With the new updates coming, please add basic, seated on-foot VR support

[Foolski]

The one thing that stopped me from playing the game was when I bought Odyssey and realised what the VR implementation was like. On the one hand, you have one of the most amazing, immersive VR games out there, and then you get out of the ship and suddenly I'm watching a TV again. The disappointment of being unable to stand beside my ship in VR was immeasurable.
You don't need to implement VR controller/hand support, no one is asking it to be Pavlov or HL: Alyx. The cockpit experience isn't VTOL VR so why would we expect the on-foot VR to suddenly have hands? A simple, seated experience is all that's required. We already fly our ships with a brick strapped to our face so playing FPS is not going to be difficult.
For example, It wouldn't require any tuning control-wise. It can be basic shooter controls but with the ability to turn your head. If any of the devs have played Arma with TrackIR, then they know what I mean. In-fact, Elite has TrackIR support and I think I remember the only issue on foot being some clipping/missing mesh in FPS when turning your head. Aiming down sights can just bring the sight picture up ahead in front of you as usual as done with TrackIR.
Either way, I love Elite but I cannot play it with the knowledge that I'm either limiting myself to my ship in VR, or having to dip out the wonderful VR experience in order to not have a horribly jarring experience on foot.

 

[Arioch]

In case you haven’t seen it, here is the most “Liked” suggestion in the Suggestion sub-forum:

Allow the VR '2D screen' to be disabled?

Hello lovely devs! This suggestion is based on some major assumptions, but it would be great if it were possible. Initial Assumptions: That the stereoscopic render used for ships & SRVs in EDO functions in Legs mode. That the 2D screen mode for Legs can be set to toggle on or off...

forums.frontier.co.uk

 

[Schmack]

I wonder what it would take to implement VR into that aspect of the game, if it's even possible without an entire redesign.

 

[Foolski]

In case you haven’t seen it, here is the most “Liked” suggestion in the Suggestion sub-forum:

Allow the VR '2D screen' to be disabled?

Hello lovely devs! This suggestion is based on some major assumptions, but it would be great if it were possible. Initial Assumptions: That the stereoscopic render used for ships & SRVs in EDO functions in Legs mode. That the 2D screen mode for Legs can be set to toggle on or off...

forums.frontier.co.uk

No, I hadn't seen that, but it's good to know it's so wanted. I thought I'd bring it up again with the new updates coming out to potentially give it some momentum.

 

[Jack Winter]

I wonder what it would take to implement VR into that aspect of the game, if it's even possible without an entire redesign.

I'm not sure, most parts seem to be there already (put the cam where your face would be).

 

[Quaero]

I promise you if they allowed mods (Ala fallout+skyrim) to be used in solo/pg the community would have it live in less than a week.

It's probably already on standby, waiting for the possibility

 

[CMDR X]

I wonder what it would take to implement VR into that aspect of the game, if it's even possible without an entire redesign.

I installed UEVR and played Unreal Tournament 4 in full VR and it is fricking amazing! (kb + mouse)
Anyone saying on-foot Elite FPS can't be done in VR is full of butt droppings.

Edit to add:
Detailed info on UEVR for anyone interested. It makes any Unreal engine game playable in full 6DOF VR:

Introduction - UEVR Documentation

praydog.github.io

 

[Arioch]

I installed UEVR and played Unreal Tournament 4 in full VR and it is fricking amazing! (kb + mouse)
Anyone saying on-foot Elite FPS can't be done in VR is full of butt droppings.

One of my best VR experiences has been Cyberpunk 2077 using the Luke Ross VR mod - and most of that time has been spent with monoscopic vision because I don’t like the halos/ghosting around characters when using stereo views. Because there is still 6 DoF head movement most views still look 3D, it’s only things within a meter or two that look distinctly flat. Everything else, controls etc. are the same as the flat game.

I’d love to be able to do something similar with Odyssey.

Even just a camera suite preset view and the ability to interact with stuff would be great.

 

[Foolski]

I wonder what it would take to implement VR into that aspect of the game, if it's even possible without an entire redesign.

The only thing they would have to do to polish it is make sure the mesh of your body is there when you look around and make sure gun sights look alright. Currently and AFAIR, your arms aren't connected to the rest of your body. You can experience this by looking around with TrackIR. Thing is, it still works with TrackIR so why they didn't initially implement on-foot VR as a beta feature is not known. As far as if VR would work in the first place - absolutely. As someone else said, a player could mod it in right now if we could. If you're in the weird 2D on-foot screen in VR and toggle on photo mode, you are instantly in full VR again. It's just an artificial limitation specifically on foot because for some reason someone decided that on-foot VR wasn't worth polishing and therefore not worth adding in; despite the fact VR ED is one of the best VR experiences ever and also no one would really mind if they just stuck "beta" on it.

 

[Arioch]

The only thing they would have to do to polish it is make sure the mesh of your body is there when you look around and make sure gun sights look alright. Currently and AFAIR, your arms aren't connected to the rest of your body. You can experience this by looking around with TrackIR. Thing is, it still works with TrackIR so why they didn't initially implement on-foot VR as a beta feature is not known. As far as if VR would work in the first place - absolutely. As someone else said, a player could mod it in right now if we could. If you're in the weird 2D on-foot screen in VR and toggle on photo mode, you are instantly in full VR again. It's just an artificial limitation specifically on foot because for some reason someone decided that on-foot VR wasn't worth polishing and therefore not worth adding in; despite the fact VR ED is one of the best VR experiences ever and also no one would really mind if they just stuck "beta" on it.

There was a short time in Odyssey’s alpha when you could trigger a key-combo and you would be in full VR with a view from inside your avatar’s helmet. You could look down and watch your virtual feet leave footprints on alien ground. The helmet geometry still clipped the view so it wasn’t perfect, but it’s one of those annoying things that they were so close to having what some of us had been asking for and it all got “fixed” away (a bug in the camera suite was solved which had the unfortunate side effect of removing the key-combo glitch).

 

[jojon]

It might be worth keeping in mind that unlike things like VorpX, and Luke R's Cyberpunk VR mod, et.al, the UEVR injector activates stereoscopy and other VR support features that are already there, in the engine, and the Unreal editor is available for everybody to download, and use to familiarise themselves with how the engine is organised and works. It is an amazing feat, but also starts from a, relatively speaking, less "hack-reliant", and more moddable, still proprietary but less clandestine than more exclusively in-house engines, starting point.

...so what would be needed for Odyssey, minimum implementation?

• The engine already has the stereo cameras, so that should be done and dusted.
• Do "we" draw the inside of the helmet (characters are also already animated to track sightline), and learn and implement the ways to mitigate possible discomfort issues with drawing something that close to the eye, or do we simply draw the 1st person commander headless, as in the cockpit?
• Do we bother with preserving the screen-space visor reflection effect overlay (which is not particularly realistic anyway)?
• The visor condensation overlays have more purpose than the above - do we keep them? If so, do we add a 3D visor mesh to map them to?
• UI overlays can probably remain in buffer space, if just adjusted for FOV (shrunk to size) and stereo separation, but on the other hand, it would probably not be all that much effort to take the minor additional step of spatialising them to at least some degree (paste them onto some floating rectangles) - preferrably ones that allow you to look around a bit, to read at their edges.
• Object-attached HUD overlays are probably already spatialised, and should come out correctly, right as they are...
• A lot of tool/weapon HUD elements (status lamps, ammo-count holos) are by all apprearences already diegetic (exist in the game world).
• Reticles need to be dynamically aligned for stereo. This typically means raycasting to the object one is looking at, and drawing the reticle at its fixed-in-FOV size, but with the stereo separation of the distance to the targetted point in 3D space (so both left- and right eye crosshair, are stuck on the poor guy's knee, regardless how far away he is, instead of one soaring to either side of it).
• "Ironsights" for each thing that you can aim along needs to be aligned for a human user, rather than monitor camera.

That should be most of it, I believe. Everything about how the game is played would be exactly the same as on-screen, using the same input devices.

-That organics sampling tool absolutely begs to be swirled around in one's hand, for sure, so that one could inspect all its details, and point it freely; And it would absolutely be awesome, if one could tap directly on those touch-interface terminal screens/panels/keypads (EDIT2: ...without locking you in place, too), etc; And grab objects, and so on, and so on, but some is better than nothing, and this is after all not a VR-first game. (EDIT: Please do let me operate the terminals stood half a step farther back, though; It feels wierd to have to press your guts right up against them. )

(I'll never stop griping about the screen-space-aligned sprites, though, no matter how much it may simplify a shader to do them like that; Heck they are annoying enough out of VR; Not as much as in VR, given you can not tilt your head without it, but that huge single-particle cloud, that spans an entire landing pad, rolls right along with your ship no less on monitor, than it does in VR. )

 

[Arioch]

(I'll never stop griping about the screen-space-aligned sprites, though, no matter how much it may simplify a shader to do them like that; Heck they are annoying enough out of VR; Not as much as in VR, given you can not tilt your head without it, but that huge single-particle cloud, that spans an entire landing pad, rolls right along with your ship no less on monitor, than it does in VR. )

Ah, that glorious brief period in a Beta when the cockpit smoke didn’t rotate when wobbling our heads.

Stellar ejecta, geyser outgassing, cockpit fires, all the station atmospheric stuff - all looks bloody awful with just a slight change in head angle to the side

 

[jojon]

Ah, that glorious brief period in a Beta when the cockpit smoke didn’t rotate when wobbling our heads.

Maybe it's for the best that I somehow never noticed that, or I'd be outright bitter.

...and it's not just the roll axis, for that matter: Since all the "cardboard cutouts" are parallel with the screen, rather than each facing the camera in world-space, from their respective locations: The farther out in the periphery they are, the more you see them edge-on; And a big, grainy-and-banded, multi-screen-size lens flare around a sun, will swivel together with your head, when looking off to the side, until, and past, its plane clips through your head.

 

[[VR] Goooost]

The one thing that stopped me from playing the game was when I bought Odyssey and realised what the VR implementation was like. On the one hand, you have one of the most amazing, immersive VR games out there, and then you get out of the ship and suddenly I'm watching a TV again. The disappointment of being unable to stand beside my ship in VR was immeasurable.
You don't need to implement VR controller/hand support, no one is asking it to be Pavlov or HL: Alyx. The cockpit experience isn't VTOL VR so why would we expect the on-foot VR to suddenly have hands? A simple, seated experience is all that's required. We already fly our ships with a brick strapped to our face so playing FPS is not going to be difficult.
For example, It wouldn't require any tuning control-wise. It can be basic shooter controls but with the ability to turn your head. If any of the devs have played Arma with TrackIR, then they know what I mean. In-fact, Elite has TrackIR support and I think I remember the only issue on foot being some clipping/missing mesh in FPS when turning your head. Aiming down sights can just bring the sight picture up ahead in front of you as usual as done with TrackIR.
Either way, I love Elite but I cannot play it with the knowledge that I'm either limiting myself to my ship in VR, or having to dip out the wonderful VR experience in order to not have a horribly jarring experience on foot.

Yep, this is the main reason I stopped playing for the last year or two. I am done with 2-d games. It's time to move on.

 

[Foolski]

Yep, this is the main reason I stopped playing for the last year or two. I am done with 2-d games. It's time to move on.

I had the same thought process when I got VR, but it's quite nice not to strap a brick to your face in all games, especially in summer. The thing is that it's hard to go back to 2D in a game that has excellent VR, like Elite. I legitimately don't want to play Elite if I can't play the expansion in VR too.

 

[dodalee]

On-foot VR is already present, just not enabled. Go jump on the bridge of a carrier and you will see what I am talking about. All it needs is a HUD. I was hoping with the recent activity boost of Frontier with updates and stuff, that they would reconsider their VR ban. I mean, just look at the announced 32 hardware button limitation lift... that has ed off users for years and now suddenly they listen.

 

[rootsrat]

On-foot VR is already present, just not enabled. Go jump on the bridge of a carrier and you will see what I am talking about. All it needs is a HUD. I was hoping with the recent activity boost of Frontier with updates and stuff, that they would reconsider their VR ban. I mean, just look at the announced 32 hardware button limitation lift... that has ed off users for years and now suddenly they listen.

Unfortunately you are incorrect. If you look in 2D how the Cmdr's body is implemented, you will see that (spoilers, because once you see it there is no going back!)

Spoiler

There is no chest. Just legs and stiff arms. Try sprinting while looking 90 degrees up. Try putting on a headtracker and look down until you should be able to see your chest.

On foot VR requires a lot of work to function properly with full body, arms and hands, gun aiming mechanics and whatever else is part of the whole movement and aiming system. It's one thing to implement a 100% static character that never moves and just sits on a chair all the time and completely another to do a full first person body movement with interaction and items handling.

Not sure why people think it's just a matter of "enabling it" and "all it needs is X", but it is definitely not that easy. Lots of devtime required!

 

[jojon]

Not sure why people think it's just a matter of "enabling it" and "all it needs is X", but it is definitely not that easy. Lots of devtime required!

The things you write there are only a problem if you go the whole hog, with full bodytracking, and inverse kinematics to match it in game, which very, very few VR games do; On the contrary, the most common approach is, disappointingly, to only render the player character's hands.

Those of us who talk about something kind of: "just enabling it", are those who in our recognising that the game is... let's call it "multi mode", would accept "just" making the avatar camera steroscopic, up on top of the ordinary third person view bodies, which would animate the exact way they do when viewing the game on a monitor.

There is a host of things that would need adapting, along with the camera change, but let's not exaggerate them. (EDIT: ...nor diminish them, of course.)

 

[Arioch]

On foot VR requires a lot of work to function properly with full body, arms and hands, gun aiming mechanics and whatever else is part of the whole movement and aiming system. It's one thing to implement a 100% static character that never moves and just sits on a chair all the time and completely another to do a full first person body movement with interaction and items handling.

Not sure why people think it's just a matter of "enabling it" and "all it needs is X", but it is definitely not that easy. Lots of devtime required!

Definitely lots of work would be involved, even for the most “liked” suggestion in this sub-forum. Unfortunately the Odyssey Alpha key-combo camera glitch has probably coloured a lot of people’s perception of how difficult it would be to implement - we’ve already been running around in VR (with a full body no less!) for a brief time and can still get a taste of it with a bit of fiddling with the camera suite.

Hand-tracking, I think, is a big blocker - I’d be perfectly happy with a “head mounted gun” style of play (like PSVR games or certain PCVR mods) but I know many players would want full motion controls and I’m sure FDev are in the latter camp; if they can’t do the best version of on-foot VR then they just won’t bother.