please do not compare the raytracing of the dinosaur era (I know, I was there, on the Amiga) to current RTX solutions which are able to create photorealistic graphics in real time. It works and it's about to get much stronger with new Nvidia RTX generation. We're only at the beginning of this tech. The question of "yet another API to support" is a business one, not a tech one. Cyberpunk 2077 will support RTX at launch, I wonder to what extent though. And we're sure to see more support added as new generation becomes available and install base widens for RTX tech in general (I don't care whether it's stamped from Nvidia or AMD or even Intel).

So - same with VR in my opinion. There are harmful myths surrounding VR, most people still think it costs a grand, it doesn't. Most people think it needs a nasa supercomputer to drive it, I wouldn't call a four year graphics card and a modest i3 a supercomputer exactly. And people who never tried VR cry loudest about nausea problems, which are usually temporary for the majority of people. I don't know a single VR user who didn't get over initial nausea. It's a process, you need to be selective with content at start. That's it. And some people tried crappy VR on google cardboard with $2 lenses and dismiss the whole experience because of multitude of reasons which are specific to mobile VR.

Yet you could see hysteric posts on HL: Alyx boards touting all these humbugs in full glory like it was 2016 all over again

 

[epoch5]

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.

Half Life Alex built a AAA from scratch it can be done.

 

[VR StarLightPL]

Half Life Alex built a AAA from scratch it can be done.

It's not a best example TBH. It shows what an AAA VR game can accomplish, but it has been in development for four years, with Valve not caring whether it makes money or not (it was bundled with Index). This basically means budget is not a constraint and Valve being the biggest game store on Earth can afford it without problems, especially when it will drive their VR platform forward. Also IMHO the game is strung by its locomotion options, in my opinion their approach is too reserved and restrained and Alyx feels like a grandma with a walking stick. Also the "we couldn't get the crowbar right" excuse is, well, an excuse, because there are games like Blade & Sorcery and Gorn which do physics in an entertaining way. Also there's Boneworks which is similar to Elite in the fact that it's a big physics sandbox with potential to be something greater, but falls short on story implementation. Didn't stop me from hanging on the MENU ROOM for half an hour just playing with the props lol

EA's SW:SQ is another matter and they simply had the resources to do VR, knowing it will drive the hype forward. I mean, full fledged Star Wars in VR! Mind-blown!

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

So 83 pages of hand wringing, whining, dummy spits, Dev praise, Dev abuse, game abuse, false comparisons, strawmen and the collected works of Tolstoy, what do we have? "VR will not be included in Odyssey at launch." which is what we started with. I've seen some people asking good questions, only to be drowned out by "DBOBE says it only took 3 days originally!" which is a load of crap I can't verify. I'm aware that VR is going to be big going forward, but clearly there is no market and no money to be made from AAA titles at this point, which means you early adopters are, as usual, overselling your own importance. And despite what some of you think, tech that makes you nauseated is not a winner with Joe Sixpack, who will not persist with it..

But really, we know nothing at this point, beyond 'Not at launch" and I suspect some of this thread was simply an opportunity to throw salt. Do FDev have a reputation about marketing releases? Sure. But some people seem to think they know better than everyone else and are 100% sure that it's all broken and will never happen. Some of you clearly hate Elite and FDev to the point I wonder why you are still here? And I wonder if some of the people here realise that the reason FDev runs the marketing plan they do, where silence is key, is partly due to them and others like them.. Much easier to take flack for nothing and let people invent the salt.. Congrats on playing their game.

You realise that you yourself are guilty of what you are accusing others in this thread?. And if you choose to believe David Braben is a liar when he said it was only a few days work to put VR into ED that is up to you. The bottom line for me is , if FD were concerned they were going to drop VR support (or are unable to confirm if they are even planning on adding in after launch) they had no place at all allowing their game to go on a VR only store. It isn't ok that 1 arm of customers are going to end up with a version of the game which is going to be a dead end. Even Mac users had options to get around it, oculus store users.are boned
Yes us VR users are a minority. You know who else are also a minority in the pc games space? AMD gpu users
Imagine if ED:Owould ONLY work on Nvidia GPUs!
No one forced FD to market ED as built from the ground up for VR. And true we can't force FD to not drop support... But we CAN complain about it (so long as not breaking forum rules) and we can refuse to give FD any more money.

 

[[VR] Orodruin]

EA's SW:SQ is another matter and they simply had the resources to do VR, knowing it will drive the hype forward. I mean, full fledged Star Wars in VR! Mind-blown!

Just now I got a mental image of the opening crawl in VR ... I salivated a bit extra..

 

[Rat Catcher]

Just now I got a mental image of the opening crawl in VR ... I salivated a bit extra..

... now wipe your chin!