Fool me, this is real good shit ! [the VR thread]

[Whiteball]

I see Zenimax are trying to make claims John Carmack stole VR tech from them before he left !?

[KlaxonCow]

Ouch, crashed at start.

Yeah it crashes on start-up for me too. (2013 MB Pro, W7 Home Premium.)

Bizarrely, though, I cheekily tried it with Wine on Linux (in non-Oculus mode) and it worked just fine.

[Baggypants]

Works OK in wine for me too. Although I can't see the sun. More fun is to spin 360 degrees and watch your ship do laps as it tries to work out if you're an owl.

[KlaxonCow]

More fun is to spin 360 degrees and watch your ship do laps as it tries to work out if you're an owl.

Oh. That's what that was.

My ship started doing laps around the sphere when I started level 2 and I didn't know what that was. But now you mention it, I did do a quick 360 to try to locate where all the asteroids and minotaurs were in the level right at the beginning, so that must have been it. As it coincided with the start of the level and then, on level 3, it went away, I thought it was just some variation in the gameplay for that particular level.

[Jamesac]

It has a tendency to lose my mouse.

Need a Rift now, though, because I really want to see this in 3D.

-edit- Figured it out, it's not losing my cursor at all. So that's what the "you're an owl" thing meant.

James

[Yak]

Well we had a great weekend demoing Minotaur Rescue VR in Blackpool. Key points:

- Nobody at all felt ill.
- People were queueing constantly the whole weekend to play our little game. Indicative not so much of anything about the game, more that there is a HUGE amount of interest in VR out there. People really want to give it a try for themselves.
- People picked up the head-only controls of the game straight away with no bother. Amazingly enough one hardcore gamer dude walked up to the Occy, put on the headset for the first time and proceeded to demolish *my* highscore on his first attempt .
- Standout moments for me were just the sheer delight some people had when playing the game. It's been a long time since I've seen people expressing genuine wonder at a videogame system.
- Best of all was when a guy came up in a wheelchair, I guess he had cerebral palsy or some such affliction, had very little coordinated use of his hands. He got the Oculus on and proceeded to out-score most of the able-bodied people just using his head to play, much to his and our delight .
- Seeing a 7 year old lad put on the headset and without needing any instruction at all cane his dad's high score .

Cracking weekend, and a real delight seeing people get their hands on our first ever VR experiment .

[OX mkII]

Any vids of the Blackpool Expo Yak?

[sdetoni]

It has a tendency to lose my mouse.

Aye, me too, was having fun, got the high score then my green ship goes into never ending circle mode with the mouse unresponsive. Looks as though it gets confused on the X axis, the Y axis is partially responsive.
Otherwise its a fun little asteroid game, and some what reminds me of Williams arcade game, Blaster.

[Jamesac]

You just have to "unwind" for that. Do a full circle clockwise and if that doesn't work, do it again counter-clockwise. The game doesn't know quite what to make of you spinning your head 360, Exorcist-style.

I did just have my best-scoring game come to a halt after destroying the final asteroid and flying around for a few minutes with an empty screen, though.

James

[Whiteball]

Good news guys, glad everyone liked it.

At this point I can't see VR failing as long as it gets delivered at the reasonable prices they are currently talking about.
Obviously there is going to be the big brand titles with a VR experience, but I reckon building a little library of games ready for VR's big release time would be a killer move.

Just imagine walking into a virtual arcade where all the machines are VR takes on Llamasoft games
Re-imagining the newer iOS titles and some of the older ones too, just like you've done here with Minotaur, would be heaven.

[Dio]

At this point I can't see VR failing as long as it gets delivered at the reasonable prices they are currently talking about.

There's nothing whatsoever guaranteed about this.

The need for completely separate game types for VR means you're not trying to create a peripheral, you're trying to create a platform. That means you need millions of sales. Even a million units is a failure; you need 5 million, 10 million. You're selling to the great unwashed, not just to the Kickstarter fanboys. This thing is going to have to be advertised.

That is an absolutely extraordinarily tall order for a £300 peripheral.

[random_dave]

It was great to get a chance to play this over the weekend whilst in Blackpool.

My takeaways were

- Not as "batshit" as I had imagined, but that was to it's benefit (although i'd still like to fire a full on space giraffe session at my face, even if it's just to see how long I can survive
- The adaption of the touch to point in the direction you want to go and have the inertia smooth out the actual ship motion basically eliminates any issues of lag from the head tracking
- Having the UI not in a static location on screen means that unless you stop and specifically look, there is no problem with aliasing/screen door/visible pixel outlines as once it is all moving you're not focusing on any one spot
- The only downside I found was some difficulty with heading up towards the sun, I found I drew myself an imaginary perimeter that once a minotaur started to go beyond that I decided i couldn't be arsed to try and save it and i'd just go for something else further down

But overall it was a really fun little application of it, although i'm really interested in using a Rift for iRacing, more abstract and unique experiments like this are going to be far more successful as an experience I think.

P.S. TxK on ps4 was running rather bloody nicely too

[gilesgoat]

It was great to get a chance to play this over the weekend whilst in Blackpool.

My takeaways were

- Not as "batshit" as I had imagined, but that was to it's benefit (although i'd still like to fire a full on space giraffe session at my face, even if it's just to see how long I can survive
- The adaption of the touch to point in the direction you want to go and have the inertia smooth out the actual ship motion basically eliminates any issues of lag from the head tracking
- Having the UI not in a static location on screen means that unless you stop and specifically look, there is no problem with aliasing/screen door/visible pixel outlines as once it is all moving you're not focusing on any one spot
- The only downside I found was some difficulty with heading up towards the sun, I found I drew myself an imaginary perimeter that once a minotaur started to go beyond that I decided i couldn't be arsed to try and save it and i'd just go for something else further down

But overall it was a really fun little application of it, although i'm really interested in using a Rift for iRacing, more abstract and unique experiments like this are going to be far more successful as an experience I think.

P.S. TxK on ps4 was running rather bloody nicely too

Mind you this OR DEMO was made in about 2 weeks starting from "I don't know anything about OR" to what you seen there, it's been also a "port" from the Morpheus
version that required quite a bit of fiddling/changing/adjustments to make it look and fit nice on the OR.

Also I could not use almost anything "directly" of the OR SDK stuff as I had to integrate it in our stuff that is quite a bit different so I kinda hacked/chopped all their stuff and in the end re-done it almost totally within our framework, it's been done quite quick in really intense days.

Then I done all the installer and stuff and had .. about 3 days of testing on a few PCs and that's all about it, I wasn't even sure it was going to work in ANY other PC but ours

[DeanoC]

Short review of Minotaur Rescue VR

Awesome!

Is that long enough, okay a few more words...

For a hacked together quickie demo, its amazing. I liked thge slower parts, when lots was going on was a bit too hectic for me, but it alternates between the fast and slow portions quite nicely. As a demonstration for VR, its one of the best, the graphics style suits the issues with DK1 regarding screen dooring and resolution and the spherical style HUD with point of view controls shows how much precision you can get just using neck muscles.
As someone who has been quite ill the last week or so and mostly confined to bed with every joint hurting like a bastard (including fingers) nice to be able to play this. Even playing practice is quite relaxing (think I may have played it for 10-20 mins in one session!).

Bit of balance and a bug fix and I'd pay £15-20 personally, though I think they might be a little high for this type of game for most people. If I were you i'd polish it up and get a paid version out, lots of OcRift people will pay especially given the hype with Facebook and DK2 (I expect quite a few people brought DK2 without really understanding what a DK was meant for).

Now saying that and repeating it was awesome, heres a few hopefully constructive criticisms, always seems mean giving negative comments but hopefully understand that its in the spirit of making it even better.
1. HW compat. Oddly it doesn't work if my DK1 HDMI is plugged in. I have to start the game then plug it in... odd just crashes so hard to help why. Need any help debugging let me know.
2. Off center. Possible due to the way I sit, the center of the HUD isn't aligned with my neutral point. Doesn't affect the game much (maybe a little at the edge of the playfield) but feels odd, that my center is off from the gunsights.
3. Quit confirm. Had a few games quit accidently when near the quit area
4. Aliasing. The procedural grid texture could do with distance AA as I got major moire patterns.
5. Asteroid depth. A few times I was confused for when I could hit an asteroid or not. This one might just be I'm stupid though.

Really good, performance was pretty good even on the weird thing I played it on. It was a Quad Core Bay-trail laptop (HP Pavilion x2), thats an atom and low power Intel IGP, so CPU/GPU performance is pretty low but it held up except for a few crazy bits when lots of those red birds were attacking. It basically a Win 8 Tablet, so surprised it worked at all, the demo that comes with the rift, is max 5FPS to give you a relative idea of how low end it is.

Purely a personal aesthetic thing, I think it would be awesome with some 80s neon glow because everyone know 3D and VR is meant to be neony

Let me know when I can hand over some cash

[gilesgoat]

4. Aliasing. The procedural grid texture could do with distance AA as I got major moire patterns.

I TRIED IT !

I got to the conclusion "NO FOOKING HELL NO" and/or "something DIFFERENT" is necessary.

I am EXTREMELY PICKY in what I see ( and to be fair I am NOT 100% satisified of the Oculus so far , 70% maybe ).

So I did try some very light AA on the grid and while "at a first glance on the screen" looks "oh well, looks a bit better" .. the moment I worn the OR
my eyes were starting to go nuts trying to look at something that "it's not quite in focus" and where "you really can't focus it at all because you just blurred it".

Depth of field MAYBE but "it has to be studied/experimented with", it also depends on how your 3D world is constructed.

Bottom line : You cannot compensate for poor rez with antialiasing, not in this case, the more you put the much worse it gets.

I am thinking at "other solutions" and I will experiment but certainly "put a filter on the things" is FUCK NO, it's NOT so simple.

Besides there's already a TINY AA by using the "augumented rez trick" ( see the OR forums ).

But as I said even that it's not a simple matter I saw where it gets and I am telling you I don't like it at all, some more sophisticated solution has to be found.

[edit] - ah right you saY DISTANCE AA, I think you mean some "depth of focus" ( i.e. filter more with distance ).

Again, yes, MAYBE, has to be tried, depends also on how far you are supposed to see, anyway that's really "trickery" trying to compensate for the fact the DK1 res is FUCKING POOR !