Yeah, I wouldn’t recommend any PC VR to people who aren’t willing to research and tweak. If you just want something with no fuss, your options are the Quest or PSVR. Even the Rift, where Oculus/Facebook put a ton of money into the UI, has a bunch of niggling issues and weird interactions with SteamVR. It completely borked my sound settings such that non-VR apps would randomly start trying to send sound to the Rift headset even when it was turned off and even when the output was set to speakers in Windows.
Kolbex
4639
I always thought the title of this thread was a typo, but it turns out it really was Time and not Tom who started the discussion.
Editer
4640
Oculus has a really well-done and thorough setup and training sequence for the Rift. Those of us who started on that found it all nicely explained step-by-step, and if you stay in the Oculus ecosystem, everything is really easy and for the most part just works.
If Oculus is the iPhone of VR, SteamVR is the Linux PC of VR. It’s way more configurable, more open, but if you’re not using the original Vive chances are you’re going to have to learn how to dive into settings and adjustments to make it work well. Kind of a pain on the Oculus since it doesn’t work as smoothly, but almost all games would support the Oculus controller config since it was so ubiquitous, and SteamVR keeps you from being locked into the Oculus ecosystem for software.
Windows Mixed Reality can be pretty much thought of as a driver with a UI for turning your goggles on and off, for the most part, at this point. I have a big Steam VR link in the room where you spawn and I click that if I haven’t just launched my VR app from the desktop.
As for Oculus, nowadays it’s easy if you’re just playing the simple Quest games, but if you want to do more sophisticated PC VR stuff, then you’re getting into “rated USB C cables” and bandwidth and messing around with developer modes to do wireless VR and stuff like that. It’s the most flexible system, for sure, but the simplicity of the Rift isn’t there if you’re doing PC VR.
The good news is that most of this is pretty easy to set up and get working reliably. Once you figure out where to find community controller bindings, the worst part of the Reverb G2 – having to remap the controller on some games – is a one-minute fix the very first time you run a title.
After that, it’s only painful for the simulation guys, who are looking for an impossible combination of full detail and 90 fps so they’re trying to figure out whether to set ASW in Steam, WMR, or by praying to the elder gods, stuff like that.
Yeah, I suppose if you only play Oculus games then the Rift is (my sound issues notwithstanding) relatively newcomer friendly. But I wouldn’t recommend anyone do that. If you’re content with just Oculus games, get a Quest.
Editer
4642
Yeah, I was more recounting the history of us VR pioneers.
We’re like the guys who flew biplanes. Pretty much crank the prop, keep the blue side up and the green side down, and don’t let the speed fall below 40 or you will plummet to the ground and die. Otherwise, have fun!
Whereas Chaplin has entered the realm of piloting by walking into the cockpit of a Concorde, with the engines and power not yet turned on.
schurem
4643
But then, we’re used to that shit. Have been dealing with janky tech since the first time someone tried to simulate something. It happens when you’re both on a niche and at the bleeding edge of what is possible with any state of tech.
The 630k of lo mem I was referring to earlier? that was for a sim, falcon 3.0
Within the PC masterrace, (flight and space) simulation gamers are the elite. We have controllers built in former Soviet republics by people who used to engineer MIRV’s. We have had headtracking for a decade before oculus came on the market. Our PC’s are never ever fast enough, powerful enough or the discs big enough. And we like it that way! Hoo-AH!
jpinard
4645
Congrats! When did you order it?
I ordered it on the first day preorders opened here in Au, 16th September. :)
jpinard
4647
You knew you wanted it! So you have another VR thing right now?
Lol yeah… I am a hopeless case. I have all the Oculus headsets starting from the DK2 (excluding the Go)… so the G2 will be my sixth, and my first non-Oculus! :P
I thought it would run on less conventional memory than that. But I know you pretty much had to max out your low memory if you wanted the vaunted gold cockpit. Achieving that kind of zen back in the day got me my first tech job (at fucking minimum wage) which has led to jesus christ 25 years of tech jobs (not at minimum wage).
Figuring out how to get some recalcitrant PC VR app to run through a Q2 -> rift link -> steam VR -> chicken entrails will never get anyone a job :)
¿POR QUE?
Since DK2 was in 2014, that’s only one HMD per year…! Everyone has some stupid hobby they throw dumb money into, I guess this is mine. ;)
jpinard
4651
whoa whoa whoa. Any chance Falcon 4 will work with VR?
Falcon 4.0? Nope. The devs of BMS, the last, greatest fork of F4, are constantly bothered about this from the punters. The F4 engine won’t allow it.
schurem
4653
Sad, isn’t it? Alas. Perhaps in some bright future we’ll return to the glory and fly meticulously simulated jets in overwhelmingly complex dynamic scenarios again, but this time in VR.
For this, I hate to say, DCS is currently our last, best hope. Unless something utterly awesome comes out of the left field. Which has happened before.
See I don’t disagree with many of the criticism of DCS as a whole. Matt Wagner is an awesome producer of superb bits of software, but a game designer he most definitely is not. As a game, DCS sucks (for most people). As a toy… it’s an acquired taste.
But if there ever is going to be fast jets and dynamic campaigns again, beyond the endless propping up of the rotting corpses of the Great Sims of Yore, our hopes are with saint Matt and his merry band of Russians. They are working on something. Slowly.
TurinTur
4654
I was testing VRDesktop vs Link Performance in Open VR Benchmark
Link 1.2x resolution
vs VR Desktop, normal quality, 100mb encoding
Surprisingly even if VRD is at slightly higher resolution it performs better. I suspect the encoding could have something to do. Link is now equivalent to almost 200mb?
edit: not really, increasing the bitrate to 127mb (maximum for me) just decreased the framerate in 0.3 fps.
jpinard
4655
Do any VR supported games have dynamic campaigns?
Ohhhh, can you play ArmA3 in VR? That would be amazing!
No. But then again, there aren’t any modern sim dynamic campaigns out there that approach F4’s or even TAW’s dynamic campaign. All the “dynamic campaigns” we’ve had for the last 20 years have been glorified mission generators; e.g. the Il-2 games.
Nope. And yes, it would be fucking amazing if you could.
There’s gold in remastering older games that cry out for native VR but we’re still downslope of the “cost of remastering/VR user base” curve. Although with mass market goodies like the Quest 2, we’re inching closer. The joke has always been “mass VR is five years away”. I figure we’re at “four years, nine months” now.
Just as a recap, here’s the native PCVR sims I know of: DCS, IL-2 BoX, and War Thunder. Adding space sims gets you Elite Dangerous and Star Wars Squadrons. (There’s also X:Rebirth but it was a one-off and who the hell wants to play that?)
Chaplin
4657
I have double dipped on a few games, but I am looking to add to some PC experiences. I am looking over the Black Friday sales and the following jump out at me:
- Beat Saber (not on sale, but is it ever?)
- Karnage Chronicles
- Space Pirate Trainer
- Battlezone Gold (a triple dip, but its a goodie and I can play it with my flat screen PC friend)
- any shooters? Pavlov? Player One?
I am looking at Steam, and I know there are some great Oculus games I have never played that I should be able to play with Revive. However, I didn’t see a sale. Maybe I am looking at the wrong place.
