Reply With QuoteHaven't tried it, but I think a sensor behind me wouldn't work well as the second main sensor; the position isn't ideal. As a complementary sensor, though, I can see it working.
No luck with the 2 sensor diagonal setup?Originally Posted by Thirith
Haven't tried it, but I think a sensor behind me wouldn't work well as the second main sensor; the position isn't ideal. As a complementary sensor, though, I can see it working.
I gave House of the Dying Sun a quick spin last night, and I absolutely love the VR implementation. The opening menu has a space battle behind it that's very reminiscent of Homeworld, and I spent a good minute admiring it.
There's a dedicated viewpoint-reset button (R3/right stick), and the modeling of the ship around you is fantastic. Your objectives and their status are on the rightmost side of your cockpit window, and you've got a clear view of the front of your ship, with its guns. Reloading vents some gas from the gun. The controls take some getting used to, and the missions so far have consisted of flying to some small ships and machine gunning them with the very forgiving lock-on system, then skipping out before the big guys arrive. They're probably just easing the player in, so I can't wait for the missions with a bit more complexity.
Okay sorry for the double post but REZ JUST CAME OUT ON STEAM! Holy shit, I was just lamenting its PSVR exclusivity last week.
Fingers crossed that Psychonauts VR's days as a PSVR exclusive are also numbered.
Was planning on playing more House of the Dying Sun, but then Rez Infinite dropped in front of my magpie-like gaze like a shiny bauble. Playing in VR (with motion controller) makes it almost insultingly easy, as I got 100% across the board on the first go at the first two levels (haven't played the game in at least 5 years). I assume mouse control would yield similar results. You also don't spend so much time looking around because the next enemy is going to pop up dead center at the front within 2 seconds anyway. The default control type really weirds me out - the aim is controlled by either your head movement or motion controller movement, whatever moves at that time. Your field of view is also a boundary for the aim, so you drag it with you when you turn your head. This creates a disconnect between the direction your hand is pointing, and the direction it's pointing ingame. Best switch to motion controller only aiming (Type 2, I think).
Rez's classic levels are apparently capped at 60 fps, and in VR this translates to a slightly less smooth feel than most VR games' 90 fps. I still think it's worth playing this way if you own a VR headset though. Also you can really beef up the visual settings without worries.
Huh, I didn't know that existed, or that there's a Psychonauts 2 coming. Sounds interesting enough.
I also just tried out Rez, and while there's definitely not much of a game there, or at least little in the way of challenge, it *is* fascinating: it's basically like being inside Tron, though a more dancefloory Tron. As such, it's an immensely cool experience, but it's not something I'll fire up all that much - though I may demo it to the glowstick brigade among my friends. All... one or two of them?
Also, Lone Echo is as immensely well done in terms of zero-G locomotion as people say. The way your hands react to the environment absolutely sells the fiction that you're an android out in space. It's also always great to have characters in VR being there in front of you, looking and talking straight at you. It just feels so different from the same thing if you're looking at a regular screen. Definitely looking forward to playing more of this.
Quick P.S. on my first steps in Lone Echo: as a default, you can only turn around, but you can't pitch or yaw. I switched those back on, and it ended up with a highly disorienting situation where I thought I was standing up straight but I must've been leaning forward quite a bit, because some parts of the spaceship are at an angle, so by trying to stand up straight in the game I pitched forward quite a bit in reality - which I only noticed when the blue grid of the Guardian system indicated that I was close to a wall. I would've thought that my body has a fairly strong sense of whether it's upright or not, but obviously this is easily overridden by visuals that indicate otherwise.
Hah, yeah. Ever been in a "tilted house"? They have them at a lot of older amusement parks. Really, really disorienting, and it's not even VR.
Okay, Lone Echo is pretty damn impressive. Curious as to how you other guys have been playing it. I started standing, then thought I'd try sitting, but found that too restrictive, so went back to standing.
I'm amazed that zipping around in zero gravity hasn't made me nauseous. Makes me think the 3DMark guys should revamp Shattered Horizon for VR.
Quite a workout too!
I think the sheer amount of things to scan and poke is going to mean it'll take me quite a while to complete. Here's to hoping other Oculus Studios titles maintain the same degree of quality.
I generally play all first-person VR games while standing, so that's what I also do with Lone Echo. I definitely like its movement, although I wish they'd add the ability to turn when holding on to something with both hands. Then again, I could imagine they tried to implement that but didn't get it to work they way they wanted.
Quick update: sensor no. 3 has arrived. However, I'd not considered that while I can put it on the wardrobe at my back, i cannot tip it downwards enough so that it actually points at my play area. I've now ordered a camera mount that should allow me to tip the sensor as far as I like once I've attached the mount to the top of the wardrobe.
Just finished POLLEN (~4 hours long). It's a sci-fi adventure where you're a technician sent to a remote spacebase but when you get there all kindsa weird shit has happened and you have to figure out what. There's audiologs, puzzles, mystery, all the usual stuff. One thing this game does very well, is object interaction, and setting up logical systems for how it's world works. Sometimes these objects and systems are used for puzzles, but very often they're simply there to make the world feel more real. In the below video I discover that a panel in the control room actually controls the locks on every door in the base. Game progress does not rely on using this panel to open any of the doors, but it was still fun to see that this system existed within the gameworld. Later on, down in the cargo bay there's plenty of tools you can pick up and use. Totally not necessary in any way, but the fact that when you hit the use button while holding a flashlight it actually flicks on and off is a small thrill. Being able to pick up and interact with non-essential objects is of course something that's been around for a long time, but this stuff feels especially nice in VR.
So how's the game beyond just tinkering with random objects? It's ok! Storywise, it gets off to kind of a hectic and messy start where it's difficult to take it all in, but once it slows down and starts letting you uncover the mystery at your own pace it's good. The ending was pretty great too. The touch-control implementation is a bit janky, but useable.
If you're looking for some sci-fi mystery and you've already finished Lone Echo, give this a spin. It's a mere 10€, tho I picked it up for a fiver in the last sale.
Vive just got a 200$ price cut! Good news for VR adaptation.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/21/1...dset-price-cut
HTC has cut the price of its Vive virtual reality headset by $200, bringing the system’s cost down to $599. [...] This price drop mirrors the Oculus Rift’s $200 price cut in March, and it means that both systems now have the same base price, although the Rift is currently $399 as part of a summer sale.
It's not bad news, but I feel like it's also not good enough. The Vive controllers are by most accounts not as good as Oculus' controllers, and it hasn't got the integrated headphone backstrap included. The knuckles controllers will be out soon, but between those and the heaphone strap, you're still looking at about $200 extra to bring it up to par with (or slightly better than) the Rift (which is still cheaper if you include a third sensor). The only advantage of the Vive right now that I can think of is the wireless tracking cubes.
I hope they become more competitive though, so Oculus doesn't sit on its arse.
I think sales-wise, the Vive has sold more than the Rift, and PSVR more than the Vive, so I don't think Oculus are anywhere near resting on their laurels.
I really want Oculus to succeed now I've got one, and it's not post-purchase rationalisation. There's a lot of cool engineering tricks going on, with the excellent quality built-in headphones and their clever adjustability, the great built in mic, which became apparent in its excellence when that Vive user joined our Rec Room session, the non-powered sensors (by all accounts, the Vive's Lighthouses apparently make an audible noise), the magnetic battery compartments on the Touch controllers, hell the Touch controllers in general.
But overall, I want to see some official standards adopted, so proprietary technologies don't threaten to destroy the fledgling tech before it's even fully of the ground. Sony, Valve/HTC, Oculus and Google and MS should all start talking to each-other to make sure all users can enjoy the same content, no matter which headset they're using.
For example, the difference between determining a user's height. Valve's system allows for multiple users from one calibration, whereas if you want to use an Oculus native app and hand the headset to someone else shorter or taller than you, you should really recalibrate first. In that scenario, Oculus should really adopt the "place headset on desk and measure distance from floor to headset" system, but probably can't because of it being Valve's intellectual property.
Well, there are ideological reasons for prefering Vive to Rift as well. Valve made the open-source OpenVR SDK, they make cool shit like Steam Audio and provide it for free to developers, and their platform is open to any HMD, whereas Oculus are more into platform-exclusivity.
Though, in Oculus defence, they seem to have cooled off a bit on the platform-exclusivity recently, at least insofar as they're not stamping out Revive hacks as much as previously. And they're also doing more to get actual VR games made, vowing to spend half a billion dollars on funding VR games, having already funded stuff like Robo Recall, The Climb, Lone Echo, and the pile of free stuff you get as soon as you buy the headset.
Really though, from a hardware standpoint the two headsets now have more things in common than not, and anyone claiming there's a huuuuge difference is likely just trying to justify their purchase of one and not the other.
I genuinely prefer the Vive wands to Oculus Touch. The Touch is designed so that your load bearing fingers when holding it are your ring finger and your pinky, which aren't really meant to be the gripping fingers. Any sort of gripping pressure with your middle finger activates the middle finger button, and the trigger is placed so that if your index finger isn't on it you don't have a passive rest position. I also don't dig the tiny analog sticks and the face buttons.
The Vive wands, on the other hand, rest in your whole hand. The grip buttons may not be analog, but they also have no chance of accidental activation. If my figure isn't on the trigger the wand still rests on it. And the touch pads are the same as the Steam Controller touch pads and I fucking love the Steam Controller.
The Knuckles controllers are a different beast altogether. Valve's probably going to do at least one more design revision on them, but the current devkits are kind of amazingly natural, even when just using the emulation settings instead of any applications that have been designed with Knuckles in mind (if you've got access to a Knuckles devkit, fire up Gnomes and Goblins and set the capsense settings to 'capsense as trigger' and you just... pick stuff up. It's fantastic).
I also find the Vive with its default headstrap much more comfortable than the Rift. The fact that I can see through the nose gap on the Rift contributes to motion sickness that I just plain don't get on the Vive. And the interface foam being much narrower on Rift increases the psi of the headset and I get 'vr face' in ~10 minutes on Rift, where it takes like an hour on Vive.
That thing about "just picking stuff up": gotta say that this is pretty much what the Touch controllers feel like to me, though it varies subtly from game to game. It's definitely my experience in the First Contact demo (the one that plays after setting up the controllers) as well as in Superhot: my brain and my hands convincingly tell me that I'm just grabbing that gun or that disk. For me, the illusion is pretty much perfect.
Yeah, I'm with Thirith there. The Touch controllers simply "disappear"; you don't consciously think about them.
But admittedly, I haven't used Vive at all.
The only problem I have with the Touch controllers is that sometimes I'll accidentally hit the Oculus button, bringing me out of whatever game I'm playing, but pressing it again gets me immediately back in.
Just played the first halfhour or so of Edge of Nowhere, then some creepy crawly things showed up and I was like NOPE, that's enough for tonight. How many creepy crawling things are there in this thing? And how many jumpscares? Do not enjoy either of those things. Besides that I'm liking it tho.
I don't remember many jump scares in Edge of Nowhere, more atmospheric dread. There are many, many things skittering about in the dim light, though.
Fellas. Last night I got to play an early build/demo of Flotilla 2. Remember Flotilla? The turn-based Homeworld-esque roguelike by Blendo Games? He's making another one, in VR. It's AMAZING. It's pretty much exactly how I imagined a VR interface for Homeworld should work + some lo-fi Blendo-ness. Walking around a space battle and just grabbing ships and dragging them where you want them and pointing them where you want them to face and watching it all go is so fucking good. I haven't been this excited about a VR thing in a while, but I want the full thing now and I can't have it so I'm sad.
I also really want an actual VR Homeworld game because this totally proves the viability of the concept and I think adding real-time on top would just sing.
Oooooh, I never did play Flotilla, tho it always sounded interesting. Very cool to hear a VR sequel is in the works. Always looking forward to what Blendo is making next.
Okay, you know what, if anything's going to tip me over into donning a fucking sensory deprivation helmet, it's going to be motherfucking Homeworld VR.
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