MeLKoR posted:

"Please make this game a sausage fest, I want to be fully immersed in dicks!"

Now here is something you don't read everyday.

Hav posted:

Tallest building until downtown, and we're a very, very flat state.

his nibs posted:

Star Citizen: The Man Who Fell Through Earth

SwissCM posted:

Here's a good writeup from a VR developer (the dude behind the excellent and innovative Hot Dogs, Horseshoes and Hand Grenades) about challenges faced from VR development:

Hey folks, A little late to the party, but I thought I'd add my two cents to this conversation, and share a bit of the challenges that I've faced, and some observations I've drawn from tackling the problem space of scaling systems/spaces/etc. for VR games.

There are a number of challenges faced by devs moving to VR (big and small) that I don't think folks who don't do game dev are quite aware of the magnitude of. These relate to what are called implementation patterns, patterns used for things like character controllers, physics objects, spatial event triggers, visual effects, the list goes on. Games from AAA to one-person-indie are in a sense, always resting on, building on top of this shared body of arcane knowledge on 'how we do things'. All the little stuff that contributes to things in games that you don't notice when they work well, but DO notice when they don't:
How a character model walks across a bumpy surface, or up and down stairs.
How heavy vs. light objects interact with the player/other forces, when and how they come to rest
How a door works
Fire/explostions looking like fire/explosions
The ability to rapidly jump between gameplay and interface manipulation situationally
A Main menu
The list goes on. In many ways, the 'indie revolution' in gaming, and frankly the rising across the board software quality of AAA games has occurred because of the fact that successful patterns, in abstract and in code, have become significantly easier to share/spread over the past decade, and many of those problem spaces have been effectively 'solved', meaning that there are 1-3 ways to do a given thing, because its the most reliable/easiest to implement for a desired behavior/context, and everyone just does that.

Now imagine a majority of it has been thrown out the window. THAT is where we are at.

And not just for one reason/property of VR, for several of them. The most prominent that I've dealt with are:

Stereoscopic Rendering
Far more of the content in traditional games we play is flat than you'd imagine. One can occasionally get a glimpse of this glitching a camera into an effect, or if its just poorly built, but seriously think for a moment about how pretty much every visual effect you see in a game is a bunch of flat 'cards' overlapping each other. Most of these look immediately wrong/bad the moment you introduce stereo (this is also incidentally why vfx in post-converted 3d films often look so stupid). We have just gotten to the point where its performance efficient enough to have truly volumetric effects in regular games (fog, pyroclastics, simple liquids, etc.), but all of these effects get GEOMETRICALLY more expensive for larger resolutions/higher framerates. Which brings me to:

VR Resolution and Framerate
1080x1200x2x1.4xPrewarp Supersamplingx90fps = 326592000 pixels (assuming a single pass, no overdraw at all) This is more pixels than full 4k gaming at 30fps, but in a context where using motion blur is out of the question (as most AAA games do), and dropped frames result in physiological discomfort. Plus, due to having two views involved, despite some major recent advancements in the common engines, the cpu overhead is much higher than rendering single 4k frames.

How to put this... we have gotten used to, especially with AAA games, of eating frame stability in the name of content. Other than Order 1886's rock solid 'cinematic' 30fps, and the latest DOOM (which is a technical tour de force), I can't remember the last time I played a major release game that didn't oscillate WILDLY draw-time wise. Even shops like Blizzard that used to be way better about this feel like they've knocked this down a few notches on their priority list.

So we now have a situation where the way we make everything, measure and create content, compose scenes, and combine everything at the end is a gun to our head. AAA productions in particular are not ready for how game-changingly hard this is. Those big games like Assassins Creed and Watchdogs? Yeah, major scenes, assets, mechanics, etc. were integrated into the final build mere weeks before those games went to cert. That ain't going to fly making VR games. An entirely new philosophy needs to be adopted oriented on significantly more organized pre-production, technical iteration and perf. testing in cycles throughout productions, frankly... constraining content production in ways that these large edifices aren't used to having to do. There is no longer a 'well, it doesn't run perfectly, but it works well enough' grey area. You hit frame-time, or you don't.

When it comes to the first AAA VR titles, expect some of them to cock this up ROYALLY. DOOM VR will probably run amazingly, because ID locked that poo poo down. Fallout 4 VR will probably run unreliably. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that 90+% of their resources in making that happen are about perf.

Physics
This is one that will hit folk differently based upon what type of game is being made, that I've grappled with to a preposterous degree in H3VR, because Anton made the quixotic decision to go 'everything's a physics object'. But even if you're not going to this extreme, it's important to realize that game physics engines are not architected to handle what we're already asking of them for VR games. They handle coarse interactions between man-sized objects very well and very fast. They handle vehicles... pretty drat well, if you're willing to throw 2-3 NERDS at the problem for the entire dev cycle of your game, and especially if you're building off a code-base that's been refined over a series of games (which is why we have so rarely new break-out IPs in those areas).

What they DONT handle well, is things the size of your fingers, or even your hands. Or the size of most of the objects you hold in your day to day existence. Keys and locks, glasses, mice, realistically sized levers/handles/etc. Even something like... using a crow-bar to twist-break a chain off. Utterly outside the realm of said engines to do without it being mostly non-physically canned. This is why thus far, most folk have gone with very arcadey, very loose/forgiving, non-physics-based solutions for common interactions that.. could be physics based (I almost said 'should', but that's just my position on things, certainly not a board truth).

One of the core value propositions of VR is this ephemeral notion of 'presence', which in part is this idea that we stop perceiving the interface between us and the content, and are merely acting and seeing and hearing and being. We have the tracked controllers for being able to give you hand-proxies, but at the moment it is actually game engine tech stack that is preventing use from making those hand-to-thing and hand-to-hand-to-thing interactions feel more solid, feel more reliable, and most importantly, have physics-based interactions at small scales that map to our received experience of the world. Part of this is a perf issue, part of it is a fundamental design/architecture where we need a physics engine tuned for inserting a key into a lock, not a roadster drifting around a turn.

Anywho, I hope this ramble has been at least somewhat interesting/illuminating to those of you who don't do VR dev, and helps to illustrate the degree of technical challenge that we're all embarking on at the moment. Many of these problems are things that disproportionately hit AAA-size developers, as they are behemoths, are slow to change, and are rife with inefficiencies, poor organizational structures, and are frequently crewed with underpaid, overworked, semi-burned out folks who don't want to be given another half dozen challenges on top of what they already deal with. I'm not saying it's hopeless, but I am saying that the big VR games (that really feel like things BUILT for the medium), are probably going to take a while.
9/22/16, 4:59 AM

ljw1004author; platinum
Joined Jan 17, 2005

MeLKoR posted:

"Please make this game a sausage fest, I want to be fully immersed in dicks!"

Now here is something you don't read everyday.

Truga posted:

I thought bf1 doesn't have girl soldats either

MeLKoR posted:

"Please make this game a sausage fest, I want to be fully immersed in dicks!"

Now here is something you don't read everyday.

Lime Tonics posted:

Hey guys, lets be fair here, the patch is only re-downloading 2/3 to 5/6th the game, so not ALL OF IT.

Chinese space station gonna crash soon too,

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/sep/21/chinas-tiangong-1-space-station-out-of-control-crash-to-earth

MeLKoR posted:

That would make sense given that it's a WWI shooter, but in the world this man imagines 900 years in the future, women are still not considered able to pull a trigger.


e: (un)related rant: the "women shouldn't be allowed in the army because they might be raped" assholes trigger me. What the gently caress do you think will happen to women if your country is invaded and your army is defeated? They have every god drat right to fight in the front if they want to, it's literally their rear end on the line.

grimcreaper posted:

Considering they can't pull a trigger, their own weight, and have special training courses designed to be easier by 40 - 60% than the men's stuff? I wouldn't want them getting in my way either.

I feel that if women want to be on combat duty in squadron 42 , they should have to go through a man's basic training. It should take no less than 2 months of in game time to complete and they should get paid 70 cents to every dollar the men make because the men already completed the course and proved themselves.

If you say otherwise your just enabling weaker people to get themselves killed.

grimcreaper posted:

Considering they can't pull a trigger, their own weight, and have special training courses designed to be easier by 40 - 60% than the men's stuff? I wouldn't want them getting in my way either.

I feel that if women want to be on combat duty in squadron 42 , they should have to go through a man's basic training. It should take no less than 2 months of in game time to complete and they should get paid 70 cents to every dollar the men make because the men already completed the course and proved themselves.

If you say otherwise your just enabling weaker people to get themselves killed.

grimcreaper posted:

Considering they can't pull a trigger, their own weight, and have special training courses designed to be easier by 40 - 60% than the men's stuff? I wouldn't want them getting in my way either.

I feel that if women want to be on combat duty in squadron 42 , they should have to go through a man's basic training. It should take no less than 2 months of in game time to complete and they should get paid 70 cents to every dollar the men make because the men already completed the course and proved themselves.

If you say otherwise your just enabling weaker people to get themselves killed.

Charles Get-Out posted:

This is actually a pretty common opinion, a lot of gamers are uncomfortable with women-as-concept being in "their" spaces. This is especially true when there is a convenient excuse like women largely not being present in an analogous real-world situation and thus breaking "immersion" because they can more freely criticize the presence of women without being accused of sexism.

You see this a lot more in traditional wargame or tabletop RPG communities, where it's typically framed within "verisimilitude." E.G. "That sci-fi soldier can't not have a penis, it breaks with the lore and in the Real World females aren't combat participants!"

tl;dr gamers love being surrounded by massive penises and will think and talk about throbbing cocks at the slightest provocation

Mirificus posted:

grimcreaper posted:

Considering they can't pull a trigger, their own weight, and have special training courses designed to be easier by 40 - 60% than the men's stuff? I wouldn't want them getting in my way either.

I feel that if women want to be on combat duty in squadron 42 , they should have to go through a man's basic training. It should take no less than 2 months of in game time to complete and they should get paid 70 cents to every dollar the men make because the men already completed the course and proved themselves.

If you say otherwise your just enabling weaker people to get themselves killed.

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

Star Citizen: Open Distraction, Closed Development

Propagandist posted:

Thread's getting weird again.

D1E posted:

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3777359&perpage=40&pagenumber=78#post464528658


LOL now imagine Crobbers trying to flip the 'VR switch" on in SC.

EDIT: linked original post so as to not steal goon valor

Tijuana Bibliophile posted:

This is just so blatantly misogynistic. There are lots of roles possible for female combatants in SQ42: medic, paramedic, combat medic, and that's just naming a few of them. Oh, and did you forget a little thing called "the inevitable consequence of piracy"? You don't get that with only dicks about, that would just be wrong.

grimcreaper posted:

Clearly you don't know about the Sisters of Battle.


But it's also that many people have a traditional view on combat where woman aren't supposed to be. You know, the whole less muscle mass thing, which is a real and proven fact. Yes woman can be just as strong as men but it requires quite a bit more effort to maintain that muscle.

The reasons people use are more just 'the stereotypical bad rear end douchebag soldier' are more appealing than the 'I broke a nail ' character.

grimcreaper posted:

No. What's weird is that people think women should be allowed in combat zones when they could be making me a sandwich.

Charles Get-Out posted:

I'm not criticizing the viewpoint or trying to get into a serious discussion, I'm just making a funny about penises.

edit: I am one of those gamers that will talk about massive penises and throbbing dicks at the slightest provocation.