Oculus CEO and co-founder Brendan Iribe is stepping down to take charge of the PC VR team at Oculus. Palmer Luckey’s new role will be announced soon.
First impressions:
The Climb: Awesome. I’d been slightly put off by some of the reviews, and obviously it makes no sense without touch, but with touch it’s great fun. My one downside so far is the jump mechanic doesn’t seem to work well enough, or I haven’t figured out the knack, to do it with touch, so I have to do it with the buttons, which is a little immersion breaking. There hasn’t been a lot of jumping so far though.
Ripcoil: Not as good as I was hoping, though partly this is no doubt due to my inexperience. The movement mechanic is strangely indirect, and I can’t for the life of me get the punch timing down. I’d give this a miss unless you’re willing to put a lot of practice in at what is basically VR Pong.
The Lab: Some nice tech demo stuff. The archery game is particularly fun, and the robot repair experience is beautifully animated (though I was stuck at floor level because I forgot to calibrate SteamVR before starting it). Most of the others are kind of forgettable. I’d heard the Secret Shop one get bigged up in other sites’ commentary, and I’m not sure why.
I Want You To Die: The best all round experience so far. Very Stanley Parable feel, but with real puzzles, and of course touch controls.
Superhot VR: This has the potential to be amazing, but I suck at it. Stopped for now after dying at the same point a dozen times.
DotA VR Hub: Very gimmicky, but very cool. I wish you could free move the camera rather than teleporting, though I understand why they don’t let you. And there doesn’t seem to be a way to track a hero like you can in normal DotA.
Things I want to try next, but don’t yet own:
Lone Echo
Job Simulator
Google Earth
TheBlu/The Martian (are either of these actually worth the money?)
Raw Data (does this work properly with Touch now after the last SteamVR update, or should I wait for official support?)
Thumper
Anything obvious I’m forgetting?
Yes, you’re forgetting that Google Earth is free. Also Medium and Quill, which you should have as part of the package as well.
Well, Google Earth involves some faff which I haven’t done yet. And I’m not remotely a creative person, so I don’t have a particularly strong desire to check out the others, though I probably will get round to it eventually.
You put one dll into the install directory. It’s worth that minimal faff!
Question, how does the graphics look like in consumer Rift when connected to decent PC (say gtx 1070) ? Is it much better than PSVR? I haven’t tried any VR yet but friend tried PSVR and complained the games look like 10-15 year old PC games, just wasn’t impressed. And how strong is the screendoor effect still ? Is it noticeable always, or does the brain get used to it and filters it out or something ?
Also, Obduction or Fantastic Contraption? Obductions claims to require the remote. That can’t be right, surely? I don’t expect it to have full on Touch controls, but surely there’s nothing the remote can do that they (or the Xbox controller) can’t.
Fantastic Contraption. Wait on Obduction - it has touch support coming but it’s not in yet. Same with the Solus Project.
A lot of PSVR games look like they are 10-15 year old games. PC VR is more like 5 year old games. It’s running at 2160 x 1200 and 90fps. Can’t run lower than that without risking nausea, though some software tricks have been developed that mitigate it like ASW.
Remote is a min spec:
Will the game be better with touch do you reckon?
Dunno really. I haven’t played the original and it might not be a game that adding touch really enhances but I kind of doubt that.
http://uploadvr.com/tpcast-wireless-vive-kit-works/
So that wireless kit for the Vive might not be vaporware. Even more surprising it might not suck.
That’s what I mean, the session time. Developing a game that is long but designed to be played in short sessions seems harder than it looks, though. Most long-format games encourage binge playing. VR will have to find a way to break that paradigm perhaps.
Dead and Buried: Should be a natural given that you just point and shoot, but I’m not sold so far. Partly because the only multiplayer mode I’ve played, Shootout, is just too chaotic to be worthwhile. And partly because of a problem which is my main issue with the Touch controllers - many games don’t seem to respect the play area/guardian zone or whatever it’s called, so a lot of times objects you have to grab are out of reach, or at least involve a dangerous reach into uncharted territory. My space is small, but it was labelled moderate by Oculus itself, so it’s hardly the smallest allowable space. It’s understandable, if annoying, when you’re in a level — messing about with level geometry would be very tricky, though I do think designers could do a better job realigning the world so the main things in front of you are within the zone. But many games put their menu interface outside the zone, which is just crazy, and so far only I Want To Explode has an alternative means of picking things up. It’s exacerbated by UI design like Dead and Buried’s, which mixes shooting at menu options with physical hand presses, for no apparent reason.
I hate when that happens in VR. I wasn’t expecting so many of the Touch devs, especially a marquee title like Dead & Buried, to screw up with room scale. There are quite a few solutions ranging from the programmatic to asset design for this.
These issues are one of the reasons I was taken aback by the touch vs vive room scale and how I ended up preferring the Vive. I figured the standing 270 degree with little to no movement would be enough to handle most room scale games but this is frequently false. I still think it could go that way but the problems are looking to be harder than I first imagined.
I asked about this 'sorta upthread, but as I’m seriously looking at the Vive I wanted to clarify something.
Let’s say I have two VR-capable PC’s: one in my office and one in the family room. Let’s also suppose I use tripods or a wall mounting system that make the base stations relatively portable.
I want to be able to move the Vive between rooms. When I play Elite or another generally sitting sim, I’d play in the office. When I play room scale games with the family, the more common scenario, I’d move it back to the family room.
My supposition is that I would need to do the room setup every time I switch rooms, but this seems to be a relatively quick thing. Once I get efficient at moving things around, it’s maybe 10 minutes to get up and running?
So, this this a viable thing?
Yes with a caveat… I think moving the light houses around is onerous. You could buy additional light houses, one for each room. This is what we have at my work with a variety of lighthouse zones set up. When you move your Vive from one zone to another, you have to do the room setup and you’ll get good at doing it quickly. Lighthouse setup is pretty time consuming though. We haven’t found a way to make it not annoying so we just move them every few months.
It’s technically viable, but you don’t want to do it. You;'d have to do a full setup, make sure the bases are stable etc.
Diego
Can you unpack that just a bit for me?
As an example, my nephew brought over his full kit including computer. He had the base stations on tripods and put them in the corners of the room. He plugged everything in, and ran through a room setup that seemed to take all of two minutes (put a controller on the ground to find the floor … walk quickly around and hit the button a few times to trace the available space).
All told, I’d say from opening the case to slipping on the headset was maybe 15 minutes? Assuming you aren’t moving the thing back and forth every day, it seemed fairly reasonable.
But maybe there was some part of the setup that you would normally do, but that he didn’t do in the interest of time?
Not necessarily a deal-breaker for me, but I really want to try Elite in VR, and it’s just not a couch experience. Gotta’ be at my desk with my gear. There’s a reasonable chance a cockpit game is going to be make me nauseous and the office will become a non-factor, but I guess I’m just trying to weigh the risk/reward of the investment. Having some flexibility to make use of either of my PC’s would be cool.