VR Megathread: Valve's VR Has Entered The Game

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > VR Megathread: Valve's VR Has Entered The Game

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homeless snail: Mar 14, 2007

# ¿ Jun 11, 2016 23:23

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 00:57

homeless snail: Mar 14, 2007

smh if you can't recognize Geordie LaForge in his natural element

# ¿ Jun 11, 2016 23:47

homeless snail: Mar 14, 2007

Bethesda will only ever talk about Vive because they still have pending legal action against Carmack and Oculus, but yeah no poo poo it'll run on a Rift, its openvr.

That's probably why they also announced the Doom VR experience thing, to make Carmack cry.

# ¿ Jun 13, 2016 04:01

homeless snail: Mar 14, 2007

wolrah posted:

I'm very interested in how they're doing the locomotion with this one. Fast-paced FPSes seem like a real trouble point for VR right now.

Doom VR sounds very much like an "experience", just walking around environments from the real game or something like that, asset reuse. They were a little more ambiguous about what Fallout 4 VR would be, so its possible people are jumping to conclusions here. Especially considering yeah, probably an uphill battle getting Gamebryo to push VR.

# ¿ Jun 13, 2016 05:19

homeless snail: Mar 14, 2007

Is Holoball or Cyberpong the better ball bouncing game?

# ¿ Jun 13, 2016 23:42

homeless snail: Mar 14, 2007

Lemming posted:

I think it was originally not intended to be released at all, sort of just a cool thing they made that they'd demo themselves, but people asked them to release it so they did. Sounds pretty reasonable to me.

Yeah, it was originally an art installation.

Poetic Justice posted:

So I haven't watched it yet, but apparently Sony knocked it out of the park with their VR games (of course).

tbh outside of RE7 I found it super loving underwhelming. Like sure, meaningful VR content is still pretty thin on PC, but its still a million times better than the "experiences" that filled up Sony's conference. I was expecting more out of Sony's VR push than anyone else's this year but if that's an indication of what their launch lineup is going to be, yikes.

# ¿ Jun 14, 2016 06:33

homeless snail: Mar 14, 2007

The Exclusivity Concern Troll Strikes Again

# ¿ Jun 14, 2016 06:47

homeless snail: Mar 14, 2007

A lot more goes into a platform's architecture than just an instruction set, and consoles are still fairly loving different architecturally than the 40 year old IBM Compatible PC. It's fair to say APIs have moved a lot closer (in both directions) and that's made porting a whole lot easier, but as x86 becomes inexplicably more popular as an embedded platform it becomes no different than expecting 3DS games to run on your car's gps because "they're both ARM".

Head strapped monitors can't make the same excuses

# ¿ Jun 14, 2016 20:37

homeless snail: Mar 14, 2007

I want knifegrab back, can we trade

# ¿ Jun 14, 2016 21:29

homeless snail: Mar 14, 2007

KakerMix posted:

Once upon a time a little game called 'Halo' was going to be the best Macintosh strategy game with a persistent world. Then Microsoft happened. Does that count?

At least they just bought the studio outright

# ¿ Jun 14, 2016 23:19

homeless snail: Mar 14, 2007

Lucid Dream posted:

I'm really curious what they will do as far as input methods. OSVR doesn't really seem like a decent alternative if it is lacking motion controls by the time Touch comes out. Right now OSVR seems like a really lovely option because you can't play most of the Vive games without motion controls and you can't use the Oculus store for gamepad games.

Their API can access just about any input device in a systematic way, but not quite as abstracted as OpenVR. Also, OSVR has OpenVR drivers too now, and so do the Hydras, so you should be able to play any Vive game if you can piece together the setup. Hopefully some new third party inputs come out soon though, cause the market for Hydras is getting insane.

Truga posted:

Wasn't there also rumours that PSVR would work with PC? If that does happen, it would actually be an epic deal, if you already own a ps4 and a pc.

Unless there's some dumb authentication or something, someone is gonna hack up OpenVR drivers for that thing real quick regardless of if it has official PC support.

homeless snail fucked around with this message at 18:37 on Jun 15, 2016

# ¿ Jun 15, 2016 18:34

homeless snail: Mar 14, 2007

KakerMix posted:

Man I can't be arsed to pirate games anymore, Steam and GoG is so much easier. Anecdotes of course but seriously dealing with images and poo poo? No thanks. Easier to play by the rules.
All the .nfo art and crack music is on youtube anyway.

the kids pirating poo poo now don't even make sick nfo art or cracktros anymore, they've lost their way

# ¿ Jun 15, 2016 21:30

homeless snail: Mar 14, 2007

Ciaphas posted:

Moving on from poor taste puns: it's probably the lack of sleep that's making me dumb, but what's the practical purpose of Virtual Desktop? I mean ok sure nice backgrounds, fine, but is there some use case I can't think of that's better than "take off the headset"?

It's good for launching demos that are just like random exes you download from the internet, and Vivecraft/Minecrift. Also testing things in Unity, you can just hit run and Unity takes over for awhile and when you're done, you're back on the desktop ready to go.

Tbh you can use Bigscreen for some of that too and that isn't 15 bucks. Virtual Desktop is a bit nicer though.

# ¿ Jun 16, 2016 05:25

homeless snail: Mar 14, 2007

I haven't had any issues with it on my 970, not exactly watching a framerate counter or anything but it feels fine.

# ¿ Jun 16, 2016 06:31

homeless snail: Mar 14, 2007

Lemming posted:

Oh yeah, a lot of games will make it so what you choose as "forward" is actually "backward," I assume because you point at your monitor to choose the direction and it wants to encourage you not to smash it.

Also I think its working off the assumption that your computer is near the monitor so if you face the opposite direction the tether will be behind you.

# ¿ Jun 16, 2016 23:55

homeless snail: Mar 14, 2007

Tom Guycot posted:

You made this? is photogrammetry easy enough for a novice to do? I thought it was something you needed like, 12 cameras and a ton of equipment to even do. Any chance of knowing how you go about doing something like this, or a guide online somewhere? I'm going back to visit my parents in a few weeks and I love the idea of being able to do a photoggrammetry capture of their house, cabin, yard and other stuff.

You don't need any special hardware, and you only need 1 camera, you just have to take a bunch of photos. There's a bit of technique to efficiently shooting things for photogrammetry, but its pretty easy for the most part. You need some software though and most of it is pretty pricey since this stuff is used commercially, best package I've used is Agisoft Photoscan which is $180 at the cheapest, although you can get a 30 day trial if you just want to capture a site or two. If you just want to do a small thing there is also Autodesk 123D Catch which is free andhas an iphone version, but is severely limited. There's also the open source VisualSFM but its a total pain in the rear end to use and I've never been able to get anything good out of it, everything is super sloppy and needs to be cleaned up.

I hear Reality Capture is going to come out with a consumer version on Steam soon, and I hear that's a pretty good package, but I'm not exactly sure when that will be.

# ¿ Jun 17, 2016 01:06

homeless snail: Mar 14, 2007

I just played a game of battle dome and here is my review: holy poo poo buy battle dome right now

# ¿ Jun 18, 2016 02:53

homeless snail: Mar 14, 2007

Lemming posted:

From what I hear the mechanics are basically like the territory control in Splatoon, is that at all accurate? It sounds like something I'll definitely have to try out when I setup my Vive again

Yeah, its a fairly similar territory control mechanic. You have a paint gun on your offhand with an extremely limited range, but you can teleport to any square of floor your team's color within line of sight. On the map that I played on all the cover was one or two hops away so if you're trying to build up territory you're invariably going to put yourself out in the open for a second which ends up meaning super tense cover to cover shootouts with teams trying to outflank each other. You can also forego the paint gun entirely for more powerful weapons which neuter your ability to capture territory but are significantly better at killing dudes.

The best thing about it though is just the physicality of playing it in room scale. Its one of the best games I've played so far in terms of how thoroughly it uses the space, right up there with Budget Cuts. You have to move all over the place, peeking around corners and over cover, crouching down, hitting the loving deck and doing sweet combat rolls when you see bullets coming your way. Its very intense.

# ¿ Jun 18, 2016 03:48

homeless snail: Mar 14, 2007

Fargin Icehole posted:

I'm a huge Skeptic sssso, do we still need to jack into cyberspace to VR?

we're all about punching deck, now

# ¿ Jun 18, 2016 03:58

homeless snail: Mar 14, 2007

EdEddnEddy posted:

Now you got me seriously considering this now. Using a drone to capture an entire properity and then throwing it into a virtual world for people to see as if they were physically there, would be pretty sweet.
Might just have to load up the demo and charge up the drone and see what I can get.

I've done some of this, it works pretty well. Main thing is you want is to geolocate your images with GPS data, I was going to hack together some arduino GPS logger or something but my brother had the amazing idea of just getting a cheapo Garmin watch and strapping it to one of the legs of the drone. Once its geolocated you get correct scale and alignment for free out of the photogrammetry software.

# ¿ Jun 20, 2016 02:26

homeless snail: Mar 14, 2007

EdEddnEddy posted:

Using a Phantom I wonder if there is a way to jack into the GPS data the drone itself uses.

Or better yet, sell it and get a better drone (its a P2 and I really need to get a P4 or better) or built one myself. Hmm

I believe on a Phantom you would either need the DJI data link/ground station stuff, or to hack up a data logger to plug into the canbus port, not sure if there's any way to have them log GPS other than that. You can actually just go in after the fact and take a couple of pictures by hand and manually key in the coordinates of where you stood for a basic fix, the software only needs a couple of control points to align the site. That would probably be fine for VR, honestly.

# ¿ Jun 20, 2016 06:39

homeless snail: Mar 14, 2007

Jarmak posted:

So some fun updates on this the 6th week of HTC shipment drama:

Yesterday I finally got the charge-back successfully processed against Digital River and reordered. That was a bit of a bittersweet victory because today I got a call from my local AGO's consumer advocacy office who finally got back to me and was outraged and wanted to help us by threatening HTC. Instead they are helping us by putting a note on file that they're naughty and by putting them on official notice that if they try to collect on the back-charged payment the AGO's office will take an interest in loving them up.

Hopefully if this 72-hour poo poo is true I'll actually have a Vive by week's end.

I was in the same boat as you and yeah wow the process is a whole lot smoother now, at least as far as ordering and shipment goes

# ¿ Jun 21, 2016 20:25

homeless snail: Mar 14, 2007

IMO the picture quality in Big Screen is a lot worse, even on max quality and with a super close/big screen it looks very aliased compared to Virtual Desktop, and if you curve the screens it seems like it messes up the aspect ratio. The Vive controller support is much better than Virtual Desktop's though. They could both stand to be better.

# ¿ Jun 21, 2016 20:49

homeless snail: Mar 14, 2007

Honest Thief posted:

Lloyds thinks I'm commiting credit fraud when trying to pay for the damned Vive.

Digital River strikes again

# ¿ Aug 4, 2016 20:18

homeless snail: Mar 14, 2007

Truga posted:

I'm about 99% sure they said PSVR support confirmed, but I can't find anything about PC VR

They've never straight up confirmed it but they've strongly implied that they want to do VR and that they've at least worked on some kind of NMS VR demo internally. They definitely have multiple VR headsets in their office too, PSVR included.

# ¿ Aug 5, 2016 22:40

homeless snail: Mar 14, 2007

JazzFlight posted:

I don't have high hopes for PSVR support on the PS4, maybe only on the Neo if anything. I mean, they would have to get it running at a pretty high frame rate, right?

I think it already runs at 60 on PS4, and that's the minimum for PSVR support

# ¿ Aug 6, 2016 01:42

homeless snail: Mar 14, 2007

The question was about APIs rather than the hardware, though. The OSVR API has totally different design goals than OpenVR, and I think its fairly successful at what it tries to do. OpenVR abstracts everything at a fairly high level so applications have a hardware independent interface for handling tracked objects and hand controllers, it makes a lot of decisions on the behalf of hardware in how it should be presented in the interest of orthogonality. OSVR goes the other way and makes very few judgements about how hardware is presented, its just a very regular and cross-platform interface for enumerating and accessing hardware without going through a dozen different vendor APIs. If you're making a game OpenVR is definitely the way to go, but if you're doing something weird or experimental in VR that falls outside of OpenVR's purview you might actually be better served by OSVR.

The OSVR-OpenVR bridge is actually way more in OSVR's favor than anyone else's. For Valve all it means is that you can use an HDK on their store, which okay who even owns an HDK, and the people that do probably didn't buy it to play games on. For OSVR it brings more hardware into their ecosystem and the more stuff they can support the more attractive it is as a development interface.

homeless snail fucked around with this message at 11:57 on Aug 8, 2016

# ¿ Aug 8, 2016 11:54

homeless snail: Mar 14, 2007

EdEddnEddy posted:

I will say that the Vive finally turns itself off when you are not wearing it finally.

Still have no idea what that button on the headset itself does though.

It does the same thing as the menu buttons on the controllers, brings up the overlay, double tap for camera. I forget if this is still only in the beta or not, but you can also hit the menu button to turn SteamVR itself on which makes it a million times more usable imo

# ¿ Aug 8, 2016 19:20

homeless snail: Mar 14, 2007

GlyphGryph posted:

Uh... hasn't minecraft worked on Rift (and Vive) for months now?

Yeah as a mod for the old version, this is official support for the Win 10 version. The mod is probably still better tbh, especially if you have a Vive, but performance isn't great.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2016 20:19

homeless snail: Mar 14, 2007

Thor-Stryker posted:

Has anyone delved in deep with DolphinVR yet? How good is it with n64 titles? How does it treat Vive controllers with Wii titles? I'm considering getting into it but I don't know if the software is there yet.

It varies from game to game but it puts some games in a really cool new perspective IMO. My favorite that I've tried is Paper Mario TTYD, because it just looks like this incredible tiny little diorama that you're poking your head into which actually kind of substantially improves that game. Most of the other ones I've tried have been a whole lot less impressive, although there's an AR patch for one of the Mario Karts, Double Dash I think, that makes it first person and that's pretty cool.

They recently patched in wiimote emulation for the Vive controllers I think, haven't tried it. And idk if it works with N64 VC games or not, hadn't thought about trying it but now I'm going to go do that right now.

# ¿ Aug 16, 2016 15:57

homeless snail: Mar 14, 2007

Thor-Stryker posted:

Thanks for the info, I just wanted another way to demo VR to friends with a more "well known" franchise of games like Nintendo.

In that case check out Wind Waker, it would make a pretty good demo. The perfect game would be Mario, but I couldn't get any of them working well enough to show off, lots of weird clipping issues.

# ¿ Aug 16, 2016 17:01

homeless snail: Mar 14, 2007

GlyphGryph posted:

The vive software can already do a simple kind of photogrammetry, imagine slapping a few labels on something and turning it in your hand to get a 3d scan of the object inserted into your scene and saved.

In other news, does anyone know if I can join regular minecraft servers with vivecraft? or would I need to get a vivecraft group together?

Anyone interested? :V

You can, but you're stuck using direct locomotion unless they install a server side mod to enable teleportation

# ¿ Aug 17, 2016 14:39

homeless snail: Mar 14, 2007

Cojawfee posted:

AR and VR are totally different things. AR augments reality and VR replaces reality. The uses for one are pretty exclusive from the uses for the other.

I don't disagree with the second part, but AR and VR are just on opposite ends of the mixed reality spectrum.

Its not super practical right now for one device to act on the whole spectrum for a whole variety of reasons, but things like the Vive or the Gear VR can dip left a little bit with their cameras, and Hololens or Magic Leap (maybe) have a lot of flexibility around the middle area. Its conceivable that a full MR headset will come out sometime.

# ¿ Aug 21, 2016 17:23

homeless snail: Mar 14, 2007

SwissCM posted:

With a mixed-reality device like the Magic Leap, whats to stop anyone from just blocking all light from coming through the lenses and instead relying purely on the device for visual display?

If you have the technology to augment reality, you can use that same tech to create a virtual reality and likely to do a better job of it. VR is a subset of AR.

The CastAR last I heard has a clip on for doing exactly that

# ¿ Aug 21, 2016 18:42

homeless snail: Mar 14, 2007

Tokyo Sexwhale posted:

The lighthouses use bluetooth to talk to each other if they are not connected via sync cable. RF noise most certainly does matter.

Nah, they optically sync, the BT is only for communicating with the computer via the headset for power management/firmware updates

# ¿ Aug 23, 2016 00:07

homeless snail: Mar 14, 2007

Alan Yates has talked a bit about multiple lighthouse configurations, and it sounds like the current hardware is specifically designed to work in an asynchronous scheme that distinguishes the lighthouses based on each one rotating at different spinrates that are prime to each other, and possibly varying modulation also, the info that's out there is kind of vague right now. TDM is a way simpler scheme that works just fine with 2 lighthouses though. Maybe we'll see the async stuff surface later on.

# ¿ Aug 23, 2016 03:03

homeless snail: Mar 14, 2007

Poetic Justice posted:

Alan Yates has tweeted that this generation of sensors in the headset and controllers only support TDM.

He's said that the current sensors can't do FDM, because they're designed around a fixed oscillator. The async mode is still a thing though and shouldn't require new sensors.

I doubt they're gonna do TDM for more than 2 stations though, you're probably right about that.

# ¿ Aug 23, 2016 03:54

homeless snail: Mar 14, 2007

AndrewP posted:

I'm looking for weird/experimental/concept/half-done poo poo. Trying out weird VR things is one of the main reasons I didn't want to wait for PSVR. Where should I be looking?

https://itch.io/games/tag-virtual-reality has a bunch, probably want to filter down there's a lot of old DK2 poo poo on there

# ¿ Aug 24, 2016 04:28

homeless snail: Mar 14, 2007

# ¿ Aug 25, 2016 23:59

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 00:57

homeless snail: Mar 14, 2007

Tom Guycot posted:

Unrelated to games I recently got back from taking thousands of pictures to try recreating some places with photogrammetry, which was the whole reason I was doing tests months ago, but my god these large scenes take time. The first one I'm trying is ~1,400 pictures, and so far it looks like its going to take about 50 hours just for the first stage... if it even completes it. I started trying it yesterday and my computer blue screened at 40%, and it never blue screens so I hope it was just a fluke.

Has anyone else who's worked with the photoscan software or photogrammetry in general, ran into a problem with extremely large sets of photos? The biggest one I'm going to try to put together is a whole house and roughly ~2000-2400 pictures.

Processing time goes up exponentially with the number of photos you take. If you're doing a really big set you want to either break it down into multiple groups of photos and combine the models later, or preselect your pairs so its only scanning against photos that you know overlap. If you're running more than a couple hundred photos at a time I think you need to very carefully reconsider your workflow. Photoscan gets super unstable for me at that scale, also.

I've been messing around with Reality Capture lately and it is by far the best package I've tried and at this point I'm convinced its the only one worth using. Its way faster than Photoscan and takes better advantage of GPUs, doesn't use as much RAM and doesn't crash when it runs out, and the accuracy of the models it produces seem a lot better.

# ¿ Sep 5, 2016 13:01

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