Oculus - Quest vs Rift S

Foveated rendering without eye tracking is a gimmick

 

To me the screendoor on the Quest 2 is still clearly noticable, but arguably the poor black level of the display is a bigger issue for my immersion. I never really think about the FOV to be honest. I even use the glasses spacer on both my headsets, so it's an even smaller FOV than normal, but I'd want to have a better display and better lenses before even thinking about increasing the FOV.
IRL my nose is pretty big, so the stereo overlapping part of the FOV of my actual eyes is probably way below average, so I might be more used to staring straight ahead. Which may also explain why I disagree with this statement:

To me it's a performance tradeoff that I'm more willing to take than some other tradeoffs. But good to know some people don't like it.


@hippocoder I wondered why so many metal surfaces look so fake in the Quest demos that I've seen so far. Trying to find out more about the hardware limitations and not quite knowing what search terms to enter, I stumbled over a thread where you posted in and you seem to enjoy the challenge of getting the best visuals out of such a clearly defined hardware target. Are cubemaps for more realistically shaded surfaces too expensive, or do many devs just not care enough to make that performance tradeoff? I understand that you can't use a standard PBR shader on everything, but I was expecting to see more materials to at least use a roughness channel and a cubemap in the shader. Any idea why they seem to not do that usually?

 

Probably just badly spending their perf budget so they focus on trying to improve the wrong things.

 

You need to be very careful with your probe placement. Otherwise metal looks way off.

 

Thing is you move your eyes subconsciously all the time, if you detect a object in your peripheral vision you will have a quick gaze on it even without thinking about it. So eye trackign is a must for correct foveated. Otherwise it will just be a source of irritation

 

So, to give a little update on my VR experience in case anyone cares: I've finished all 31 beat saber campaign tracks, the first two OST volumes on expert, and I'm working my way through the third volume on expert. I have yet to manage doing a song on expert+, but I think I'll get there eventually, at least for some.

I was curious enough about PCVR that I installed win10 as dual boot on a new SSD and tried oculus link with a USB cable and wireless via ALVR. For "proper gaming" with detailed textures etc. I think the wireless quality isn't good enough for me to be happy with it. At least in ALVR and the way I had it set up. Oculus link via cable looked significantly better, even though it was just a USB 2 specced cable. I played a bit of Fallout VR and I'm not very motivated to keep playing. I don't think VR adds anything the way they ported it. Same with Doom3Quest sideloaded via sidequest. It's technically impressive to have the game run natively on the Quest2 and it looks pretty good, but I'm not immersed at all and don't think it being in VR adds anything for me, except nausea and discomfort.

The games that I played and think do really benefit the most from VR so far are Beat Saber, In Death:Unchained, and Superhot VR. I think it's no accident that they're so heavily promoted on the store and sell so well. Imho they understand the medium better and work well with it, instead of trying to retrofit VR into games that don't really benefit from it.

I'm still curious about Boneworks, a proper swordfighting game, and maybe HL:Alyx. But since my GPU really is struggling, I'm not sure it's worth jumping on those now. I was also surprised that for my immersion the "realism" of the graphics has basically no impact. If anything the attempt at realism seems counterproductive where it falls short.

 

Sent you a key so you can try properly implemented VR

 

I think vr sickness is a big deal for some, and can put them off trying it again later after they've obtained their VR legs.

 

That's why we demo our comfort mode in the tutorial so they know it exist

 

Thanks, I've tried it out and will post a little more detailed feedback later. But I wasn't able to properly try movement anywhere but in the tutorial level and the spawn crate, because within 10 seconds I get kicked from the server that I hosted with some message about "invalid height" and suspected cheating. I have no clue what is triggering it, I was standing and had the floor of the guardian calibrated to the right height, playing through ALVR. I have absolutely no clue what the game's problem is. I'll try again later or tomorrow with oculus link and cable, but maybe you can tell me before then what may cause this?

My first impression of the movement comfort options is that they they make it better, but only a little bit. It's not a night and day difference whether I switch it to 100% or 0%. Hard to say for sure when I can only move around in in that empty warehouse or the shipping container. It is quite distracting though to turn it up high, so I'm not sure I'd want to leave it on.

What does the "Est. heading" option do? I think this needs a better name or a description.

While sprinting and turning with snap rotation, the running direction no longer aligns with the view direction. That felt very disorienting, is it a bug or a feature?

Did you ever try reloading a pistol (beretta in my case) ingame with Oculus Quest controllers? It seems impossible to get them physically into the position that the game expects for a full reload, because of that tracking ring on the top of the left hand controller. I can only put the mag halfway in, and then have to turn the pistol upside down to let it slide in from gravity.

I don't play multiplayer anymore, but when will you have those bots finished?

 

When the game starts you calibrate your ingame Avatar. If we detect you are higher than 20% of this for a long time (10 seconds) we kick you for cheating (other wise you could make yourself a smaller target and run around as a midget ) But we should probably make that kick message even more clear to the player! edit: hmm, though host shouldn't be able to be kicked from his own game, bug!

Estimated heading tries to estimate were your body forward vector is and use that instead of movement controller. edit: we have a new version of this as a POC that uses machine learning

Its a feature. It simulates that it takes longer time to change your momentum, we talk about here, maybe should also mention it in the tutorial?

 

Ops pressed post before finnished.

We requested the Quest dev kit but didnt get one so game is completly untested with Quest / Quest 2. Before our big single player update we will need to buy one. I honestly don't know which interaction points you are using., But should be Rift interaction points. (Which are missing the rings) edit: They are not missing rings, but they are pointed down instead of up

Single player / coop will be done when its done

Thanks for the feedback btw!

edit: You probably need to leave the comfort mode somewhere close to a 27" monitor at normal view distance for it to work if you are really sensitive

 

I was still sitting during that calibration step, because I was planning to play like that. I only stood up later because the game didn't seem to offer a way to account for the incorrect viewpoint height. I recommend adding settings that allow seated play and improve the communication around your avatar calibration and anti-cheat measures. There must be a better solution than auto-kicking people too. E.g. you could force them back into calibration if you think they're cheating or the data makes no sense. Leave them exposed to get killed ingame while they recalibrate, and it should still serve its purpose without doing any false positive kicks.

Understandable you don't give timeframes anymore. Let's hope it doesn't take as long as Duke Nukem Forever .

I tried again at various settings. There doesn't seem to be a way to open that menu while ingame on a server, correct? If so I'd change that, otherwise it wasn't clear to me how to open it. I don't think I need the scoreboard available on each controller. And that screen could easily be more multifunctional via tabs or similar.

The comfort option for turning does very little for me at any setting. Smooth turning is just very uncomfortable. Snap turning should have more options imho, at the very least a selection between 30 and 45 degree turn snaps.

The comfort option for movement is slightly better. At max it makes walking maybe 30% less nauseating, but it is very distracting. I'd probably turn it off and just try to move less during play, if I was playing this solo.
Iirc google earth had a solution that works pretty well where it makes it look like you're static and standing on a grid plane, and the 3D world fades in like the edges of a hologram and it's more like scrolling a map instead of "flying".

I'm undecided about the implementation of the direction changes. But I think the implementation of the movement speed changes is among the better ones that I have played. Thumbs up for that!

The weapon models look really nice and the Beretta has a pretty good feel for it. Good job on those too. I would change a couple details on the models, to make it more realistic. E.g. when you look down the barrel of the Beretta, I think it should fade to black instead of showing the inside of the model. The reloading is problematic with the Quest controlers, and I'm not sure thumbstick press is a good choice for so many actions. I always find those really awkward to do on these controllers. I didn't check out the remapping options though, iirc you allow remapping those?

What really puzzled me, and I think is either a bug or a bad choice, is that you can't walk with a gun in each hand. When I carry an mp5 in one hand, keep walking, and draw the pistol with my other hand, then I can no longer walk after I stop for a moment. It makes no sense to not be able to walk with a gun in each hand.

With the sprinting I'm not sure you're reaching your balancing goals with the implementation that you have. I find it pretty awkward how you can't sprint when the gun is pointed a certain way, yet I can sprint with the gun held at eye level as long as it's pointing down, and can quickly snap it forward to get a quick shot off while stopping the sprint at the same time. This seems to me like it doesn't fully block the behaviour you wanted to block, but can still annoy players that didn't even intend to fire while sprinting, but just held their gun the wrong way.
Have you experimented with making sprinting gesture triggered with a sort of walk in place running motion of your arms? Supposedly movements like that are effective for reducing motion sickness for some people too, so it might both be more comfortable, immersive, and block sprint+run exploits in a more natural way? Alternatively, have you considered getting rid of sprinting as a "state" entirely, and instead modify movement speed by the type of gun carried? Fastest with all weapons holstered, slowest with a sniper rifle in your hands, and various steps inbetween according to weapon class?

Also during loadout, why can't I spawn with two pistols? I tried putting it in the primary slot first, which didn't work, so at first I didn't think this is a weapon slot at all. I think you need to add visual indicators for where you can slot things in during the loadout phase, and use some icons. Also I think it should be possible to spawn with 2 pistols and no rifle.
For a first time player it would also be helpful to mention you won't spawn with the weapon you are holding. I found it counterintuitive to grab a gun, click spawn, and then no longer hold the gun. Maybe if a suitable weaponslot isn't used yet, just allow spawning like this with the weapon drawn?

The thing that's bothering me the most, and that I really don't understand and don't think you'll be able to convince me is a good idea, is the insanely high lag between pressing the trigger and a shot going off. In practice this leads to the ridiculous situation that I can quickly press the trigger of any semi auto gun 10 times in a row, without a single shot being fired. This is completely immersion breaking for me. So if you had John Wick play your game, instead of doing quick double taps, he'd be confused why no shot is going off at all because he's releasing the trigger faster than your animation system can trigger the shots. Imho this is completely stupid. If there is a balancing reason for this, I'd say fix the balancing instead. But there is literally no shooter that I can think of, that doesn't go "bang bang bang", when I go "click click click" on the trigger button with a semi auto weapon. Shooting is the most basic element of the gameplay loop, I think such a high delay and failure to register input there is unacceptable.

I didn't try extensively, but it was my impression that throwing objects also is very awkward because they don't detach instantly when letting go of the grab button, is that possible? I didn't test that enough and so far throwing felt awkward to me in almost every game.

Have you considered branching out into a simple shooting range game? The way it is now, you've got some cool and immersive tech and ideas that would work very well in a singleplayer shooting range game, stuck in a multiplayer game that doesn't have a playerbase to play, and no shooting range level... If you could bring just that aspect of the game to the Quest 2, add some timed challenge modes that require to get good at reloading, and quick aiming etc. and you'd probably sell more units than you can expect to get from updating your main game with bots. That's my best guess at least.

Hope this feedback was useful to you!

 

We do not support seated at all Thats a good idea actually! Disable player and let him recalibrate. Or even kill him and return him to spawn area and let him calibrate there.

Snap turning IS a option



Untick that

About the thumb button being used. This indicates to me that you do not use Rift settings. Because there we bind to the buttons. Bring up the SteamVR menu and check the controller settings.



We must buy and fix good support for Quest 2 before we release our next big update, we cant ignore its market place.

About walking with two guns, with rift this is possible because we do not use the thumb stick for actions on the gun. But I suspect your binding is some kind of default Quest binding or something that is fubar

For vive and windows mixed reality you cant walk with two weapons' up because you need the trackpad to walk with. However if you start walking and unholster it does not stop walking until you stop walking now you cant start to walk again because now the buttons are reserved for actions on the gun.

We did some extensive playtesting with the sprinting actually. We implemented both the artificial sway and that we disable sprint while ADS after these play tests, before these mechanics players were running and gunning alot more. But could probably make ADS detection even better

Per weapon movement penalty is on the todo. Will probably be implemented before we release first LMG

Those bubbles are placeholders. We will have a modelled war-belt before leave early access. Maybe we could loosen up the rules so you can put pistols in the primary holster Interesting with not spawning with the weapon in hand, was pretty sure that was implemented, will investigate. But yeah, maybe add somekind of visual feedback during load out, though we hate visual indicators in VR more so in a realstic game like ours. Maybe instead have a step in tutorial were we show you the holsters, this will be a less of a problem once we have a proper war-belt.

The trigger is because you use a binding not made by us but a default binding for Quest by Valve. For knuckles the settings look like this



At 100% there is a physical clicker, here you fire off the round (no delay, it fires same frame). You need to return the trigger 40% for it to reset and you can shoot again (if not full auto). We are two activing shooters on the team and we have made sure the trigger settings are as close at it can be. In reality the wall is much sooner but since the clicker is were it is we cant do much. You can set it to engage earlier than 100% but then there will be no physical wall before bang.

Throwing objects is very dependent on the bindings, and it seems your bindings are way off But I think we can improve on throwing logic a bit. But its important not to overdo it Alyx / SteamVR unity demo have a implementation that makes throwing feel mechanical.

Actually we started out as a Shooting range sandbox, but then H3VR released and we pivoted towards MP shooter
edit: Though we will fix a kill house type scene along side the tutorial.
edit: The bots will not be bots for existing game modes. It will be a new game mode (or several) specific for SP / COOP..

Thanks, lots of great feedback. Will take them with me

 

I know. I meant it should have more advanced options other than "on/off". Other games allow setting different increments for how many degrees to turn per snap, and things like instant vs quick but animated snaps. I'd always want it instant, but if there are games that offer these options I assume there are people that want/need them.

I'll have a look the next time I boot up win10, but your game would be the first where I have to set anything myself, everything else worked fine out of the box so far. And I'm 100% certain the trigger was physically pressed to 100% and released again, and still no shot went off. I think it is because there is a delay between the finger movement animation and the real trigger press state. If this is somehow related to the controller mappings, something would be a very bad default there. In e.g. Fallout VR this was very different. I can't rule out the delay being some kind of input smoothing like the movement axis of the old Unity Input system when you press wasd keys, but then that setting would make no sense at all since the triggers are analog (but they don't have that additional click at the end).

Yeah, you'll find there are problems with controller tracking precision that you'll need to work around as well. They are very jittery, expecially for scoped weapons. Might need to do some smart input smoothing or similar there.

Good idea, that would be cool. Don't forget the "Switch to your other weapon, it's faster than reloading"-meme x].

 

Ah yeah, the least we could do is fix a drop down with angles to choose from.

It would be very strange if we had a bug that only targeted Quest. Letting SteamVR be the master of bindings is the way all native SteamVR are doing it. This is how it works with default Valve Index bindings. Look to the right at the bindings debug, look at the binding called Trigger it goes from 0 to 1. You can see it fires the moment it hits 1. And I need to pass below 0.6 for it to reset.

 

Seems like you do have a quest-specific bug... I definitely wasn't able to fire as fast as you could in that video.

But I'm relieved to hear this is just a gamebreaking bug and not a gamebreaking design choice .

 

Interesting when you have time please look at the binding setting for "Trigger pressed".

 

This menu is way too complicated for any normal user imho. All the Input control stuff that I've seen valve design seemed unneccessarily confusing. I would recommend to avoid users having to interact with this if at all possible.

As far as I could tell it is using Oculus Touch controls as default, and trigger click was mapped to trigger, and after mapping it to trigger pressed I was able to shoot waaay faster. It still was a bit unintuitive because the triggers have fairly far travel distance and low resistance, so unless actively trying to let it travel back 100% before a new shot can be made, sometimes I'd press again too soon. I would adjust that to be a bit more forgiving. But overall with the adjusted setting it worked much much better! Thanks.

 

We have had a feature request about that for 2 years now

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/openvr/issues/1047

We had a really nice in-game system before



Thanks for testing will revisit those settings again. But we hav had lots of Touch players in the user base. And we have carefully mapped these settings our-self using Touch controllers (for rift).

edit: does Touch have a physical clicker? I dont remember and dont have access to Touch right now. Both knuckles and Valve Wands have this which in a way simulates real firearms and the wall you need to pass before bang.

 

I can only talk about the quest 2 controllers that I have, and they don't have a physical click. There was a sort of simulated click from the vibration function, but that wasn't at the end of the travel path iirc and I assume it's something your game does? Or is it part of steam vr emulating that physical click?

 

SteamVR default has a vibration. We have disabled it for our bindings we want to control from code. When the gun goes bang, we vibrate from code. The physical click is nice becasuse then you can land there and wait until right moment to fire off a round

edit: if you have rebound Trigger pressed I bet that default StreamVR vibration is back

 

@neginfinity Good luck doding this seated (timecode 1:50)

Thats the PC mod with shadows, as it should be played btw

 

When HL:Alyx went on sale recently I gave it a go and it was worth it. Mostly runs fine on my gtx 1060, and I can deal with the parts where it doesn't. I didn't really expect to like it, but I actually quite enjoy playing it. I'm a little over halfway through I think (stopped right after the Jeff level), and I look forward to playing the rest of it. Might even do a second playthrough eventually.
But on the other hand it also kind of left me cold more than I expected. Somehow VR doesn't stir any emotions in me. It definitely won't make it into my top 10 games of all time list. Ask yourself this: would anybody care about this game, if it wasn't VR and didn't have the names Halflife and Valve behind it? Personally I don't think so. The gameplay - while fun - feels somewhat shallow and casual to me. I had hoped there to be a little more room for creativity and mastery of the gameplay systems. Or at least more challenge, I'm playing on hard and it still feels easier than it should be. Nowhere near as hard as I remember HL1 on hard to be.
I feel like games that use VR are still so caught up in making it work in VR and making the necessary concessions, that they severely underutilize the medium "game". Might be a dev cost thing, but shouldn't valve have an unlimited budget for games like this? Is it just too hard too make more complex game mechanics work in VR? Are players not up to it yet?

I've read that you have to manually raise the process priority of the ovr_server process. That seemed to fix the stutter for me when using a cable. I bought a 5m cable and haven't used ALVR since.

Oh, really?

Spoiler: don't read if you haven't played Alyx yet

I genuinely don't understand how you can get so hyped for this. I just finished that level and it just wasn't scary to me. It's entirely predictable, the game even literally tells you that Jeff is predictable. You throw something where you want him to go, Jeff goes there. You do your thing until you make a noise and need to evade and repeat. How on earth is this the best gamedesign you've seen in your life??? Have you skipped every all-time classic game ever? Never played a good survival horror game?
I liked the moment where you open a cupboard and a bottle rolls out that you can catch in time so it doesn't make a noise and you get an achievement for it, that was good use of VR hand controls. And I liked the moment where you're stuck in the lift together with Jeff and there's this short moment of ambivalence where you think "Ok, what do I do now?".
It was a fun level, definitely one of the best in the game so far. But if this wasn't VR and Halflife, no one would be talking about it imho.

I'm still playing with snap rotation, don't feel there's a benefit to changing that for me. I'm using a mix of smooth movement and "jump" to teleport. I still feel slightly sick if I use smooth movement for too long, but with how the controls and levels are laid out I don't have to. I use smooth movement for combat or certain parts of exploration, and I use teleport for longer distances or backtracking through known areas. That way I can play 2 hour sessions without feeling nauseous afterwards. Just my face hurts from the headset.
I play seated and use the "hybrid" stance change function. Overall I think this is a great implementation for accessible VR controls that work in seated mode too. The grav gloves are a brilliant alternative to picking up stuff from the ground - intuitive and fun to use.
One gripe I have: during combat, I often don't manage to grab a mag from the backpack, and I don't know what causes that, because putting them in there after picking them up is very reliable. Any advice for that? I've read grabbing over your head is supposedly more reliable, but I haven't tested that yet.

I have some more thoughts on VR gamedesign that I'd like to discuss, but I want to finish the game first. Probably should make a new thread for it anyway.