Do you dabble in VR?

[Jonathan Capps]

I’m curious how many among you have some sort of VR setup. With the Oculus Quest 2 it’s finally got to the point of being affordable for me so I’ve had one of those for the last few months and I love it, to the point that I’m currently developing something for it. So I’m curious what you, potential alpha and beta testers, might have if anything.

PCVR? Quest? Cardboard? GearVR? Other?

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

I’m waiting for the groin attachment to be honest.

[Dave]

I had one but a knight escaped from it so I got rid.

[GlenTokyo]

I’ve got a Valve Index, I love VR, tried a Vive about 5 years ago and was hooked. Had a Vive a few years ago but sold it when I moved, but once you’ve tasted it it’s hard to give up.

Obviously one of the points of me getting it was to make something Red Dwarf related in it, but I’ve yet to finish anything.

[Jonathan Capps]

I’d love to try a high end headset at some point. As much as I love my Quest I’d love more FOV, especially, but I’d never swap what I have for anything that wasn’t a standalone device as well.

I’ve been using Unity to develop little things for it, and it’s amazingly easy. I have Quest and PSVR builds just working almost straight away.

[GlenTokyo]

Yeah Unreal is the same, you can just load a preset for VR and you’ve got the skeleton of the game. And you can use nodes so it doesn’t matter if you don’t know how to code which is great because the only programming language I know is Sinclair 128 Basic.

The standalone thing is fair, it’s a bit of a bollock the initial set up, though I’m a big proponent of outside in tracking, but Facebook selling at a loss means competition has no chance if they wanted an headset with similar specs to an Oculus one outside of their ecosystem.

[Jonathan Capps]

Yeah, I’m not proud to have fallen for Facebook’s strategy. I was pretty close to deleting my whole account and now they’ve got me locked in, the bastards.

I’d be really curious to try properly lighthouse tracking. I’ve been absolutely amazed at how well the inside out tracking works on the Quest but I bet it’d be nice to remove those occasional blips you get.

[GlenTokyo]

Yeah, I’m not proud to have fallen for Facebook’s strategy. I was pretty close to deleting my whole account and now they’ve got me locked in, the bastards.

I’d be really curious to try properly lighthouse tracking. I’ve been absolutely amazed at how well the inside out tracking works on the Quest but I bet it’d be nice to remove those occasional blips you get.

I imagine the amount of time it really matters having outside trackers is probably a single figure percentage to be honest, but for me it’s the fact that you can track other things outside of the headset if you have the trackers.

I want to kick stuff in VR, so getting a couple of Vive trackers is on my to do list so I can have leg tracking.

[Jonathan Capps]

Oh man, that reminds me of my first VR ‘solution’ I tried at the start of lockdown. With barely any money to dedicate to it, I got a second hand Oculus Go and hooked it up to software that would emulate a Vive and stream to the headset. All very lovely, but the Go has no proper tracking so I then ended up getting a Kinect and using more software to get some really, really flakey head and hand tracking working. It was basically unusable but it was a lot of fun. And as a side effect I also had foot tracking, but that was also about as reliable as you’d expect.

[GlenTokyo]

Oh man, that reminds me of my first VR ‘solution’ I tried at the start of lockdown. With barely any money to dedicate to it, I got a second hand Oculus Go and hooked it up to software that would emulate a Vive and stream to the headset. All very lovely, but the Go has no proper tracking so I then ended up getting a Kinect and using more software to get some really, really flakey head and hand tracking working. It was basically unusable but it was a lot of fun. And as a side effect I also had foot tracking, but that was also about as reliable as you’d expect.

Between Vive and Index I only had a PSVR and wanted to play the Steam games I had, that was equally janky, lots of dodgy driver software off the internet that let my PC recognise the PS camera and the move controllers, and the best part, a Poundland USB flexible inspection light with a spherical diffuser for the LED, attached to my head for head tracking because it was recognised as a Move (software couldn’t recognise the PSVR goggle lights).

That wasn’t really worth the effort, barely worked and it was a nightmare to set up. I just really didn’t want to have to buy Superhot again.

[King_Rocket]

I rock an Original Rift, I was tempted by later headsets but the increase in resolution just isn’t enough of an upgrade to make the purchase worthwhile.

Hopefully the Quest 3 is the one I’m waiting for.

Anyway done a lot of testing for various projects due to having good “VR legs” (ie. no nausea even in sub optimal situations.)

[Jonathan Capps]

I rock an Original Rift, I was tempted by later headsets but the increase in resolution just isn’t enough of an upgrade to make the purchase worthwhile.

Are you much bothered by the wireless aspect? I have to say, the Quest being standalone and now so good with streaming from the PC is pretty much the biggest selling point for me.

[Jenuall]

I just wish it was a little bit more affordable. There are lots of things I would like to try out in VR (from a playing perspective but also in terms of development/experimentation) but I simply can’t justify the cost

[Jonathan Capps]

I just wish it was a little bit more affordable. There are lots of things I would like to try out in VR (from a playing perspective but also in terms of development/experimentation) but I simply can’t justify the cost

It’s definitely going in the right direction for you. Facebook like your data more than your money so they’ll keep subsidising the Quest line more and more, I’m sure. So long as you don’t mind the downsides…

The main problem is that the software is always too expensive and very rarely goes for cheap because the audience isn’t big enough to justify it. I’m sure that will get better as more people adopt VR, though.

[Jenuall]

Yeah there has been significant progress, the Quest 2 has been the closest I have got to pulling the trigger on a VR setup. But it still feels just that little bit too much, and I keep coming back to the view that “if I’m sticking down multiple 100’s of cash on this thing I want it to last/be a ‘premium’ experience” and of course that isn’t necessarily the case with the Quest, good though it is.

Like you say with regards to the software a lot of the difficulty is that it still hasn’t managed to break into the mainstream and so the cost is likely to remain high due to good old economies of scale.

[Jonathan Capps]

If it helps, they’ve done a hell of a lot of make the Quest feel premium. I’ve not had any problems with tracking, the resolution is basically as high as any other headset out there at the moment, it supports 120hz now, and so long as you don’t mind the trade-off that comes with streaming, the wireless nature of it is incredible. The only thing I wish they’d pushed a bit more is the FOV.

[Jenuall]

That does all sound very positive, thanks for the info!

More than anything I just want to play Half Life Alyx and to have as good an experience as possible without selling a kidney!

[GlenTokyo]

I just wish it was a little bit more affordable. There are lots of things I would like to try out in VR (from a playing perspective but also in terms of development/experimentation) but I simply can’t justify the cost

It’s definitely going in the right direction for you. Facebook like your data more than your money so they’ll keep subsidising the Quest line more and more, I’m sure. So long as you don’t mind the downsides…
The main problem is that the software is always too expensive and very rarely goes for cheap because the audience isn’t big enough to justify it. I’m sure that will get better as more people adopt VR, though.

With Oculus can you only buy games from their shop? No external sales or anything? Because in my experience I’ve only paid more than £10 a couple of times for VR games, thanks to Steam sales, GOG/CDKeys etc, and humble bundles.

Maybe now they’re going to start putting adverts in games Oculus will see prices go down. I suppose that’s the one potential benefit of a shitty situation.

[Jonathan Capps]

With Oculus can you only buy games from their shop? No external sales or anything? Because in my experience I’ve only paid more than £10 a couple of times for VR games, thanks to Steam sales, GOG/CDKeys etc, and humble bundles.

With a bit of setup you can set your account as ‘developer’ so you can sideload what you like. There’s an external store called Sidequest that makes this nice and easy.

Other than that, you can use the USB or Wireless streaming so your PC just treats it like a Rift so you can play absolutely any PCVR game you like.

[peas_and_corn]

>With Oculus can you only buy games from their shop?

No, you can buy games from steam and play them on the Oculus (rift at least), it’s what I do to give the the flexibility to change to a different brand when I upgrade.

VR is *fine*, but honestly… I don’t like gaming while standing up. That plus the fact there are few proper full games as opposed to what I refer to as “experience games” and wonky ports limits its appeal. For me VR ports overwhelmingly cause me nausea problems- I have several Serious Sam ports, they all make me ill, and Thief Simulator VR has a real short time period I can play.

There are some great games out there- Half Life Alyx is really the only game I can list as a full length game that I’m aware of and what I’ve played is wonderful. Blade and Sorcery is the best experience game I can think of, stabbing people in VR is pretty cathartic but limited in scope. The dev is going to put in a mode with some sort of progression because it’s still in Early Access so the game is still limited. Beat Saber is always recommended, but only if you use mods. The base game is too focused on upselling overpriced song packs.

Duck Season is fine, I’ve only done part of it but in terms of a VR duck hunt it’s good, and without going into spoilers uses its ‘living room in the 90s’ setting in an interesting way.

Boiling Steel is broken.

And for the last few to mention (as I’m sure you aren’t interested in me listing everything I have), HoloBall is a pretty fun squash-like game, and Soundart has the advantage of generating maps (unlike Beat Saber) but has a lot of limitations and features missing (can’t do flac, doesn’t have room rotation in options).

[Jonathan Capps]

Yeah some of the hastily put together (and often full price) VR ports are awful. I tried Borderlands 2 VR because I got it in the Humbler Bundle and it was fucking abysmal. But then I don’t really like Borderlands or Gearbox in general anyway.

[GlenTokyo]

The Bethesda ones are basically unplayable without modders doing the developers work for them too.

VR Games are like electric cars, need to be ground up developed for the purpose really or they’re compromised.

A shame because I’d love Starfield to get a good VR port.

[Jonathan Capps]

I was actually really impressed with how good No Man’s Sky’s VR support is these days. Definitely worth checking out if you haven’t. Just… don’t press the jetpack button. Ever.

[King_Rocket]

Are you much bothered by the wireless aspect? I have to say, the Quest being standalone and now so good with streaming from the PC is pretty much the biggest selling point for me.

I won’t lie, I am super tempted to get the new Quest as I have insanely good wifi and getting a PC VR wireless experience is very appealing. (I’ll probably buy one now that you made me think about it again.)

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