General VR Catch-All

The Ghibli thing was pulled down at the request of the studio.

For you Elite players... Engineers 2.1 beta 4 seems to fix the image quality issues in the Rift. It looks gorgeous now!

Do the Engineers patches apply to non-Horizons accounts?

So I got some time with The Gallery : Call of the Starseed Episode 1

This is a point and click adventure in the same vein as the old King's Quest type games. It's a mix of a serious story and some humor. So far the puzzles aren't all that hard, I made it through the first 2 environments easily enough.

The graphics are beautiful (I run a 980ti). I really enjoy the inventory system in this game, it's well done. The voice acting is a high point. The teleport movement though is worse than some of the other game experiences I've had. I'm finding it difficult to aim well, the target tends to float into the the distance, making moving short distances challenging. This takes me out of the immersion pretty hard... I hope they fix that in a patch.

If you like adventure games though, it's worth picking up. It will be my go to demo from my non action oriented guests.

I also picked up the Space Pirate Trainer on a lark. (Thank God for $ bonuses this month).

I would skip this one. It's not that it isn't a decent shooting experience... the aiming is good etc... I just don't find it has much replay value for me. Especially when the drone shooter you get for free in the lab is almost as good.

polypusher wrote:

Do the Engineers patches apply to non-Horizons accounts?

Yes, version 1.6 (non-horizons) / 2.1 (horizons) is in beta now. So, non-horizons accounts will get all the graphics upgrades and bug fixes. The 2.x content is just walled off.

If you are nearsighted and wear glasses, do you even need to wear your glasses with any of these VR options? The actual screen is inches from your eyes, so if you can read without glasses I'm guessing you can focus on VR images that are at about the same distance.

Anybody try this?

My son, 9 removes his glasses to play and seems to do fine. Hard to get good data out of a 9 year old though.

Though what you're looking at is very close, the lenses make the graphics treated by your eyes as if they are distant. You see about the same as if you were not wearing your glasses.

Imagine if this was not the case. Normal sight people would have a hard time with these things due to correction they don't need, like putting on contacts AND glasses.

Pretty great write up of Vive vs Oculus vs PSVR from Tom's Hardware:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...

EDIT: This is probably the best, most complete, most fair write up I've seen so far. I don't have any experience with PSVR, but all the info on Vive and Rift are spot on.

So my Vive is coming Thursday. I'm actually kind of tempted to sell it...they're going for $1400 still on eBay. But I've been waiting sooo long for VR.

Orphu wrote:

I don't have any experience with PSVR

My experience as a gamer since Atari says that adding hardware in the middle of a cycle and otherwise fragmenting a console user base is pretty much always a loser. That alone is enough for me to avoid PSVR.

Warriorpoet897 wrote:

So my Vive is coming Thursday. I'm actually kind of tempted to sell it...they're going for $1400 still on eBay. But I've been waiting sooo long for VR.

Realistically, you'll be able to get another VR headset of your preference before the end of the year for much less so it might be worthwhile. Right this second there aren't a ton of great experiences to be had. There absolutely are some and I don't regret my purchase for an instant, but if that extra $600 is meaningful to you, you'll probably not regret selling it and having a little patience.

Edit to add: I'd say it took about 3 weeks for the luster to wear off. I played a ton of The Climb, BlazeRush, Darknet and ProjectCARS. I still play a few hours a week but I'm not watching videos in VR, browsing the web in VR, relaxing in VR... These may be future activities but they're not ready yet.

polypusher wrote:
Warriorpoet897 wrote:

So my Vive is coming Thursday. I'm actually kind of tempted to sell it...they're going for $1400 still on eBay. But I've been waiting sooo long for VR.

Realistically, you'll be able to get another VR headset of your preference before the end of the year for much less so it might be worthwhile. Right this second there aren't a ton of great experiences to be had. There absolutely are some and I don't regret my purchase for an instant, but if that extra $600 is meaningful to you, you'll probably not regret selling it and having a little patience.

Edit to add: I'd say it took about 3 weeks for the luster to wear off. I played a ton of The Climb, BlazeRush, Darknet and ProjectCARS. I still play a few hours a week but I'm not watching videos in VR, browsing the web in VR, relaxing in VR... These may be future activities but they're not ready yet.

I might just do that. Have you tried Vanishing Realms? That and Elite Dangerous are the ones I'm most looking forward to trying.

Have not played Vanishing Realms, though I do hear good things
I played Elite Dangerous for a long time when it was launched and stopped, then I tried it again with VR. It was really overwhelming. I mean the view of the game and all was amazing, but trying to control it and figure out what to do after being so out of practice was too much for me to get back into. If you're already playing and comfortable, then it will absolutely be a long term blast for you.

Can anyone who received their Vive/Oculus tell me if it was shipped from

BRIGHTPOINT NORTH AMERICA
TRAFFIC DEPT/MITCHELL TOTTY
501 AIRTECH PKWY
PLAINFIELD, IN US 46168
31770285790000

I have a Fedex shipment scheduled for tomorrow that requires signature. I have nothing I can think of ordered other than VR pending delivery. However, Brightpoint is a Telecom company as far as I know and do not know why they are shipping something requiring signature to me.

Not sure it helps, but mine is on the way and the FedEx tracker says that it originated from Plainfield IN.

The Vive ships from Brightpoint's distribution center in Plainfield, IN. They are a logistics company that handles distribution for HTC.

re: Vanishing Realms. It's really just an early access demo right now. There is about an hour of gameplay in there at the moment. It looks promising, but there's not a game yet.

My Vive came. I'm keeping it. Not sure why I convinced myself I might sell it.

This is my first VR experience of any kind. Couple of things:

- Wow.
- Put your sensors on light stands if you don't want to drill holes in the wall.
- if you drop even a frame under 90 fps it is jarring.
- Fantastic Contraption is fantastic.
- If your controllers suddenly won't sync just connect them via USB to your computer one at a time.
- I made the mistake of trying Job Simulator while installing other programs and the stutter became terrible. I was nauseous in literally ten seconds.
- I can't imagine using VR without this level of tracking and motion controls. Oculus better hurry up with its controllers.
- Words can't describe the first time you look down and are surprised your body isn't there because you forgot you're not looking at a real space.

Dramamine time and then I'm going back in.

Vanishing Realms is my favorite.

Don't forget Portal Stories is free if you own portal 2. Just came out the other day.

Warriorpoet897 wrote:

- if you drop even a frame under 90 fps it is jarring.

Make sure you have reprojection turned on. This will allow the HMD to "tween" missed frames. It makes missed frames nearly undetectable until you drop under 45 fps.

I've tried reprojection now. It seems to help a bit but I'm not sure exactly what it's doing.

The first time something hit me in Vanishing Realms, I recoiled physically and got an adrenaline rush of expecting to feel pain. I guess that's what you call immersion.

I was playing BlazeRush tonight. There's a massive bulldozer that chases you around the racetrack. I had just been knocked off the track thanks to a heat seeking missile after a rather miraculous corner, cutting move boosting off a ramp. The bulldozer passed just under my face and its two exhaust smoke trails passed right across my mouth and nose. For a split second I absolutely felt imagined heat against my skin.

It was eerie and cool... and proves your brain (well my brain) cannot be trusted.

Warriorpoet897 wrote:

I've tried reprojection now. It seems to help a bit but I'm not sure exactly what it's doing.

Basically, what's happening is if steamVR detects a missed frame, it will read the current HMD orientation and perform a 2D transform (a reprojection) on the previous image and show that to you instead. This smooths out the judder on your head orientation. Reprojecting the previous frame based on HMD orientation and not position is called rotational reprojection. (Oculus calls this time warp).

Typically your head position won't change that much frame to frame at 90fps, so you don't really notice that your rotational orientation is keeping up but your head might be a few millimeters in the wrong place for a single frame. Turns out head orientation is more important than position.

This works really well for one missed frame. Two in a row starts to get dicey as you begin to notice your head is in the wrong place.

There is also spacial reprojection that takes into account your position. That's not quite solved yet. I've seen some presentations on using z-buffer data to create an approximation of your new head position, but it has a lot of artifacts as it can't fill in gaps for areas that were occluded in the previous frame.

Interesting. Thanks for the write up.

Funny story... I just tried to grab the Oculus software so I could hack some of their games onto the Vive, and it won't even let me install their app because my CPU is not supported (SSE 4.2 or something?). I think it's amuisng that I can run most Vive applications fine but Oculus won't even let me into their store because of my CPU.

It might be time for an upgrade, though. My CPU is like five years old.

Also, I tried playing Elite Dangerous. I found the text on screen to be so aliased that I couldn't read it a lot of the time. Apparently this is a Vive issue that is better on Oculus at the moment. Just throwing that out there.

polypusher wrote:

I was playing BlazeRush tonight. There's a massive bulldozer that chases you around the racetrack. I had just been knocked off the track thanks to a heat seeking missile after a rather miraculous corner, cutting move boosting off a ramp. The bulldozer passed just under my face and its two exhaust smoke trails passed right across my mouth and nose. For a split second I absolutely felt imagined heat against my skin.

It was eerie and cool... and proves your brain (well my brain) cannot be trusted.

That's awesome.

Warriorpoet897 wrote:

Funny story... I just tried to grab the Oculus software so I could hack some of their games onto the Vive.

In case you are talking about revive, you should probably be aware that it appears that oculus broke that on purpose with their latest software update.

Reddit posr

Warriorpoet897 wrote:

Interesting. Thanks for the write up.

Funny story... I just tried to grab the Oculus software so I could hack some of their games onto the Vive, and it won't even let me install their app because my CPU is not supported (SSE 4.2 or something?). I think it's amuisng that I can run most Vive applications fine but Oculus won't even let me into their store because of my CPU.

It might be time for an upgrade, though. My CPU is like five years old.

Also, I tried playing Elite Dangerous. I found the text on screen to be so aliased that I couldn't read it a lot of the time. Apparently this is a Vive issue that is better on Oculus at the moment. Just throwing that out there.

Oculus chose to set a minimum hardware requirement so that they could develop against that known set almost like developing for console. Good for devs but possibly not for customers from a certain perspective. One thing it does is prevent bad game experiences. No one talks about performance for Oculus games because it's almost never an issue. I got an explanation of Asynchronous Time Warp this week from an Oculus dev that I'm not smart enough to regurgitate it but it seems to be generally more successful than the Vive's solution. People can be playing on 45 FPS and basically have no idea it's not 90 FPS.

As of now my favorite VR title is easily Space Pirate Training. It's barely a game but is so fun and addictive, and makes you feel like a real badass. I also grabbed The Gallery but I only put in a few minutes.

So I couldn't take it. Ordered parts to build a whole new PC. I was just going to replace the motherboard cpu and memory, but at that point I felt like it was easier to just build a new machine. VR is an expensive hobby.

BigScreen might be my killer app. I can't wait to see where they go with this and hopefully they'll add the ability to get the audio from the other peoples machines at some point.

There's just something about hanging out with friends across the country in VR that works for me.

And it's all for the low low price of free...

http://store.steampowered.com/app/45...