• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

PC VR - Hardware, Software, Recommendations & Discussion Thread

Alexios

Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
Yup, today's a big bony VR day. This week is a big week even, that's not the only game coming. Hell, this whole month. Assorted recent cool updates to kick off the new page as usual but there were tons so check the last page too:

 
Last edited:

Wonko_C

Member
Watched all of them. It looks eeeeen-sain! I fear Alyx won't be as indepth with physics as this game is now.
 

Alexios

Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
Not every game has to have in depth physics to be good just as not every FPS needed Half-Life 2's crate and see-saw "puzzles" since. The physics stuff can be unintuitive and janky just as much as they can be cool and exciting. I played around two hours myself, still in the tutorial phase.

On Oculus Touch they could have made the neutral hand pose more natural. I'm not sure if the grip trigger on Touch is touch sensitive but they don't detect anything unless you start pressing it so your middle, ring and pinky finger are all open and flat, but they do touch-detect the index trigger so your inder finger is naturally bent quite a bit, and then they also detect if the thumb is up or not, so the neutral pose is just way off when you aren't doing anything. I don't think anybody ever has his fingers flat out when not doing the robot dance or similar so it's really awkward that's the default state regardless of the controller used.

But it's just a visual thing, when it comes to interacting with stuff it works as intended.

Climbing surfaces aren't as convenient as in games that aren’t fully physics driven but just have preset intuitive climbing spots (it's not fully freeform in Boneworks either, you only properly latch onto specific surfaces like pipes, ladders and other such things). The climbable flat wall surface in particular was annoying as my "back" hand kept going all over the place by, I guess, getting stuck between the physical surface and my physical body as I just tried to move sideways.

Melee weapons aren't as intuitive as in Blade & Sorcery where you have all the same freedom (and many of the same restrictions as they can't go through other physical objects, your hands, body and other weapons etc.) in how you hold and handle and change your grip and throw them and so on. It works well enough, though it also has an annoying wobble for heavier weapons like the mallet, it's a tad overdone.

Firearms handling works well but again something like Onward does it more conveniently, it's snappier yet still realistic with many of the same interactions, from the different grip positions to the offhand steadying and the reloading. For example having you able to take out the mag of a pistol without pressing an eject button meant I kept accidentally taking it out while just trying to grip and steady the pistol (you need to grip it properly to reduce recoil, not just steady your one hand on top of the other).

Thankfully I can hold all the rifles and such as I wish, I didn't notice any physical shoulder/stock interaction that would stop me from bringing them too close depending on object/arm length or anything. The physics seem to only come into play when you try to do unnatural moves just to see that you can't, which other games let you do. It's basically just visual and I don't feel it adds anything over games that don't have it, when I play Onward I don't intentionally try to break the animations, I hold the weapons properly just as I do in Boneworks because that's just how weapon handling is natural and efficient.

When holding a long object like a broom with two hands apart however it seemed to restrict certain moves it shouldn't, I was just trying to wave it around and go all ninja and stuff to check out the inverse kinematics but it didn't follow my movements for much of it, as if it thought it would break my arm limits when it shouldn't.

The problems of not having full arm/body tracking I suppose but I'm sure it can be improved.

Finally, the way almost every object is fully physics driven leads to more unintended interactions. When you open the drawers of a file cabinet it's almost impossible to not shift the whole cabinet around, the same when opening a cupboard, and basically any other thing. It seems like they should increase the weight of some objects so that you only move them when you persist and intend to do that. not at the slightest touch at the wrong angle. The same for things like tables almost flying off when you just accidentally slightly bump into them.

It seems like a pretty decent jack of all trades but other games have done this or that thing better (yet not all at once) so they could have taken a look at them to implement things similarly intuitively. Maybe it's ambitious to use physics for almost everything as they do but it doesn't necessarily add much to every aspect of it.

I do like the feel of the game so far, I'm not trying to make it sound like it's bad, but I did expect better behavior in some things (and feared worse in others so that’s good). Outside all these minor annoyances and given single player campaigns like this aren't exactly common, it's very exciting as it seems very well designed and very promising overall on that front. I'm sure I'll learn to work around its quirks with practice or maybe just not even care after a given point in the game (ie, bumping into tables felt off at first but maybe I just won't care after doing it x1000).

Again, this seems very good but it's also not the second coming of VR like others proclaim, the first killer app and all that hype.

It's another good game, maybe a great one, in a long line of cool VR experiences. I played Stormland again while downloading and that still seems pretty damn cool in terms of core gameplay (yeah it's short, repetitive and only does one thing, all out shooting without any deeper interactions, I've criticized that game elsewhere, I just mean the feel of the game, the climbing, the gliding, the weapon handling, it all feels great and exciting still), not like it's suddenly last gen crude stuff, and the same goes for other games like Blade & Sorcery, Onward and whatever else I've enjoyed in the past, there are many others.

Also for me the game keeps hanging on level switching. Thankfully it also seems to save before that so I can close it, open it, choose continue and select the section it should have loaded when it hanged.
 
Last edited:

Alexios

Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!



I'm not the only one I guess.
Despite my earlier criticisms I still looked forward to the actual campaign but it seems they have misses in their game design too. Most people are still hyping it to hell and back anyway, we'll see, hopefully I'll like it better than that guy overall but the complaints are well explained and written.

Also they've already pushed out a patch mostly to help with WMR user issues so that's nice.
 
Last edited:

Wonko_C

Member
Over at era someone who worked on HL2VR posted a thread about Boneworks committing every known VR sin. I found that read interesting.
 

Alexios

Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
I disagree with the term sin but there are definitely problems with the implementations in Boneworks as I've mentioned. I too don't often like it when games accommodate physics or whatever external factor you don't perceive out of the game physically over the 1:1 controls, which for example can lead to a disconnect between your real hand placement and what happens in the game because your in game hand was stopped by whatever in game object or system and your real life hand was, obviously, not, but I think there are use case scenarios for such things, as well as different degrees they can be implemented in (ie, your hands pushing against a wall rather than clipping inside it is always neater looking as long as it doesn't affect you negatively in any other way, Lone Echo does this great) so if some of them don't quite work in this or that scenario doesn't make them universally bad ideas that can't be utilized better.

I'm not even a fan of how Blade & Sorcery simulates the weight of larger weapons by having your in game actions trail behind your real hands rather than follow in 1:1, I think that would be better done by simply not having those weapons cause damage but rather bounce by the enemy or whatever if they're not swung wide and fast enough instead, but most people like it that way I guess and it's definitely done a lot better than in Boneworks overall. And I'm not a huge fan of having full arms over floating hands because, again, as long as we don't have full body tracking hands are 1:1 and your arms are not no matter how good the inverse kinematics are, but they're cool to have all the same in Batman: Arkham VR as they're generally convincing and, again, don't affect playability negatively. Etc. So, sin is too big a word even if I get where they're coming from (without having read it, lol, I'm just assuming what it's about, haha).

Edit: just googled for it to read it, it focuses too much on the lack of comfort options and people getting sick. I didn't get uncomfortable or anything in Boneworks, it just often didn't feel right or fun. I don't care that it doesn't have teleport movement options (though I guess there's no reason for it not to have the tunnel vision option for turning around/running if it does help people play as unlike teleportation it doesn't require any additional work on the gameplay/AI/whatever) and shit, just that, to me, its systems often unintuitively get in the way of fun and immersion. That thread is basically telling them they are wrong to try to cater to advanced VR enthusiasts (edit: ok further down they do move on to the implementation, not the intent itself which can work) only and not also try to include others. I think developers should cater to whatever market segment they like (but not pretend they're better), I just don't think they did the best job at it regardless.
 
Last edited:

Thaedolus

Gold Member
I only got about an hour in yesterday but I do agree there are some game design issues early on that are a little frustrating in that they’re unforgiving and it doesn’t feel like it’s really my fault. There are levels of polish to games and the more complicated they get, the more difficult it is to have them feel super refined. Think of something like Breath of the Wild: it’s by far the most complicated Zelda ever in terms of the systems at play and the freedoms they afford the player. It makes sense it took Nintendo like 6 years to get it to a level of polish that they felt they could put out. Boneworks, similarly, is doing a lot of new shit and it’s complicated, so it’s understandable that make it feel like a polished game would be difficult, but you can see where there are some compromises there.

When I was playing and things were going as intended, it was great. But one of the first puzzles involves using a grip surface on a wall to pull yourself across a gap, followed by a running and jumping section. The grip surface portion was clunky as hell and the run button being mapped to the left stick click is always hit and miss for me no matter the game, so each time I fell and had to redo the earlier clunky grip section of the puzzle got more and more frustrating. When I finally got through it I checked the time and had to go pick up my kid so I was done...I want to keep playing because of the good stuff I saw, but it wasn’t a great first impression tbh. I’ve got a head cold today so I think I’m going to bug out of work early and try some more...I’ll add as I keep playing.
 

Stitch

Gold Member
It really needs checkpoints. Clicking the left stick for running sucks so the first puzzle can be annoying. Then I got stuck in the gravity thing later on so I had to restart. Which means going trough the Museum again.. blergh, can't even finish the tutorial.
 

pr0cs

Member
but it seems they have misses in their game design too.
Not too surprising to me, it always looked good and the Node videos showed well but when I heard that the release date was in Dec it felt like there wasn't much of a story to be had.
I'm sure they came up with a lot of solutions to vr questions, no doubt some elements the developed will be reused by a variety of teams in other projects but as far as games go it always looked like a sandbox first.
 

Thaedolus

Gold Member
It really needs checkpoints. Clicking the left stick for running sucks so the first puzzle can be annoying. Then I got stuck in the gravity thing later on so I had to restart. Which means going trough the Museum again.. blergh, can't even finish the tutorial.

haaahaha this is exactly what happened to me. I didn't jump off fast enough and the balloon gun fell into the glassed-in area, no way to retrieve it. The game is pretty impressive in what it's doing and I want to like it but Jesus Christ did they play test some of these things??
 

Stitch

Gold Member
I already managed to get to the other room but thanks to that gravity thing I was still floating in the air and couldn't get down. Really weird but many people on the steam forum seem to have this problem. Man, I don't want to do this museum again, but I also can't just do silly stuff in the Sandbox because it only unlocks after the Museum :messenger_hushed:

Maybe I wait a bit and try Espire again
 

Thaedolus

Gold Member
I already managed to get to the other room but thanks to that gravity thing I was still floating in the air and couldn't get down. Really weird but many people on the steam forum seem to have this problem. Man, I don't want to do this museum again, but I also can't just do silly stuff in the Sandbox because it only unlocks after the Museum :messenger_hushed:

Maybe I wait a bit and try Espire again

When you go back through the Museum it's actually not bad at all, just rush through it, do that one puzzle and jump down the garbage chute in the giftshop. It only takes a few minutes.
 

Thaedolus

Gold Member
I slammed my hand into the ceiling climbing in Boneworks :|

Also: pretty sure my left Index controller has a dead zone when the stick is clicked. Basically if it's pointing straight forward the click doesn't register, but if I turn it either way it registers again. I can even see it click and unclick with the virtual controllers in the headset. Probably need to RMA that
 

Alexios

Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
Holy shit!
Halo in VR would be pretty fucking cool
It's from the dude that did the Alien Isolation VR mod among others so it should be pretty sweet. Glad he's doing hand tracking this time and it already looks so good too. I wonder if it'll be applicable to the whole Halo collection, are all the games enhanced on the same engine version or? If not, do any share Reach's engine?
 
Last edited:

Stitch

Gold Member
When you go back through the Museum it's actually not bad at all, just rush through it, do that one puzzle and jump down the garbage chute in the giftshop. It only takes a few minutes.
Yeah I tried again and it was still broken lol. Gravity thing wouldn't let me go so I was floating around in the gift shop. Managed to grab a bench which was heavy enough to let me go to that garbage chute and jump down.
I'm pretty sure it's not supposed to be that way. Oh well, finally out of the tutorial. Still no sandbox unlocked :pie_thinking:

edit: oh, so that's how you unlock sandbox mode... weird :messenger_hushed:
 
Last edited:

Thaedolus

Gold Member
Yeah I tried again and it was still broken lol. Gravity thing wouldn't let me go so I was floating around in the gift shop. Managed to grab a bench which was heavy enough to let me go to that garbage chute and jump down.
I'm pretty sure it's not supposed to be that way. Oh well, finally out of the tutorial. Still no sandbox unlocked :pie_thinking:

edit: oh, so that's how you unlock sandbox mode... weird :messenger_hushed:

I was wondering why i couldn’t open that hidden door. I noticed it and spent a while banging on it with the various tools to no avail
 

Alexios

Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
New EmuVR update.


Lots of improvements and neat stuff such as being able to set lightgun offset and also a button press to apply when you point the gun up or down, so you can for example put the Time Crisis "cover" button on a gesture like that rather than a button press.
- New season: Winter.
- Snow.
- Christmas tree and lights outside.
- New light gun settings:
- Custom alignment offset.]
- Haptic feedback when shooting.
- One-handed mode.
- Customize action when pressing or releasing grip. (E.g. spin gun, press Aux A, reload, do nothing; Or release grip to spin and grab to stop, recommended for Index controllers)
- Custom button press when pointing up or down. (E.g. press Aux A, useful to simulate the foot pedal in Time Crisis by just pointing up; Or trigger a reload by pointing down in Area 51 without needing to shoot off-screen)
- Update Unity version to 2018.4.12
- Fix performance issues for some AMD and i7 CPU users.
- Fix not being able to reload in MAME and 3DO light gun games. - New files allowing to setup SteamVR bindings for Index and WMR controllers even when offline (just in case Valve kills all community bindings for all games again).
- Fix light gun Aux A button still being triggered when pressing Aux B (for real this time).
- Fix crosshair appearing after each light gun shot after a recent Beetle/Mednafen PSX core update (if you see that, update this core to fix it).
- Fix Sega Master System light gun input.
- Fix Picodrive not being available for Sega CD games in Game Scanner.
- Fix Retroarch crashing if you swapp discs using the menu.
- Fix keyboard/mouse special input focus mode not being properly set when starting a keyboard/mouse game.
- Discard old "retroarch\config" EmuVR override files to instead use our new "auto override" method, making it easier for users to setup their own core overrides, along with our new "console folder custom overrides".
- Store separate resolution values for fullscreen vs windowed modes.
- You can now resize and maximize the window. Maximized state and window size are also saved automatically.
- New experimental setting for "exclusive fullscreen" mode. (Add an "e" to your resolution in settings.ini, like this: fs_res = "1920x1080e" . Might be unstable, be careful.)
- New experimental setting to force VSync on or off. (In settings.ini, vsync = "1" forces ON, "-1" forces OFF)
- Obsolete cores cleaned, added a new core to Game Scanner: dhewm3 (Doom 3)
 
Last edited:

Alexios

Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!

With tonight’s update, we’re also introducing 360° and 90° levels—custom engineered gameplay modes that open up the playing field and radically change the game. We’ve got dozens of 360° and 90° levels available on both Oculus Quest and the Rift Platform, with more to come in the months ahead. They span all five difficulty settings and are free when you own the corresponding music pack.
 
Last edited:

Alexios

Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
Edit: wops, my bad, Quest only for now. Edit: nope, Rift too:

 
Last edited:

Alexios

Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
This looks good too.
The non VR version has good reviews so it's promising but even though it says it supports the tracked motion controllers for VR the trailer doesn't show any hand interactions so it could be a pretty barebones VR version with basically just head tracking implemented which would be a bummer.
 
Last edited:

Alexios

Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!

Budget Cuts 2 releasing on VGA day was a mistake I guess. Only 11 user reviews so far on Steam and 8 on the Oculus Store (normally Steam reviews are far more numerous by a wide margin, except for the Oculus Quest versions of certain games that trash Steam). I hope it picks up pace :(

OhShape got out of early access too.


 
Last edited:

Alexios

Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
This guy's doing wonderful work, Vengeful Rites is already pretty great and keeps getting better. Note that's obviously just a testing shit area, not part of the game.


I've only really stopped playing it to jump back in when it stabilizes quality/feature wise so that I don't feel I got through parts of it in a less than ideal way and stuff.
 
Last edited:

Alexios

Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
 
Last edited:

Alexios

Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
January 23 2020 if that wasn't already said before. Also PSVR version Q1 20 and Quest version Q4 20.


Good lord, terrible trailer framerate, watch previous media like Node's play session for a better representation (well, hopefully accurate too).
 
Last edited:

Alexios

Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!


Preorder price up on Steam as well, nice.
 
Last edited:

Stitch

Gold Member
Let's hope they keep optimizing it because performance doesn't look great. Also head movement sometimes looked like they were playing with a joypad o_O
 

Stitch

Gold Member

As we’ve better established a baseline difficulty, we’ve received plenty of excellent feedback about ways folks wish the game was easier…and more difficult. Now, after beating the tutorial, you can swap between difficulty modes at will in the Runeforge.

0.4.0 also boasts one of the most requested features: the ability to hit your weapons together. I’m serious. We’ve done a good chunk of work to allow you to scrape and clank them together, throwing sparks and making sound effects. It’s really, really awesome.
lol best update ever
 

Alexios

Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
Trailer finally up on YouTube for the lazy :p

It's out :eek:
Fingers crossed, please be good. Edit: it controls clunky but the rest of it seems promising. Hopefully he'll get the proper feedback and modernize the controls asap, currently they feel a bit old-vive-first-VR-game with the toggle grab on the index trigger on Touch and weird rotation settings etc.
 
Last edited:

Alexios

Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
Indies jumping on the non-gameplay-trailer waggon. Lol, this video is so bad. But some of the screenshots on the Steam page are promising so who knows :)


Edit: I guess they realized it was bad and deleted it?

Unrelated.
 
Last edited:

Alexios

Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
Dang. Well, it confirms it's all good with all main decent/good/great/awesome PC VR sets so that's great :)

Free locomotion at 7m38s and various other points past that, guess they got it working just after the VGAs (lulz @ VNN's bullshit so called leaks) :p
 
Last edited:
Top Bottom