Oculus Rift Catch-All

Elite's Beta 2 patch next week is expected to properly support the DK2. Here's hoping proper support brings a performance boost, because it's just not quite playable on my rig.

polypusher wrote:

Elite's Beta 2 patch next week is expected to properly support the DK2. Here's hoping proper support brings a performance boost, because it's just not quite playable on my rig.

That's awesome news. Getting that game to run correctly on the DK2 has been a chore. I'm also keeping my fingers crossed for an Assetto Corsa update with DK2 support this week. The Ferrari calls.

Well, I'm sure by the time it comes out I'll need a new gpu anyway (560 Ti)
Holy crap, I have 384 CUDA cores, and the difference between GTX 980 and 970 is 384 CUDA cores

The new Elite update introduced some great graphics optimizations (I gained enough FPS to crank some things above "low" in VR) and there's no longer any need to futz with the Rift settings to get it to work. Just put it in extended mode and you're good to go. Man, this game is immersive. Seeing your joystick match your actual movements out of the corner of your eye in a dogfight is just a little touch that adds so much.

Still waiting for Assetto Corsa support! I thought it would be here by now.

I think the rumor for Assetto Corsa is DK2 support with a patch on Friday. I seem to recall seeing that on reddit. I dont have that game so I dont pay the most attention

I played for a few hours this morning and last night in Elite with the new patch. My experience before the patch was just not quite playable. The poor framerate and constant juddering, even in the menus, made it somewhat nauseating.

Post patch I can only say "WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!" with a happy line of drool out of the corner of my mouth. Its good stuff and makes me so excited for the future of VR games. (At least, cockpit style games. There's still stuff we have to figure out about any kind of First Person game where you're NOT strapped to a seat)

If anyone is interested in playing Alien: Isolation in the Rift, these instructions worked for me:

1.Open the ENGINE_SETTINGS.XML file using notepad, find and change whatever you have there to look like this:

2. Set your Oculus Rift DK2 to Extended mode
3. Open the Oculus Configuration Utility, then go to Tools tab-> Advanced -> Pause the service. Confirm by pushing yes. After this moment windows can show an error that config utility stopped working and blah blah. click ok.
4. Start game

https://developer.oculusvr.com/forum...

While it's far from perfect (the in-game UI is mostly MIA and there are a couple shaders that don't like stereoscopy), I highly recommend at least trying it out. One really cool touch I haven't seen before is that if you lean in close to a physics-enable object, you can actually bump it and move it out of the way with your head. Very neat.

VR Headbutt! This is a dangerous trend for our monitors and drinks sitting on the desk in front of us.

polypusher wrote:

VR Headbutt! This is a dangerous trend for our monitors and drinks sitting on the desk in front of us.

It's just extra immershun when you knock over the soda in the game and in real life. The feeling of sticky carbonated beverage dripping onto your lap really helps with presence.

http://southpark.cc.com/full-episode...

finally getting the south park rpg got me to watch some new episodes.

The lack of a tangible price point is a bit disconcerting... I'm considering a pretty big PC overhaul just for it so I'm hoping it doesn't cost an arm and a leg either.

I dub 2016 the year of VR. I'd expect the headset to cost between $300-$450 (US). Eager to hear what the final resolution will be. If screen door is gone, I'm in. I owned a DK2 and really enjoyed it but the screen door was pretty bad, probably the worst part of the experience. Head tracking was excellent and the 3d sensation really makes the experience worthwhile.

I sold the kit a few weeks ago to avoid wifely scorn when I upgrade to a proper first-gen VR headset.

I'm just afraid of how the market may be split. We've got the Valve/HTC Vibe coming out at the end of this year, the Oculus at the start of next year and Sony's Morpheus sometime next year as well. (And I think there's one that works with a Samsung Note somehow?)

Somehow I doubt these will be compatible with each other so we'll have to deal with this game supporting that VR unit and that game supporting this one. Oculus has the advantage of getting support first (and Facebook's money doesn't hurt) but Valve's support for the Vibe is nothing to sneeze at either.

I want one, but I may hold off to see how the market shakes out.

tanstaafl wrote:

I'm just afraid of how the market may be split. We've got the Valve/HTC Vibe coming out at the end of this year, the Oculus at the start of next year and Sony's Morpheus sometime next year as well. (And I think there's one that works with a Samsung Note somehow?)

Somehow I doubt these will be compatible with each other so we'll have to deal with this game supporting that VR unit and that game supporting this one. Oculus has the advantage of getting support first (and Facebook's money doesn't hurt) but Valve's support for the Vibe is nothing to sneeze at either.

I want one, but I may hold off to see how the market shakes out.

Many of these will be on different platforms, so it won't be as big a split as you paint, but I agree that there will likely be some contention on the PC. Unless things change, I'll be putting my money toward an Oculus simply because I've been waiting to do so for too long. I'm just glad these other sets are being announced, since that likely got the Oculus team to nail down a release date.

Yeah, I'm sure Sony's will be PS4 only for a while. I'm mostly interested in how the Oculus/Vibe split will shake out.

I like to think it will be a little more open, more like a monitor where your game doesn't care about much more than your resolution and refresh rate. If the companies are good, they'll share similar methods of talking to the tracking data, so the game devs can easily adapt to the different options.

Oculus has a fairly simple Unity plugin devs use to take advantage of the info. Even if another company uses their own plugin the inputs should be similar.

But folks are even able to get games that don't support vr at all to understand and use the Oculus, to varying degrees of success. (VorpX) so I don't expect you'll be locked to one set of games if you choose one headset over another unless one of the makers pays for exclusivity.

Well, SteamVR works with the Oculus SDK. The Vive has those motion controllers and a different tracking setup. Right now, the only thing I use the Rift for is Elite:Dangerous, and I've hot a HOTAS for that. So I'm leaning towards the Oculus at the moment, but I'd like to see the final specs on both.

Can't seem to find a generic VR thread (I thought we had one?), so I'll just leave this here...

The Void - A physical and virtual reality environment

LockAndLoad wrote:

The lack of a tangible price point is a bit disconcerting... I'm considering a pretty big PC overhaul just for it so I'm hoping it doesn't cost an arm and a leg either.

Same here, hopefully it stays in the $200 - $400 price range that they wanted back when DK2 was released. Anything more is going to be hard to justify for the general population. (Especially considering you will need a relatively high-end PC to run it, and whatever input solution they come up with as well)

I don't expect any screen door effect to bother me. I'll be buying first whoever comes out first. And buying second whoever comes out second. Single 4 lyfe
And Morpheus never because there is no goddamm way Sony is going to get it's head out of its ass. I'll be glad to be proven wrong.
I'd pay $10 for 20 minutes in that void. I hope that's profitable enough.

tanstaafl wrote:

Can't seem to find a generic VR thread (I thought we had one?), so I'll just leave this here...

The Void - A physical and virtual reality environment

That turns out to be nearby where I live, I'll have to check it out when it opens.

RolandofGilead wrote:

I don't expect any screen door effect to bother me.

That's something to try before you decide on. Screen door isn't just an impairment so things look a bit worse. It can make it difficult to read text, slow your reaction times due to not recognizing things as quickly and it really just looks bad.

If you have a magnifying glass look at your phone with it. It's hard to express how much it sucks.

WizKid wrote:

That turns out to be nearby where I live, I'll have to check it out when it opens.

Where's that? I couldn't find anything on the site about actual locations.

The more I play Elite, the more I want a "better" visual interface.

And in the fight between a 3+1 monitor setup or a VR headset, the headset is going to win simply on price.

Can't wait.

Chaz wrote:
WizKid wrote:

That turns out to be nearby where I live, I'll have to check it out when it opens.

Where's that? I couldn't find anything on the site about actual locations.

They're based out of Salt Lake City so I assume the first facility will be built there, though it doesn't explicitly say.

Can't remember if this was posted here before, but this website simulates the difference between various resolutions, persistence etc.
Gives you a good idea of the impact of the screen door effect.
I'd be interested to know how accurate it is.

Its not a bad approximation. The dark lines should be more pronounced, especially when you're looking at the white box with the text in it. DK2 is the 1080 resolution with Low Persistence turned on. Minecraft is not a great scene to simulate, its all 3 colors. It would work better with a highly detailed cockpit in a space shooter or a racing game... but thats not as easy as exporting some dirt blocks

tanstaafl wrote:
Chaz wrote:
WizKid wrote:

That turns out to be nearby where I live, I'll have to check it out when it opens.

Where's that? I couldn't find anything on the site about actual locations.

They're based out of Salt Lake City so I assume the first facility will be built there, though it doesn't explicitly say.

It being backed by the same people behind Evermore, a Charles Dicken time period theme park that's being built south of Salt Lake. So my guess is somewhere near there.

There is a huge thread in the Elite forums on settings to optimize Rift performance and clarity. There are a lot of suggestions to weed through, and YMMV depending on your hardware. The biggest thing for clarity, IMO, is disabling the in-game antialiasing, and setting up supersampling (DSR on an Nvidia). Switching the HUD from orange to green also helps, because of the way the red/green/blue elements line up and combine to form colors.

I do all combat CGs in the rift. I also have VRdesktop set up so I can alt-tab out of Elite and use my browser, change Voiceattack settings, etc.

If I'm flying around randomly looking for a good trade route or exploring, I will switch back to the TrackIR. Even with the tweaks I mentioned, reading still gets fatiguing, and using the Galactic Map is a pain. I need to try some different map control setups with the HOTAS, because using the mouse in 3-D is nearly impossible. Also, there's a bug where only the first letter of system names appears.

As far as games in the Rift go, Elite is as good as it gets. It has a lot inherent in the design that work to the Rift's benefit though. The fact that everything is black anyway means you only see the screen door when you're looking at something that's not-black. So for Elite, this might be 40-50% of the pixels on screen at any given time. It's a dark game. So its just not as noticeable.

For something like iRacing, 99% of the pixels are not-black because you're in a race car in broad daylight, so you can't escape the screen door. It's very fatiguing.