168 replies to this topic

[Mechwarrior Buddah]

having to have a puke bucket by my computer is a turn off for a computer peripheral

[General Taskeen]

The Oculus Rift thing seems to be geared towards hardcore simulation. I think its supposed to support Star Citizen too. The idea being that you can control an in cockpit panel virtually, which I'd like to see with Rift or some other future tech down the road. I would much prefer something like this for the DCS games where you have to click through 50 buttons to start up a Black Shark Helicopter, for instance.

Edited by General Taskeen, 17 March 2013 - 05:58 PM.

[Mechwarrior Buddah]

General Taskeen, on 17 March 2013 - 05:55 PM, said:

The Oculus Rift thing seems to be geared towards hardcore simulation. I think its supposed to support Star Citizen too. The idea being that you can control an in cockpit panel virtually, which I'd like to see with Rift or some other future tech down the road. I would much prefer something like this for the DCS games where you have to click through 50 buttons to start up a Black Shark Helicopter, for instance.

Yeah not the arcadey shooter masquerading as a sim

[Balsover]

General Taskeen, on 17 March 2013 - 05:55 PM, said:

The Oculus Rift thing seems to be geared towards hardcore simulation. I think its supposed to support Star Citizen too. The idea being that you can control an in cockpit panel virtually, which I'd like to see with Rift or some other future tech down the road. I would much prefer something like this for the DCS games where you have to click through 50 buttons to start up a Black Shark Helicopter, for instance.

You dont think turning your head to look out your mechs side cockpit window wouldn't be amazing? I've tried Mechwarrior 2 with the old IO Glasses years ago, and you could do this. I cannot describe the feeling of almost falling off my chair trying to turn my head to track a mech as it walked past me. The feeling of being in that cockpit was incredible.

[BlackWidow]

Kylere, on 15 March 2013 - 11:01 AM, said:

I already laughed at this once, now I laugh at it again. Go find a mature game and pressure them to waste time with less than beta level hardware.

Occulus Rift is going to be about as widely adopted and supported as Microsoft Bob

Tell yah what....let's come up with some numbers and make a wager.

If I'm right...you buy me Rift when they go gold. If you're right...I'll give you the cash equivalent since you're obviously not interested in the hardware.

So what is a good number? 50 titles offering official support? Cause that number would be WAY easy to hit. All you need is CryEngine support, Unreal 3 support, Valve Source support and iD Tech 4/5 support. Then (with only possible GUI modification for each title) all the games made with those engines would be added to the list.

Ding! Times' up. There is already support for all those engines.

[Haniwa]

OR will change the gaming market tremendously, but it will launch in 2 or 3 years earliest. Lets see, if mwo is still online then.

[Adridos]

Haniwa, on 18 March 2013 - 07:59 AM, said:

OR will change the gaming market tremendously, but it will launch in 2 or 3 years earliest.

Just like 3D...

Both are almost the same. Old idea having another of numerous attempts at glory.

Edited by Adridos, 18 March 2013 - 08:14 AM.

[MrLexx2k]

Wrong. Cinema 3D is a gimmick, Rift is the next step in virtual reality. There is a huge difference between looking at a 3D screen and being *inside* a 3D screen. I don't know how much fun it will be to play games with it, but in any case it is a huge step forward in technology.

[Zaptruder]

Adridos, on 18 March 2013 - 08:13 AM, said:

Just like 3D...

Both are almost the same. Old idea having another of numerous attempts at glory.

This probably comes from a mindset that also fervently wishes that Mechs will one day be a real strategic asset on the battlefield.

[Taemien]

Adridos, on 18 March 2013 - 08:13 AM, said:

Just like 3D...

Both are almost the same. Old idea having another of numerous attempts at glory.

Sometimes it takes a while.

Like the Mouse:



1960s

to



2010's


Don't ever count out a new technology just because it fails at first. The Mouse didn't become mainstream in PCs till the late 80's early 90's. And even then it wasn't used in games very much till the mid to late 90s. It took over thirty years to become useable and only because it was a standard GUI interface. Then 40-50 to make them just for gaming.

VR stuff may take longer. But I will say this, being able to look one way and aim in another will be a neat new feature in FPS's in the future, hopefully near future.

Edited by Taemien, 18 March 2013 - 12:13 PM.

[RG Notch]

Matthew Craig, on 15 March 2013 - 08:39 AM, said:

Figured I'd share my thoughts quickly, first off to those saying it's a gimmick I don't think that's true saying VR has been tried many times before and failed is accurate, but you have to look at why it failed and if there's been any break-throughs in the areas where it failed.

I've also kept a close eye on VR tech and from my perspective 3 things holding back VR tech have been price, resolution and latency. Looking at the Oculus the price seems very reasonable and in range of what would be expected for a consumer device. The resolution while not perfect seems acceptable and Carmack has helped make significant strides on the latency so I don't think the word gimmick is fair, though whether or not it truly reaches the level required for wide spread consumer adoption remains to be seen.

We're certainly paying attention and I'm looking forward to attending Nate Mitchell's talk at GDC this year regarding the Oculus to learn more about the details. My expectation without having done extensive research but having read Carmacks article on latency, is that getting down to that 20ms latency barrier that really makes the whole experience work is going to be a significant challenge especially for games with a high level of visual fidelity.

What Carmack is talking about is really the beginnings of a new wave of renderers that operate fundamentally differently from what we currently use. Minimal rendering times have been important for many years but when your trying to attain the levels of fidelity of a modern game within 5-10ms you're really talking about a significant re-factoring of how your renderer fundamentally works.

Many modern engines still have renderers that are largely sequential, draw x objects in one pass, draw x objects in the next pass etc. we're starting to see though that to truly leverage the power of modern GPUs this has to shift to massively wide and parallel tasking which is likely the path to attaining these types of rendering speeds for complex scenes. This has already started somewhat with DX11 and is one of the reasons we want to move to DX11 as we already suffer from these sequential bottlenecks that are starting to be addressed and removed in DX11 and features like this one linked below open the door for developers to work around these bottlenecks.

http://msdn.microsof...s/hh994919.aspx

There's also significant support/development required in the display drivers themselves to ensure we don't just move the bottleneck to the driver level, where the game renderer is requesting large parallel workloads but the driver is still processing it sequentially.

Ultimately I don't get the sense that the Oculus is a gimmick but I do get the sense that it will require a lot of hard-work and similar breakthroughs from developers to truly unlock the full potential of the device which won't happen over night. I don't see any reason we shouldn't start though as the potential is very exciting.

So big long post saying it may not end up being a gimmick, but it's still a gimmick. Just because smart people are working hard on a gimmick fails to raise it to not being a gimmick. Gimmick is as gimmick does. So please don't waste any real time on this. I mean by all means tell the first adopters you are looking into it. That doesn't hurt anyone, just keeps them thinking it will be supported. Its not like this game is feature complete and bug free where the team can start looking at silly stuff like this.

[DarkhorseBW]

i know it will be a hot minuite before anyone even thinks of adding this in, but it seems like it would be just perfect. There is already the ability to look around the cockpit, so the base programming is already there. It would just be so much cooler to be able to look at all the status screens in real time.

[Zaptruder]

RG Notch, on 19 March 2013 - 05:42 AM, said:

So big long post saying it may not end up being a gimmick, but it's still a gimmick. Just because smart people are working hard on a gimmick fails to raise it to not being a gimmick. Gimmick is as gimmick does. So please don't waste any real time on this. I mean by all means tell the first adopters you are looking into it. That doesn't hurt anyone, just keeps them thinking it will be supported. Its not like this game is feature complete and bug free where the team can start looking at silly stuff like this.

The depth of ignorance in this post is staggering. It goes beyond willful ignorance right back around to plain ignorance. Astounding.

It's not just ignorance really. It's just a complete lack of imagination for something better than status quo.

I mean... the idea that been visually/spatially teleported into virtual worlds is a gimmick... is just such a fundamental failure of vision and thinking, that it can only be uttered by someone so mired in the current norm of things, that they can't see beyond the literal flat screen in front of them.

Edited by Zaptruder, 29 March 2013 - 12:23 AM.

[Azze]

I rather not they use their very limited resources for some gimmicky peripheral that isn't even released.

[Randall Flagg]

Lawnmower Man poster in my Atlai cockpit viewed through an Oculus Rift® ? SOLD. once the resolution gets to 1080p on both screens and I can verify its a low input lag headset I'd spend upwards of a 1k$ for it...easily.

[M0rpHeu5]

Looks expencive and could be op so, not atm.

[Alois Hammer]

Surely PGI will get all over this once they've worked out the final details of the Razer Artemis.

[Viper69]

Alois Hammer, on 29 March 2013 - 08:42 AM, said:

Surely PGI will get all over this once they've worked out the final details of the Razer Artemis.

Or my TrackIR or even my Hotas period.

[von Pilsner]

Here is a dev preview by Jason Williams (of the simulator Rise of Flight) with a hands on test of the Oculus Rift...

Quote

Hi everyone,

I know there are several of you here that are interested in the Oculus Rift device and have been writing us encouraging 1C/777 to adopt it for BOS and ROF so I thought I would make some comments. There has been much hype surrounding this new product on the web and it bills itself as a revolutionary product that will finally give PC gamers an amazing Virtual Reality experience. I just returned from the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco where I was able to finally put one on and check it out. Here are my impressions and comments. And please note I make these comments as objectively as possible with absolutely no agenda. I applaud ANYONE who tries to create innovative products and improve gameplay. Due to my varied experiences as a former TrackIR product manager at NaturalPoint, a product development director making gaming devices and a sim developer, I feel I am in a peculiar position to comment on this new device as I saw it at GDC. I hope the Oculus is a success and PC gaming can continue to be seen as the most innovative gaming platform. Of course, as simmers, there will naturally be comparisons to the TrackIR as both are VR devices albeit with different approaches. Oculus can be described as first-person VR and TrackIR as fishbowl VR.

So, after spending a week in snowy, freezing Moscow with the team I was looking forward to a nice cruise up to San Fran in the California sun to check this thing out. I previously crashed their office hoping for a demo, but was not afforded an opportunity, so I trekked 500 miles to give it a look see. The Oculus was the belle of the ball and a huge line formed each day for attendees to give it a whirl. But seriously, if you are a twenty-something aspiring game developer, a simple shower with soap and water will do wonders. Why must gamers reinforce the stereotype? But I digress….

So after an hour in line I had a chance to put the goggles on my head. I also attended the seminar/presentation that the Oculus team put on later that day.

Read the rest of the dev preview here

[Fishbulb333]

"Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth."

Jean-Paul Sartre

Edited by Fishbulb333, 31 March 2013 - 04:00 AM.