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The Big VR Thread

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Thumper added Oculus/Vive support today on PC...I played the PSVR demo the other day and REALLY liked it. I haven't played in not-VR but despite using a gamepad, that feels like a game that gains a lot from completely immersing you in it's trippy visuals and heavy industrial music. 

 

Also I found out that the bassist from Lightning Bolt is one of the developers which...is very fitting.

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Having just ordered a beefy replacement pc, I now have a CV1 on the way :)! Not touch yet, that comes later, but I think I'll be happy with it as my Elite Dangerous hat for now :p. I've had my eye on Thumper too.

 

ETA: I just bought Thumper and Subnautica in the Steam sale, and Darknet in the Oculus store sale... I remember really liking what I saw of Darknet on the Giant Bomb launch stream.

 

I've had a bit of a go on Thumper in 2D, but stopped to save the rest. I'm already hyped by what I played though

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I picked up my CV1 yesterday, and am very impressed so far, even on my old system (my newer one should arrive today). Darknet and Thumper are very cool , and Elite is mind-blowing! I also had some fun with various VR shorts, and am looking forward to watching the FOO show. 

 

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2 hours ago, Dr Wookie said:

I picked up my CV1 yesterday, and am very impressed so far, even on my old system (my newer one should arrive today). Darknet and Thumper are very cool , and Elite is mind-blowing! I also had some fun with various VR shorts, and am looking forward to watching the FOO show. 

 

 

Don't forget to try out Lucky's Tale and Farlands at some point. I enjoyed them more than I thought I would. I assume they still come free with the Rift.

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I know everyone says that the Budget Cuts demo is awesome, but I didn't realize how fun it would be. OMG I want that stealth game.

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On 12/28/2016 at 0:03 PM, clyde said:

 

Don't forget to try out Lucky's Tale and Farlands at some point. I enjoyed them more than I thought I would. I assume they still come free with the Rift.

Yep those are still freeand seem pretty cool from what I've seen of them... I'll explore them more later.

 

I'm pretty bummed that my new pc is having issues playing external VR games. I'm fairly sure I know why though- both my monitor and CV1 need to be plugged into my GPU, otherwise my computer uses the integrated graphics  for some strange reason. My old pc doesn't have this problem. I have ordered a Displayport to HDMI covnerter which should do the trick, but until then I have to play Elite Dangerous and Thumper on my old pc. I am absolutely loving Thumper, but ED is a bit too much for my old 970, and makes me feel a bit queasy. For some reason Subnautica works fine on my new pc, and is cool, but triggers the fish in ocean phobia I forgot I had... I might have to refund it, or use it as aversion therapy :p.

 

I really enjoyed the FOO show with Sean and Jake, particularly looking around the Firewatch tower, examining the objects, and having a near heart attack when Sean started waving an ax around right by my face :D. Is it really the only episode?

 

 

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Okay, 180 degrees reversal here, folks. In the past I have been very skeptical or even negative on the VR thing. The tech demos I played never really convinced me of its potential and the Drive Club game was a shitty experience. But on new year's eve I played some games on a friend's Playstation VR that I thought were completely magical. The first was the platforming level with the little Playstation robots. It's basically Mario, and your head is the camera. This was simply magical. To be able to look around you to find secrets in the level, and having the poison ivy react as it hits your head when entering the cave, took my breath away. I was really in the level. I could glance down and get closer to the architecture in a way I had never done before.

 

Afterwards I played the rollercoaster horror game with the clowns and the guns, which was a bit less interactive but still a very fine (and scary) thing to play. The inertia of the ride coupled with having to hit targets and avoid obstacles with your head (not to mention being constantly unnerved) was, again, really good.

 

So despite this equipment still costing way more than I want to pay for it, I can see its potential. I get it now.

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I really, really would like to play Rez Infinite on PSVR. Shame nobody I know around where I live has a PSVR. Some have just a PS4. It's the only VR game that I would absolutely want to experience.

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Does anyone have experience using a Vive in a really small space? My apartment is pretty tiny and the space in front of my PC is about 5' x 8' which I think is about as small as you can go. I have a slightly larger space in my living room, but I could probably only set it up there part of the time.

 

My space issues have me wondering if a Rift might be better for me since room scale stuff might only be a novelty I can play with sometimes. Does anyone have advice for people with tiny living spaces?

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1 hour ago, prettyunsmart said:

Does anyone have experience using a Vive in a really small space? My apartment is pretty tiny and the space in front of my PC is about 5' x 8' which I think is about as small as you can go. I have a slightly larger space in my living room, but I could probably only set it up there part of the time.

 

My space issues have me wondering if a Rift might be better for me since room scale stuff might only be a novelty I can play with sometimes. Does anyone have advice for people with tiny living spaces?

I was able to move some furniture around and get a 2x1.6 meter space, works just fine for almost everything. You can also use the Vive for seated VR. I am not sure which if any of the best seated VR games are Rift only. Eve Valkyre and Elite Dangerous are both on Vive now (those are the only big seated games I know).

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2 hours ago, prettyunsmart said:

Does anyone have experience using a Vive in a really small space? My apartment is pretty tiny and the space in front of my PC is about 5' x 8' which I think is about as small as you can go. I have a slightly larger space in my living room, but I could probably only set it up there part of the time.

 

My space issues have me wondering if a Rift might be better for me since room scale stuff might only be a novelty I can play with sometimes. Does anyone have advice for people with tiny living spaces?

 

I'm using a space that is exactly that size with the Rift (when playing Touch games). My x-axis is the 8'. It isn't great, the lack of space is noticeable. Pretty much all the games I've played allow you to use teleport mechanics, but you have to remember to use them. The Guardian wall shows up a lot though you can turn it off if you like.
All that said, I don't think the Rift is going to be significantly better for you because of a small space. If anything, you can think that the games which are on the Oculus store (and the duplicates on Steam) will be optimized to allow you to play in the space you describe, but it will be tight.
 

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On 1/5/2017 at 7:34 PM, prettyunsmart said:

Does anyone have experience using a Vive in a really small space? My apartment is pretty tiny and the space in front of my PC is about 5' x 8' which I think is about as small as you can go. I have a slightly larger space in my living room, but I could probably only set it up there part of the time.

 

My space issues have me wondering if a Rift might be better for me since room scale stuff might only be a novelty I can play with sometimes. Does anyone have advice for people with tiny living spaces?

From what I've heard, having the special controllers  adds far more to the experience than roomscale.

 

I have no first hand experience with a Vive, but apparently two front facing lighthouses work well. I have to say that the Rift is super easy to set up and use. I don't have the Touch though.

 

Also, 5' x 8' very different from my idea of tiny :)! 

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I have a friend who's been playing a bunch of Elite Dangerous in VR, so I'm looking at the Oculus Rift again. I don't have much room in my computer room. so I wouldn't be able to play room-space type stuff, but it seems there's a ton of cockpit type experiences out there that would be pretty cool.

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I just want to chime in to share some of my thoughts on my VR experiences over the last 8 months or so. This post will be a long one.

 

I picked up the Vive back in May, and thanks to the fact that we had recently moved into a bigger house, I was able to snag one of the extra bedrooms to be my dedicated office/VR room. Once I got my desk and gaming collection all set up, I only really had room for just about the bare minimum required space. I think my current play area is about 5' x 6'. To those concerned about limitations in their play space size, I wouldn't worry about it too much as long as you can at least get the minimum required space for room-scale VR. Every now and then there are certain things I play that feel just a little bit restricted by the size of my play area but it has generally been a non-issue for me. Although that may also be partially due to the specific games and experiences I have been playing through. If I was playing more active games where I need to bob and weave and flail my extremities all over the place, I could see it being a little more restrictive.

 

At a high level, I am very happy to be a VR early adopter, especially with how everything has really come together over the last couple of months. Back when I first got it, I got a good handful of games and experiences, had my mind sufficiently blown for about a month or so, and then didn't really touch it for a solid 5 months. It wasn't until around mid-December that I picked it back up and started using it regularly, and based on my experiences since then, I expect I will continue to play regularly for the foreseeable future. It is just so good and I think I'm fully convinced that this is much much more than a gimmick at this point. I think it was last night that I realized I am still having my mind blown every single time I put on the headset and then I go to bed with my mind racing, thinking of all of the countless things I still want to do and try and experiences I hope to have. Contrast that with my Wii experience where I went to bed every night trying to convince myself that motion controls were amazing, but deep down I knew that the only thing it would ever be great at replicating was the act of masturbating. With VR, my brain is sufficiently convinced that I can do so much more than masturbate.

 

So here's a breakdown of what I've been doing and enjoying.

 

Elite Dangerous

This was my first purchase and I picked up a Thrustmaster flight stick to ensure that I was getting the best experience. It took a lot of tweaking to the controls to get something decent and to get the map navigation working with the flight stick and then a lot of additional research to learn how to play the game but once I got all of that down and knew how to do things, I started having a pretty great time. Cockpit games are probably the single best fit for VR from what I've tried and this one just nails it so well. The experience of being able to look around my cockpit and out the side windows to track a dude while trying to chase him down and destroy him is something that elevates this above what you would get on a standard display, in my opinion. With the scale of the planets, the great sound design, and the process of jumping in and out of hyperspace/supercruise and going through landing procedures, my brain is stimulated enough by how immersive everything is and how much I have to do mechanically that I don't really care that there isn't much that the game does to drive me forward and give me a "reason" for things. Being this immersed and having to go through every minute motion in a manual fashion is satisfying in and of itself by how it all comes together with VR and a flight stick.

 

I've probably put in a little over 20 hours at this point and ended up moving on to other things, but I definitely plan on playing a lot more of this at some point. There's just a lot of other really cool stuff out there also competing for my time.

 

One other note, with the Vive specifically, I ran into some visual issues with this game where things were really badly aliased and certain areas looked worse than a PS2 game. I ended up doing a ton of research and found that there was an issue with the way this game was rendered on the Vive. Frontier had acknowledged the issue and that they were working on a fix, but for awhile, I understand that this game looked much better on the Rift compared to the Vive. I checked back on this several months later and found that a community member had discovered what the issue was and had found a workaround. They found that by adding a 'renderTargetMultiplier' line to the steamvr config file and tweaking the value to 1.5 (or higher if their PC could handle it), they were able to get vastly improved visuals. I tried it myself and downloaded a chaperone switcher to do this automatically and it did indeed improve things substantially. And it turns out, increasing this value produces crisper visuals in the VR landing area and other games as well, if your hardware can handle it. I've bumped it back down to 1 and only increase it when I play Elite Dangerous specifically but it is a good tweak to know about. And from what I've read, it sounds like the consensus is that you get the best results in Elite if you set the in game super sampling to 0.65 and the steamvr rendertargetmultiplier to 2. Not sure if this will help anyone here but figured I'd share it as I have found it quite useful.

 

Theblu

This is just an underwater experience with a short Blue Whale encounter, a 5-10 minute coral reef encounter with a really cool jellyfish swarm, and another 5-10 minute experience at the bottom of the ocean where your Vive wands act as a flashlight and a bunch of glowing shit shows up at some point. I've gone through each of these a few times and they are nice to go back to regularly just because of how spectacular of a job WEVR did making the visuals so crisp and making it feel so immersive. While there isn't much substance here, it might be the best VR experience I've had from a technical perspective. Everything feels very 'in focus' compared to a lot of other offerings and it is just very beautiful and relaxing.

 

This is also the very first thing I show when demoing the Vive to friends and family. It is simple enough to put the headset on and perform what light interaction there is and it has so far blown everyone away that has tried it. I highly recommend this if you want to see what VR is capable of or if you just want a good app that will sufficiently convince skeptics of what VR is capable of.

 

Irrational Exuberance Prologue

This was made by the same people that made TheBlue and it is pretty cool. You are on some kind of a space rock and you get to go through a 5-10 minute experience where shit floats around you and some cool space stuff happens. It's short and sweet (and free) and worth trying out. But given some of the other options for VR in space, it isn't anything too special.

 

Fantastic Contraption

I've played a couple hours and beat a bunch of puzzles but never finished. I hope to come back as it is another good example of VR done well and things being sharp and in focus but I've been distracted again by higher priorities. My favorite thing about this is that it is perfect for just sitting on the floor with my legs crossed and building some total bullshit Rube Goldberg device that flies off of the level as soon as I set it off. It's quite a bit of fun but between my skills and the game's toolset, most of what I've created has felt pretty sloppy and pretty much just limped and morphed it's way to the goal.

 

Job Simulator

It's cute and designed well. I like that each of the environments puts you in a space that fits in the context of your play space. Being in a cubicle or behind a cash register at a gas station works really well with my small space and I never feel like I need to be too careful not to hit walls or anything (not that that happens much anyways). Even though I enjoyed what was here, it wasn't especially impressive and isn't something I felt drawn back to the way other experiences did.

 

The Lab

This is a great sampling of various things you can potentially do in VR. The games are pretty fun to run through a couple times and I hear they've improved it a bit with some subsequent updates but this isn't something I would likely spend more than a couple hours messing around with since it is fairly limited. I will say though that this is another really good example where they got the visuals and focus to a place where it all looks super crisp. 

 

Tilt Brush

This is definitely one of the best things on VR and is usually the second thing I show people after TheBlu. The effect of being able to draw in thin air all around you with dozens of different clever brush types is incredible and never gets old. I'm not much of an artist though so I tend to spend less time trying to draw a hobbit hill around my body and more time loading up the various drawings from the community that you can watch being painted in real time. There are a ton of them too so it's great to just sit there and watch an amazing 3d painting slowly spring up around you as you space out to some good music.

 

Google Earth VR

This is also one of the best things on VR and is usually the third thing I show people who are trying VR for the first time. My wife almost cried when she put it on and found her way to the house she grew up in. It defaults to a large scale mode where you feel like you are about the size of Godzilla but in the settings you can change it to human scale so you can get right down to street level. Unfortunately, the images are just not high enough resolution for it to look all that great at human scale. However, if you go to some of the more nature-y spots like the grand canyon, the resolution issues are less noticeable and it tends to look much better. Regardless of any issues with image resolution, this is still very very cool and can be quite breathtaking at times. Also being able to reach up and grab the sun to move it around and make a nice sunset is really great. And the music they have woven into this complements it very nicely as well, making for a super relaxing experience.

 

Universe Sandbox

Another extremely cool experience. From my perspective, possibly one of the coolest things I've ever had the opportunity to play with. I love that it is basically a god simulator where you can load up various scenarios and start chucking asteroids and planets into other planets and suns and then start firing lasers at everything and then slow down the time scale and watch as armageddon spreads across a planet in slow motion. And it also helps that this game has a phenomenal, sweeping soundtrack that makes you feel like everything happening is beyond epic.

 

One of my favorites is loading up Saturn and just sitting there as I watch it peacefully spinning 5 inches in front of my face, then launching an Earth into orbit around Saturn and watching Earth's gravity gobble up Saturn's rings and seeing the spots of fire from the ring debris spreading across Earth's surface as it continues it's orbit. It's just a beautiful thing to watch.

 

Another time I shot probably 30 or 40 Neptunes into orbit around Jupiter and almost puked because the framerate tanked. But I stuck with it and was rewarded with a bunch of really cool explosions and crazy chain reactions as all of the Neptunes slowly collided with each other and with Jupiter until they had eventually all merged into one entity.

 

Then there are the simple pleasures like shooting Jupiter into a Mercury-like orbit around the sun and watching it slowly change color into a gross burnt Jupiter. Or smashing two suns into each other and slowing time down to watch a super nova spreading towards and eventually engulfing me.

 

There is just some kind of a specific primal enjoyment that I get out of this experience that I haven't really experienced with anything else.

 

Thumper

This is probably one most people are very aware of but it is indeed incredible. When I play this game I feel like it penetrates into the very fabric of my being. Getting locked into the rhythm feels so good and it feels like constant sensory overload, but in a really good way. I'm only two levels in and I very much look forward to getting through the rest of this game. If you want to feel like you are on some kind of psychedelic substance, but don't want to actually take a psychedelic substance, this is the perfect game.

 

Cloudlands Minigolf

This is a great co-op game and a surprisingly well done miniature golf game. The controls are as intuitive as they get (since your Vive wand is the putter and the tracking is good enough to not require any action beyond just swinging your putter) and when I had a couple friends over, we were immediately able to jump in with almost no explanation. It's got a ton of courses as well as a built in course editor and with recent updates, there are pretty much unlimited options since community courses have been woven in with the default ones. It was awesome playing super complex courses like a par 42 hole where the ball went through loop de loops and got shot out of cannons to other parts of the course as it slowly made its way to the hole.

 

The crazy courses are especially good for co-op so each person gets a few minutes with the headset before handing it to the next person. Shorter courses can be a bit more cumbersome with the constant passing back and forth of the headset but we fell into a rhythm pretty quickly and had a great time. I definitely look forward to playing more of this and am surprised more people aren't singing its praises.

 

Anyways, yeah, VR is pretty alright and I'm glad I bought in. And also, I missed everyone around here and hope everyone is doing well.

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Oh, and one more that I forgot!

 

Vivecraft

This is the latest and greatest Minecraft mod optimized for the Vive. It works with the latest version of Minecraft and works with multiplayer servers as well. I tried it out last night and was able to tour the latest multiplayer server that my friend and I have been working on for the last year. It was absolutely breathtaking seeing all of our hard work and creations up close and personal and is definitely right at the top of my list of best VR experiences. I just hope my friend gets a Vive too so we can take our Minecrafting to the ultimate next level (even if it does make things a little more cumbersome).

 

What is also great about this is that they went to extra lengths to make the interactions more intuitive. Swing your Vive wand while holding a sword and it swings your sword. Likewise, mine blocks by physically swinging your pickaxe. They even went as far as to make the bow more realistic to where you need to set your arrow and go through the motion of pulling it back and releasing the trigger to fire the arrow. And the scale of everything is really impressive too. Considering the blocks are supposed to each be 1 cubic meter, you can never really appreciate that scale until you are immersed in it. And also, riding around our crazy minecart tracks is really vomit inducing, but in a good way.

 

If you like Minecraft and have a VR headset, you absolutely have to check this one out.

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Hey thanks Gorm, good to see you too!

 

I had one final thought I wanted to share based on my VR experiences. If you have any expectation of a wealth of good VR content on YouTube 360, don't bother. I downloaded Virtual Desktop, which is a solid app and does everything it needs to do, but after spending several hours trying to find good content on YouTube, I ultimately gave up. What is there is really weak compared to the dedicated experiences you can purchase. It isn't that there aren't interesting videos; there are actually a lot of cool skydiving videos and things of that sort. The problem is that almost everything I found was filmed with a basic "360" camera, not a "Stereoscopic 360" camera. The result is that nothing in those videos pops out and feels like it's right in front of you the way other proper VR experiences do. Unfortunately, this greatly diminishes the wow factor that is present with true VR experiences and it feels more like you are watching everything on a flat screen that surrounds your body. So yeah, it's cool that it is all around you but you don't for a second feel like you are actually "there". With that said, I did find a small handful of stereoscopic 360 videos that looked okay, but even those weren't very impressive and the resolution seemed to fall short of my expectations.

 

Unfortunately, with a few exceptions here and there (Vivecraft being the most notable one), the best experiences seem to be the ones that aren't free.

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On 1/12/2017 at 5:14 PM, Dewar said:

I have a friend who's been playing a bunch of Elite Dangerous in VR, so I'm looking at the Oculus Rift again. I don't have much room in my computer room. so I wouldn't be able to play room-space type stuff, but it seems there's a ton of cockpit type experiences out there that would be pretty cool.

There's plenty of good stuff that isn't room-scale, even with the Touch controllers (that I don't have yet).

 

As might be expected, cockpit games translate really well, but I think third person games where you are the camera work surprisingly well too. 

 

I am still absolutely loving Thumper, although there's a certain type of obstacle I really can't handle well in VR... horrible little eels coming straight at my face! I had to beat the boss of that level in 2D, where the eels were far less gross.

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I got my Rift back in September, and still haven't gotten the Touch controllers. I've only played a handful of full games in that time, but I don't regret my purchase in the least. 

 

So far the ones that have really stood out to me have been Lucky's Tale and House of The Dying Sun. 

 

Lucky's Tale is just impressive. I honestly thought that showing off VR with a 3D platformer was a bit dumb... until I played it. But it's actually awesome. The whole idea of your head being the camera just works really well. 

 

HOTDS is my favorite VR game I've played so far. Disclaimer: I haven't played Elite: Dangerous yet. But I loved how it was kind of an arcade take on space dog-fighting. I had so much fun with this one and recommend it for sure.

 

I did recently get my hands on Thumper and have played through the first boss. It's definitely intense. Though as a fan of Lightning Bolt from "back in the day," I expected nothing less when I had heard about the game's development.

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With a bunch of Birthday money, and my wife's generosity, I received an Oculus yesterday. It's pretty much everything I dreamed of. I played for 4 hours or so, barely any motion sickness, so now I've ordered the touch controllers to go along with the headset.

 

Minecraft Win10 edition: There's disclaimers all over this thing that it's still in beta, and I see why since it was the only game that made me sick at all. I turned on the VR turning and had to sit down rather than stand, but I got used to moving forward with the analog stick and it was fine after that. I definitely can't play the extreme mode though.

 

Lucky's Tale: I'd agree with folks earlier in this thread and say it's a really nifty way to show off VR. Relaxing and gentle.

 

DarkNet: I was looking at this ever since I saw it at PAX, but it came out VR exclusive, so I haven't had a chance to play until now. It's basically a timed puzzle game and there's no reason it really has to be in VR, but the developers use the VR aesthetic so well that I can't imagine play it any other way.

 

Elite: Dangerous: I didn't end up playing a ton of this, since I've been putting a lot of hours into it lately, but man it's breathtaking. At the same time, the visuals are probably the least crisp of any of the games I played. That's understandable since the other things I touched were going for a more cartoony look, but I've been looking at some tips to get it looking better so we'll see how it goes.

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Can we be friends? Actually that goes for any of y'all. I'm clyde.aesthetic on Oculus.

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If anyone is trying to put Medium sculpts into Unity, this is video is essential.

 

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