VR - the hidden gem in ED.

lasvideo

lasvideo
I would love to know how many ED commanders use VR.

I wish everyone who enjoys ED had the opportunity to experience it in all its glory! The magnificence of the experience is hard to communicate. Kinda of like trying to explain sex to someone that hasnt done it yet. The good news is that VR headsets are now more affordable than in years past.

When I fly in VR, what I do in ED feels more like a real profession with real world consequences, rather than a game on a 2d screen. If I were a billionaire I would buy VR systems for everyone that loves ED. I feel they are missing out one the majesty of what it has to offer.

Alas, Im just a retired video editor. So this post is the best I can do. ;)
 
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Andy Gee

Andy Gee
Played it from the beginning in VR - wouldn't even have known how it feels in 2D if I wouldn't have startet with on foot content in Odyssey at the end of last year. ED was without any doubts one of the flagship applications for VR (and perhaps still is).
The first few hours of ED in VR were so oppressive for me that I briefly broke out in a sweat when I was interdicted. Back then, NPC gankers would simply wipe out a noob, even if the cargo bay was empty. Thankfully, fellow players took on this role. So yes, the intensity of ED in VR can be incredibly high.

ED and VR - two niches have come together here!
 

Helmut Grokenberger

Helmut Grokenberger
You're certainly not alone. And almost every VR CMDR shares your view; in 2D, you play a spaceship game, in VR, you fky a spaceship. Personally, I got roped into ED when I decided to get a VR headset and was looking for great VR games; Elite is the one I stuck with, but I would probably never have played it without VR. I have played about 3200 hours now, and less than... I'd say 50 were in 2D. I don't launch in 2D beyond some testing and sometimes to look something up. I did some 2D playing when Odyssey launched because it was just unbearable in VR, but again, that was only about 30 hours or so.

I am sure you know the Steam numbers, which say that 1.34% of Steam users own a VR headset. Frontier never gives out any numbers, but I would assume that the number of Elite VR CMDRs is a bit higher than this. Despite being a very.... loud community and VR being marketed as the newest latest for over a decade now, VR is still very niché in the grand scheme I would say.

To get a feel for who here uses VR, you can a) take a look at the members list and see who uses a "[VR]" tag in their username, and b) take a peek who is active in the VR subforum. Beyond that - no way of knowing.
 

Andy Gee

Andy Gee
Helmut Grokenberger said:
I know what you mean. When I first launched ED, sat in my first Sidewinder and left the dock for the first time, my senses were completely overloaded, and I was just... sitting there drooling about how awesome it was.
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Yes! And then you stood in front of the mailslot, watched the station security eagles slalom between the pylons at the front of the station, and thought: Oh my God – in this game, even the NPCs make you look like an overwhelmed loser. :LOL:
 

Arioch

Arioch
There are no firm figures for VR users in Elite - for what it’s worth, the most up-thumbed post in the Suggestions forum is for on-foot VR in Odyssey, and a VR issue was the second highest voted bug on Issue Tracker for a while this year.

Odyssey was originally going to have no VR at all but that decision was altered after a short period of time, so we must number enough to have warranted that.

Steam percentages don’t help much (the figures are skewed thanks to Chinese users who have their own VR market) but the trend is upwards, and I’d be willing to bet that the percentage of HMD users in cockpit games is a lot more than the low reported figure suggest.

The only time I’ve seen a hint of what Elite’s VR user base is like was when ED was briefly in the top 10 of the most concurrent users thing a few years ago - cross referencing the VR and flatscreen figures it was something like 17% of Steam players in ED at that moment had the magic goggles on (if I remember correctly and my mental arithmetic was working correctly 😅).
 

Helmut Grokenberger

Helmut Grokenberger
Arioch said:
There are no firm figures for VR users in Elite - for what it’s worth, the most up-thumbed post in the Suggestions forum is for on-foot VR in Odyssey, and a VR issue was the second highest voted bug on Issue Tracker for a while this year.
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To be fair, VR players are very good at campaigning and making it look like they are an overwhelming majority :D.

Arioch said:
Odyssey was originally going to have no VR at all but that decision was altered after a short period of time, so we must number enough to have warranted that.
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To be honest, back then I thought that was it for ED for me, and I was baffled that, this time around, player complaints actually changed something very quickly.

Arioch said:
but the trend is upwards
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Are you sure? The recent hardware survey showed -0.56% for Steam users with VR hardware :D. Not too sure if that is actually a percentage, or if they really mean percentage points.
 

Arioch

Arioch
Helmut Grokenberger said:
Looking at that link, the trend in the graph presented is... very optimisticly drawn. If you removed the low spots from 2020, the trend would be a flat line depending on where you start the trend line. A trend line on a graph like that says nothing, it should be a higher order.

Never trust a statistic you haven't tampered with yourself!
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If you’re removing low spots and starting the trend line elsewhere, and then claiming the trend line says nothing - I’m not going to trust the statistic you’re tampering with 😁👍
 

Helmut Grokenberger

Helmut Grokenberger
Arioch said:
If you’re removing low spots and starting the trend line elsewhere, and then claiming the trend line says nothing - I’m not going to trust the statistic you’re tampering with 😁👍
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To be fair, the 2020 data is clearly an outlier in the data - did something happen in 2021 in the VR space? Something something Quest? The rest is pretty consistent (or, consistently up and down). 2020 isn't a low spot, something between 2020 and 2021 changed. That should be reflected in a trend, and that is why linear trend lines are almost always a bad idea. If I had delivered that trend intrepretation to my boss, I'd have it had thrown back at me immediately.

Edit: The Quest 2 was released in late 2020, that could be why there is a noticable kink in that graph.
 

Arioch

Arioch
Here’s the Steam VR user percentage graph from 2019:
IMG_3811.jpeg

…and the 2020-onward one:
IMG_3810.jpeg

I may live on a slight incline, but that still looks like an upward trend to me 😁👍
 

Helmut Grokenberger

Helmut Grokenberger
Arioch said:
Here’s the Steam VR user percentage graph from 2019:
View attachment 423526
…and the 2020-onward one:
View attachment 423527
I may live on a slight incline, but that still looks like an upward trend to me 😁👍
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Sorry, disagree. To be clear, I was talking about the second graph you showed. The non-chinese graph clearly has a kink from 2020 to 2021 that isn't reflected in the trend line but should be. That's my opinion and I am sticking with it :D!

It is interesting how clearly leaving out the chinese market changes the figures. I know nothing of it, how exactly does china have it's own market?
 

Arioch

Arioch
Helmut Grokenberger said:
Sorry, disagree. To be clear, I was talking about the second graph you showed. The non-chinese graph clearly has a kink from 2020 to 2021 that isn't reflected in the trend line but should be. That's my opinion and I am sticking with it :D!

It is interesting how clearly leaving out the chinese market changes the figures. I know nothing of it, how exactly does china have it's own market?
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Enough of your kinks!

As for China, I’m just going by what it says in the linked article:

“But when adjusting the figures for each month since Valve started reporting this figure to be relative to the number of non-Chinese users, as China essentially has its own tangential VR market, it's the second highest ever.”
 

Arioch

Arioch
In March 2020 Steam started scanning your past month’s logs to see if a headset had been connected, not just if it was connected when taking the survey.

From an April 2024 UploadVR article regarding the figure-skewing:

“The most popular PC VR headsets and SteamVR games aren't officially sold in China, and the number of Chinese users on Steam has gradually increased each year.”

Steam was released in China in 2021 and has seen a massive influx of users - something like a third of all Steam players now have Simplified Chinese as the language setting - so even though more VR headsets are getting using with Steam every year, the percentage figure goes down due to the huge numbers of new flatscreen players.
———
Back on topic - @lasvideo I also wish more ED players could experience the game in VR; once I stepped into my Cobra Mk3 back in 2017 after playing since Premium Beta I've never stepped back, and I’ve had many truly awesome times since - as in I’ve actually had to stop and go “wow” for a bit 😁
 

lasvideo

lasvideo
Speaking of cobras, I just got back from engineering my cobra mk five with upgraded rail guns, multi cannons and frag cannons. When I started a few weeks ago I stuck to the low resource zones. With this baby I am attacking anacondas in the high resource zones. I'm sure thankful I don't get VR vertigo because if I did I'd be barfing all over the place with the kind of flying I can do in that ship.
 
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Arioch

Arioch
lasvideo said:
I'm sure thankful I don't get VR vertigo because if I did I'd be barfing all over the place with the kind of flying I can do in that ship.
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😁
Elite’s ships, SLFs & SRV were probably the best VR trainers for me - I had a fairly strong stomach when starting in VR due to a couple of decades at sea, but smooth turning was a proper no-no in on-foot games like SkyrimVR and I always used flick turns.

After plenty of deep space dogfights and spin-outs in Elite my VR legs became cast iron, and I can now play things like the VR mod for Cyberpunk 2077 with all its enforced movements and smooth rotation without any gut blips at all.
 

aXeL

A
I wouldn't rely on 'connected' SteamVR counts either. I only VR game but I won't show in any SteamVR tally because I dumped it years ago for OpenXR runtimes I like better. Maybe SteamVR is better now but I see no reason to go back to it, not least of all because I don't have to load all that Steam bloatware cr** each time I want to play a game.
 

blastard

blastard
I have to agree with the OP.
I have just under 9000hrs in ED and have had VR from the start, 5 headsets in total so far. Started with a DK2, then a CV1 when they came out, then another CV1 when the 1st went pop, then upgraded to a Pimax 5k and 2 years ago went on up to a Pimax 8kx.
VR in ED is simply the best and like the OP says - I too think it's like a real profession with consequences when I fly. I have to add though - that the addition of 6-axis motion from my flight simulator gives that added flying realism (inclu. seatbelt and flying suit). I'm recently retired so have even more play time now.
Fly safe (and in VR)
Cmdr Blastard
 
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