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

[Barney]

Yes, they're basically 2D Sprites. You can see it in Doom on the PC when you turn - the sprites are always facing you. Head tracking works fine for world objects such as walls and stuff, it's just the sprites that are affected.

And yes, there is only really yaw. The way it's been done is for the display to render in proper 3D, but on a screen in front of you - almost fills your FOV, but not quite. Headtracking to the left and right works perfectly, but looking up and down (as Doom doesn't support that) is implemented by tilting the display on the Y Axis which actually works surprisingly well - it doesn't work in 2D at all, as things look stretched, but in VR it really does work to an acceptable degree.

There are doom engines out there that have proper pitch and yaw, as they convert the maps to 3D models properly but nobody's ported one of those yet (the Oculus SDK prohibits people from publishing GPL'd games to their store, so they have to go through SideLoadVR instead apparently) but when they do... Doom will look stunning. Even with this port of the original engine, it's enough that I can almost feel when there's a wall to the side of me.

Quake though, is amazing. It's almost as if the engine was built for VR, and is just incredible. To think that after all these years I would be walking around inside that world - well, my inner 20 year old is making a real mess in his trousers.

[RiK]

[KlaxonCow]

This one's interesting. "Modbox". Basically, it's like "Garry's Mod" in VR.

A physics sandbox, where you can build shit in "build mode" and then switch to "play mode" to engage the physics.

Here's Martyn going through the "featured" builds that other folks have made in it:



(Another interesting thing to note - about SteamVR more generally - is, at the end, a couple of other guys from the Yogscast log onto Steam and the usual Steam notifications about your friends list can show up while you're in-game too, we can note. Presumably, though, as with non-VR games on Steam, you'll be able to turn that shit off, if you don't want your immersion broken. But it's good to know that they've extended all the usual Steam stuff to work in VR as well.)

[defsdoor]

From what I've seen of the HTC Vive so far I'm very impressed. The controller tracking adds a unique feature that has amazing in-game potential.

There's a total lack of a long play fully immersive titles though - it looks like the wii all over again with 5 minute gimmicks. And the price is a killer.for me. They need to halve the cost at least before I could even hope to acquire one.

And if the devices don't sell, the game won't come.


Whats the situation with Linux support ? Was aimed for release day.

[gilesgoat]

*SNIP*

There's a total lack of a long play fully immersive titles though *SNIP*

Hopefully the work we are doing will cover that "hole" .. we are working on a VR GAME NOT "a VR experience", this is a real game in the real sense of gaming

We don't want a "5 mins oh wow" we want a "Minter you C****" moment, with "WOW" in it too

[Barney]

*SNIP*

There's a total lack of a long play fully immersive titles though *SNIP*

Hopefully the work we are doing will cover that "hole" .. we are working on a VR GAME NOT "a VR experience", this is a real game in the real sense of gaming

We don't want a "5 mins oh wow" we want a "Minter you C****" moment, with "WOW" in it too

FFS, PLEASE SUPPORT THE GEAR VR! It's awesome, it really is and it's higher resolution than the Rift by all accounts (though has a slightly narrower FOV).

[gilesgoat]

*SNIP*

There's a total lack of a long play fully immersive titles though *SNIP*

Hopefully the work we are doing will cover that "hole" .. we are working on a VR GAME NOT "a VR experience", this is a real game in the real sense of gaming

We don't want a "5 mins oh wow" we want a "Minter you C****" moment, with "WOW" in it too

FFS, PLEASE SUPPORT THE GEAR VR! It's awesome, it really is and it's higher resolution than the Rift by all accounts (though has a slightly narrower FOV).

Yes .. but the problems of Gear are 2 , no 3 :

1. "computational/graphic power" ( not super bad but see 2 )
2. "clock profile and battery life" ( if I use the "max" performance would be good, you would NOT play more than 20 mins, your phone would get super hot )
3. SDK ( or better to say NDK ) , Eclipse and very poor Google support for it

Ah yes 4 .. "do you have a gamepad for it?" ( yes there is but do you have it ? )

However for the stuff we are doing now probably with some "filing there and there" it could go, I do like the Gear VR because is "totally wireless" and as you say despite its size/thing "looks pretty enough".

What I really hate about the Gear is all the PLAVA to put up the NDK and all the rest just to start working, I wish that could be much better/easier to deal with.

[Barney]

Yes .. but the problems of Gear are 2 , no 3 :

1. "computational/graphic power" ( not super bad but see 2 )
2. "clock profile and battery life" ( if I use the "max" performance would be good, you would NOT play more than 20 mins, your phone would get super hot )

Yeah, I did get a warning once, but I since run it without the cover on and the phone stays cool now. Battery life appears to be about 3 or 4 hours from a full charge, after which you have to run it with (ironically) a USB cable plugged into the PC...

3. SDK ( or better to say NDK ) , Eclipse and very poor Google support for it

I have no idea about that

Ah yes 4 .. "do you have a gamepad for it?" ( yes there is but do you have it ? )

Of course I do :p

As I said, in some regards the hardware is better than the Rift - and as you say, it's totally wireless. I just wish that there was a way to stream Rift-enabled games from the PC to it over a USB cable, but that's asking way too much for any connection.

[seibu]

Whats the situation with Linux support ? Was aimed for release day.

All mention of Linux disappeared the day before release. So they're off the Christmas card list!

[KlaxonCow]

3. SDK ( or better to say NDK ) , Eclipse and very poor Google support for it

They've changed it now, Giles.

Rather than the Eclipse plugin, they've created their own dedicated IDE called "Android Studio" now. It's based off of the "IntelliJ" IDE but they've hacked their own version specially for Android development.

That's now officially what you're supposed to be doing your Android development with.

Can't tell you how well it works with the NDK, though, because I've not tried that out with Android Studio yet. Indeed, I've not really done anything with Android Studio properly yet - save compile a few Android samples just to see how it all works - but, yeah, don't expect it to run any faster than Eclipse.

Why must these folks creating Java IDEs write them in Java? "Java: Write once, run slow as buggery everywhere!".

[gilesgoat]

I can GUARANTEE you that if you go "clock profile 2" ( i.e. MAX possible speed ) you'd get pretty good performance out of the Sony Gear almost comparable to some console power .. but I can also guarantee you that you will NOT have 1 hour battery life, 30 mins MAX if you are lucky.

To get those 3 .. 4 hours you HAVE to go "clock profile 0", which is the lowest possible degraded thing.

I'd go for '1' and maybe 1 hour and 1/2 ..

Or at least this was Galaxy 5 .. not sure about the new ones.

[gilesgoat]

3. SDK ( or better to say NDK ) , Eclipse and very poor Google support for it

They've changed it now, Giles.

Rather than the Eclipse plugin, they've created their own dedicated IDE called "Android Studio" now. It's based off of the "IntelliJ" IDE but they've hacked their own version specially for Android development.

That's now officially what you're supposed to be doing your Android development with.

Can't tell you how well it works with the NDK, though, because I've not tried that out with Android Studio yet. Indeed, I've not really done anything with Android Studio properly yet - save compile a few Android samples just to see how it all works - but, yeah, don't expect it to run any faster than Eclipse.

Why must these folks creating Java IDEs write them in Java? "Java: Write once, run slow as buggery everywhere!".

MA DIO _)($)_#@($)_(#@$_@

http://tools.android.com/tech-docs/android-ndk-preview

.. read it and cry ...

Am I wrong or someone was telling me that NVIDIA has a better thing that integrates with Visual Studio to do Android development ?

[edit]

Google you and your )(*$@(#*$()#@$(*@ Java can go )(*$()*#@)$ in the )(*$@()#*$()#@

CPP, CPP, CPP or worse to worse C ..

END OF THE STORY, all the rest is BLASPHEMY !

[edit2] You know ? No ? You know what it means "Java and VR" where ideally you want "latency 0" and "all the max speed you can get" ?

[Whiteball]

...As I said, in some regards the hardware is better than the Rift - and as you say, it's totally wireless. I just wish that there was a way to stream Rift-enabled games from the PC to it over a USB cable, but that's asking way too much for any connection.

Maybe something like http://trinusvr.com/ ?

[Barney]

...As I said, in some regards the hardware is better than the Rift - and as you say, it's totally wireless. I just wish that there was a way to stream Rift-enabled games from the PC to it over a USB cable, but that's asking way too much for any connection.

Maybe something like http://trinusvr.com/ ?

Yeah, there's problems with that.

Firstly there's image quality - you have to run your game in side-by-side mode in a window, so that Trinus can grab the image and send it to the phone. That's at best a halving of your horizontal resolution and if you're maintaining aspect then half the vertical too.

Secondly there's the issue that it only uses the phone's gyros for head tracking, instead of the Oculus sensors in the Gear VR so it's vomit city in fast action (tried it with Serious Sam - seriously a joke).

Thirdly there's lag in the image generation, even when it's transmitting the image via USB (and worse over wifi).

It would be awesome if we could interface directly with the phone via a dedicated SDK though with a decent cable and interface.

[gilesgoat]

So yesterday Yak installed "the latest all version" of the OR SW and such ( despite we do not have the very latest OR ) and we had a bit of fun watching "something else" made by other people.

After much watching this & that I think I got to "a very simple conclusion" which is "for truly good natural-looking stuff the way *I* consider 'good' we'll need 'generation 2' with twice as much rez as today".

What actually comes out VERY GOOD is "what does not try to look natural at all" .. so welcome to "simple shading", nice clean crips large objects, good choice of colours, not too many textures or too many details at all.

We really are a bit like "back to the 16 bits era" when we did not have all that fancy stuff like textures, shaders, blooming effects and all that fancy stuff we have today.

The best so far I've seen in terms of what I'd call "visual/optical experience" is that demo game "Lucky's Tale" that is IMHO "best example of how VR should be done" in terms of image quality and visual experience.

One thing I found a bit "weird" about that game, but honestly out of the top of my mind now I would NOT know - without lot of testing/experimenting - how to improve the camera movement, almost immediately you get the feeling like "someone is pulling your chair making you move all over the places", it's "on the border" of being nauseating/acceptable, did not make me feel "bad" but made me feel "quite odd" even after quite a lot of playing.

But IMHO "that's how VR now SHOULD look to give you the best that this gen VR can give you".

Really anything else I've seen "natural looking" screams for "need more rez", I mean it's watcheable and such it's still an interesting experience but "makes you feel is still not what should be", I am sure that with maybe "even more extra work" you can improve it some more but I think "even more extra work" is really needed.

And yes those 3D not 3D movies .. scratching a bit my head but surely "definitely something more" than any "so called 3D movie" we seen so far, but then again 'the rez problem'.

"Make it big, make it loud, make it clear" .. let's say I think with the current stuff I am seeing "Katamari Damacy" would probably come out "exceptional" .. stuff like "Skyrim" .. "probably not yet" nor until the rez will be twice as much at least, there's too much detail than what the thing can do.

Stuff cell shading like is probably going to be awesome, have to see one yet.

I may be wrong, but I don't think I am going to be that wrong in this.

But yeah, very impressed about Luck's Tale I think it's one of the best VR games I've seen so far, well no there was that other "dungeon style thing" I can't remember the name I saw for PSVR that was very good as well, that's the kind of stuff this current gen VR is maybe 'the best' for.