I recall grummz saying something about VR support for ember (if i'm wrong forgive me and move it to offtopic) , so, also for my own agenda, i decided to look in it a bit and i was utterly disappointed as it seems to me that there is little support for shooter games like firefall is and probably ember will be, we've got 4 "major" vr devices if you can call them that, htc vive from valve, oculus rift wich i believe ultimately comes from microsoft, samsung gear vr and google cardboard.
Htc vive: this is the best one if you look at it from a quality standpoint and the controllers look nice and adaptive, excluding the fact that at 799$ and 899€ (By the way when did the us/eur exchange reverse? shouldn't it be, like, the opposite?) it's extremely proibitive but that is only part of the problem, the main con is that when you look at it from a logistical prospective is a nightmare of epical proportions.
It requires, i kid you not, that you have a free ROOM of 21 square meters, this automatically excludes anyone living in small apartments and people with families and/or stable relations, imagine telling your non-gamer partner that you need a completely empty room to play games..... No thanks valve, i might spare the 1k bucks but i'm not sacrificing my girlfriend to you.
Oculus rift: this one looks somewhat nice too still in the high quality realm, the price is still proibitive at 600$ but i'm faithfull than in 3 years it will fall somewhat, anyways there's a catch here, you're either using a couple of split motion controllers that look as anti-ergonomic as i've ever seen and you still need to track both joysticks and motion control or a standard xbox one, motion control is handled similiarly to the wii from what i've seen so you're either playing standing, blind with motion controllers or sitting and gesturing from a chair
There's the problem right there as you are NOT integrating this with pc keyboard+mouse or even standard controller play, it's just impossible as the controllers don't have the volume and weight to be used to track a gun with even remote accuracy even with police style pistol&flashlight holding tecnique and even if you somewhat manage people will not do it becouse holding your arms straight forward for 30+ minutes is called "isometric exercise" and not gaming not to add that it's EXTREMELY tiring, so what do you do? you ditch motion control and use a controller or just move back to the keyboard+mouse and loose a great part of the experience.
Samsung gear vr: out of the alternatives this is perhaps the most disappointing and what i would call the worst. it's google cardboard with slightly better lens and using oculus rift software adapted to android, why would anyone spend 100$ on this i simply do not know, i just don't.
Google cardboard: This is cheap, everything about it is cheap level. the quality is lower than the first two alternatives but it's more aviable, also the software and the stuff devs need are both free, visual quality is mostly phone related but with an high end phone i've heard that there's not such a massive difference between this and oculus rift.
While it does add a performance barrier due to using both phone and computer it does get somewhat nullified as more and more advanced phones come out, one thing to keep in consideration is that it has the best motion control.
But it has no motion control you'll say. And it's true. That just means you can hook whatever alternative motion controller will inevitably come out in the future as vr becomes more devenloped or you can already use a wii controller (they can be hooked on pc and are accurate to an extent in my personal experience, i wouldn't play a shooter with it but then i wouldn't play it with an xbox contoller either and it's just as inaccurate) it's a bit homebrew but then this looks much cooler and comfortable than this to me anyways.
i wouldn't recommand it over oculus for quality but it seems that it's the most viable one in terms of space required and consideration for human phisiology.
At the end my personal opinion is that vr is somewhat of a bust and i wouldn't waste money on it at this stage, probably releasing a screen streamer app optimized for the game for android/iphone later on that allows to track camera view throught the smartphone's gyroscope would be the most cost effective options specially given that you can already play in "semi-VR" even unsupported games already https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleCardboard/comments/3tk0k2/playing_fallout_4_with_google_cardboard/
I sincerely hope that he really said something about it after i took the time to write all this XD i'd like to hear other's people opinons either way
Btw i did try to not make it look too wall of texty but it was a miserable failure, also i just discovered that this forum apparently doesn't make links blue automatically if you use the [ url=XXXX ] [ /url] thingy so i colored them with bbcode
Htc vive: this is the best one if you look at it from a quality standpoint and the controllers look nice and adaptive, excluding the fact that at 799$ and 899€ (By the way when did the us/eur exchange reverse? shouldn't it be, like, the opposite?) it's extremely proibitive but that is only part of the problem, the main con is that when you look at it from a logistical prospective is a nightmare of epical proportions.
It requires, i kid you not, that you have a free ROOM of 21 square meters, this automatically excludes anyone living in small apartments and people with families and/or stable relations, imagine telling your non-gamer partner that you need a completely empty room to play games..... No thanks valve, i might spare the 1k bucks but i'm not sacrificing my girlfriend to you.
Oculus rift: this one looks somewhat nice too still in the high quality realm, the price is still proibitive at 600$ but i'm faithfull than in 3 years it will fall somewhat, anyways there's a catch here, you're either using a couple of split motion controllers that look as anti-ergonomic as i've ever seen and you still need to track both joysticks and motion control or a standard xbox one, motion control is handled similiarly to the wii from what i've seen so you're either playing standing, blind with motion controllers or sitting and gesturing from a chair
There's the problem right there as you are NOT integrating this with pc keyboard+mouse or even standard controller play, it's just impossible as the controllers don't have the volume and weight to be used to track a gun with even remote accuracy even with police style pistol&flashlight holding tecnique and even if you somewhat manage people will not do it becouse holding your arms straight forward for 30+ minutes is called "isometric exercise" and not gaming not to add that it's EXTREMELY tiring, so what do you do? you ditch motion control and use a controller or just move back to the keyboard+mouse and loose a great part of the experience.
Samsung gear vr: out of the alternatives this is perhaps the most disappointing and what i would call the worst. it's google cardboard with slightly better lens and using oculus rift software adapted to android, why would anyone spend 100$ on this i simply do not know, i just don't.
Google cardboard: This is cheap, everything about it is cheap level. the quality is lower than the first two alternatives but it's more aviable, also the software and the stuff devs need are both free, visual quality is mostly phone related but with an high end phone i've heard that there's not such a massive difference between this and oculus rift.
While it does add a performance barrier due to using both phone and computer it does get somewhat nullified as more and more advanced phones come out, one thing to keep in consideration is that it has the best motion control.
But it has no motion control you'll say. And it's true. That just means you can hook whatever alternative motion controller will inevitably come out in the future as vr becomes more devenloped or you can already use a wii controller (they can be hooked on pc and are accurate to an extent in my personal experience, i wouldn't play a shooter with it but then i wouldn't play it with an xbox contoller either and it's just as inaccurate) it's a bit homebrew but then this looks much cooler and comfortable than this to me anyways.
i wouldn't recommand it over oculus for quality but it seems that it's the most viable one in terms of space required and consideration for human phisiology.
At the end my personal opinion is that vr is somewhat of a bust and i wouldn't waste money on it at this stage, probably releasing a screen streamer app optimized for the game for android/iphone later on that allows to track camera view throught the smartphone's gyroscope would be the most cost effective options specially given that you can already play in "semi-VR" even unsupported games already https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleCardboard/comments/3tk0k2/playing_fallout_4_with_google_cardboard/
I sincerely hope that he really said something about it after i took the time to write all this XD i'd like to hear other's people opinons either way
Btw i did try to not make it look too wall of texty but it was a miserable failure, also i just discovered that this forum apparently doesn't make links blue automatically if you use the [ url=XXXX ] [ /url] thingy so i colored them with bbcode
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