Could you write a review in about half a year? I'm interested in how it holds up in the long run.

I'm planning on doing a video review sometime during the spring (if school doesn't eat me alive.) I thought it was a gimmick when it was first announced but after some positive reviews I decided to go for it. After 10 hours of use it has felt like a pretty solid product with a lot of versatility. Though I've only tried playing two games seriously with it, Beyond Good and Evil, and Kotor, which felt natural, though tinkering with Dark Forces and Surgeon Simulator has felt a little weird with the mapping available.

Hey man we should recently purchase some Pho soon.

Turok - 4.99e
Worms: Armageddon - 2.99e
some UE4 asset - 17.75e

another UE4 asset - 52.98 eur

moar assets - 39.99 e

oar massets - 30.59 e

Didn't get even more assets for a combined sum of 96.37 euros

Just bought a Vive. I'll let everybody know how sick it makes me & how bad VR is.

VR-support in Gorc confirmed! :-p

I may be remembering a dream instead, but I am pretty sure I saw the Hall of Mirrors effect in a Black Mirror episode. (Or is that a subconscious brain fart based on the title?)

Although, I must admit it's been a long time since I've dreamt about JK.

Here's my review.

Sickness: I felt a little uneasy playing Vivecraft with WASD+mouselook, but it wasn't too bad and the feeling went away quickly. In retrospect, it's not a big shock that I wouldn't suffer much from simulation sickness; I've spent a lot of time and money self-experimenting with stereoscopic displays and it has probably destroyed my brain. My wife, on the other hand, almost threw up. What's strange is that she felt fine in Google Earth, which has similar perspectives and camera motions under a different context (spinning a human-scale 3D globe, versus walking through an environment). That suggests simulation sickness, a physiological response, may be partly based upon a conscious contextual component. It's... interesting? Philosophically challenging, maybe?

Goodness:

Head and controller tracking is 100% spot-on.

The motion controls are actually good, I mean like - what everybody imagined the Wii was going to be like before it came out, that kind of good. Honestly it's the best part.

The controllers have great industrial design and build quality. The headset is okay, but I'm a little less sure about it.

Badness:

Installation is annoying.

The base stations are a bit janky. They're roughly softball-sized, vibrating plastic cubes. They have a motor that's always on and there doesn't seem to be any way to turn them off. They have a 7-segment diagnostic display, which is mounted on the back circuit board, but you read through the front of the unit, while it's running, by staring through the infrared laser array, which is... um... well, a somewhat strange engineering choice. Also, they look ridiculous.

All of the AC adapters are super long and narrow, with the prongs sideways. This **** might have been nice 10 years ago, when people were still making power strips wrong, but in 2017 it is super obnoxious. I have a power strip that has the two base stations plugged into it, and there isn't room on it for anything else.

The display is hot garbage. Yes, I know they're state-of-the-art ultra high density OLED space alien displays, but it just isn't good enough. You can count subpixels on the Vive. I'm told it's not as bad on the Rift, but it's still bad enough. HMDs at this resolution are almost useless. Quadruple it, and then developers can start discussing VR seriously. Quadruple it again and normal consumers might adopt it.

Vive developers are putting way too much emphasis on room scale VR. It's a huge mistake; room scale consumer VR is not going to stick. One problem is that you need a huge, vacant room you can dedicate to VR, which is beyond extravagant. The bigger problem is that people actually want to sit down when they play video games, and no amount of novelty is going to keep them standing up for long. This isn't a hardware issue - Vive supports sit/stand mode just fine. It's a developer problem. They need to learn that they can't throw **** directly behind players. It gets old fast, especially when you're wearing a Vive 1.0 and have more cables coming out of the back of your head than a cyborg with brain cancer.

The controller layout could be better. There are two face buttons: an "in-game menu" button toward the top of the controller, and a "system menu" button toward the middle. These buttons should be reversed. The controller's also begging for something like a POV hat, which you'd be wrong if you said it wouldn't be useful.

Have you had any moments of unprecedented immersion where you're just like, whoa, dude?

No, but only because of the subpixel size. It is distracting.

Nope, they blank out your peripheral vision. Mystery solved.

Most user experiences I've read have said that the resolution is an issue in that you definitely notice it and it's distracting, but they soon sort of forget about it as immersion takes over. I'm sure a lot of people feel the same way as you, though. I've never tried VR but I'm pretty hyped about it. Here's hoping the necessary advances happen fast.

When I used VR for the first time (an Oculus Rift), I noticed the pixelation immediately. It was a way in which I became aware within seconds how this technology will be improved over time. That, and also the limited field of vision.

The nausea also hits me pretty hard too.

I can't even read or use a phone when I'm in a moving car, without getting nauseated in an instant. As hyped as I am for VR, I feel like nausea might be a big problem for me.

Well, that's the problem, isn't it?

You need an 8X density increase in OLED displays, which I gotta think will be fairly difficult given how stubborn OLED has been so far.

Then, you'll need a computer that can drive that display. That's the hard part. Vive uses a 2160x1200 display, which isn't enough for VR to be great, but it's no joke either.

What I'm talking about as a practical minimum is 8640x4800, running at 80 FPS. That's beyond 8K UHD. A good new computer with a 1080 GTX can run games at 4K at 30 FPS or so, which means we're talking about a 12X minimum increase in GPU power to play current games at an acceptable VR resolution.

Most games use teleportation for movement through the environment, so you won't experience simulation sickness.

It's not really a problem for you, it's a problem for game developers.

Pft, kids these days. My first VR headset had a resolution of 640x480 @ 60 Hz. Combined. So each eye got only half of that. If you thought you'd have to puke from playing Descent, try playing it with that! It even had ****ty headtracking. My brother tried it out the other day. Sadly (or fortunately) it's busted beyond repair.

That reminds me, Impi, that for the longest time I played JK at 320x240 and without hardware acceleration. That's where it ran smoothly on my Pentium 120 MHz computer with on-board graphics. I didn't even realize it looked horrible even for the time until a schoolmate I was showing the game to pointed it out.

Brave. I considered getting an emagin z800 but never got around to it.

Don't judge me.

LeBaron GTC Turbo

This is absolutely correct. No one has really figured out how to make a room scale game that is more than a novelty at this point. It probably has it's biggest future in non-gaming applications. The most obvious obstacle to room scale is that a room scale game has to target only VR. The install base for VR isn't large enough to justify spending any significant money targeting it. The result is that you end up with crap indy games by kids right out of school who are all hype and no talent.

I can't understand how anyone thought this was going to pan out. People aren't going to buy an $800 game system without high budget content, and people aren't going to develop high budget content without a large user base. The only way to bridge the gap is to get people to develop cockpit games that work well on TVs and monitors, but are far more immersive on VR. Room scale is an idiotic, impossible approach to this even if anyone had figured out a way to make a decent game with it.

i've always felt the area where VR would be absolutely amazing would be driving and flight games...

look how many people who get super serious with their sims have multi monitor wrap around setups to try to achieve some small degree of what VR could just straight up give them

Yup! Almost a year after release and the best game is still The Lab, a free demo by Valve. Room scale VR demands a level of fit and polish that just isn't feasible for indies. But worse than that, human physiology also demands a gameplay style that is distinctively not game-like. I agree that the best application of room scale is going to be non-game applications, but the Vive is the wrong hardware for those applications.

This too.

I mean, don't get me wrong, room scale is really cool. It's cool enough that one really well-made, genre-defining game could move units. Valve could have made that game! They could have released it on day 0! But they didn't. The ****'s wrong with them?

You'd get simulation sickness from driving, probably. Either way the resolution is too poor for the kinds of hyper-detailed controls you get in realistic flight sims.

Sorry, don't know how to play this video :(
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wzzC-6T0Mk

Room scale is very cool. I just don't see that is has much to offer games. The trouble with room scale is that while it sounds huge when you think of it in terms of a controller, it's actually incredibly small and limiting in terms of game space. What exactly can you do with a game that you are limited to a room sized area at a time. Moveing beyond those boundaries involves awkward, weird teleportation, or similar. It's not an elegant solution. Given then limitation, I haven't seen a single example of a game-play prototype that would have lasting appeal here. I think the best you could do is some kind of puzzle game, but I don't see the target market for that buying expensive VR hardware.

VR does work well for driving and racing games. Having a still cockpit reference is important. Resolution limitations can be an issue, but you can fix that with an HMD style hud. I think the next gen of VR will have screens with very high pixel density, and reduce render resolution in less critical areas.

5m+ diagonal isn't too bad, if you have the space.... But yeah, in terms of present game design, movement is a huge problem. I've been thinking about game concepts and pretty much all I can come up with is "Papers, Please Special VR Edition". There's just not much else you can say about a device that's designed for fine motor control within a suspiciously bed-sized environment.

2D treadmill along with some space alien tech that can externally stimulate your inner ear?

Maybe the mistake is that we're all thinking about VR as an alternative display to put us in a convincing environment. Maybe we should just treat it as an alternative input device.

I really do thing Vive's biggest selling point is the sit down experience. Playing a space sim with it is basically the most awesome ****ing thing ever.

I 100% agree with Jon`C's assessment that the display itself is the biggest issue. It's not just the pixel density, it's the lenses and lack of peripheral that is most annoying. I can honestly deal with the "screen door effect" without problem, it's the other stuff that drives me nuts. Also having the IPD scale too limited (I'm just slightly too narrow for the range, so it's usable, but it hurts after a long period).

If they can move to a wider display at just one step up on the resolution (like to "4K"ish) I would be fine with that. It'll be hell to push at high graphics settings, but damn near every VR game isn't really pushing a lot of GPU anyway.

BTW Jon`C: the IR pods can supposedly be powered down in the Vive Steam UI. But that **** was hella buggy for me. The alternative I'm using is to just have one of them on a switch/power strip. When you unplug one of them, the other detects that after a short time, and enters a standby mode. Then when you switch the other unit back on, it wakes it up.

So we were near a Goodwill the other day and we popped in and I found this:

NASCAR Racing 2003 Season I found out several years back is the most desirable NASCAR racing game still to this day. I had 2002 season, hadn't messed with it for years, and was looking up something online when I found out that the next years one was the one to have. Turns out that EA got the license to make NASCAR games and this would be Papyrus' last go at it. I don't know if they did so intentionally to undercut EA but to this day new cars and upgraded graphics are still being released. It sells probably $40-50 in this condition on eBay. It cost me $3.50. NASCAR 4 was an included bonus.



Always wanted a big dictionary. Throw in a couple calculus books. $8.00 out the door.

New all steel cookset. So I can make it through the first few days of the coming collapse with hot ramen.

That Stewart book can probably net a pretty penny on Ebay.

Ten dollars.

EA made NASCAR games that leaned more towards the arcadey side of things and were also available on consoles... EA also played the ultimate dick move and got exclusivity deals on certain things where other companies were releasing a far superior product (and they still hold that deal with the NFL)

so people wanting a proper NASCAR sim were left with NASCAR Racing 2003 season... no other game since has matched it in this area and because no new copies are being made people get full on stupid with pricing on ebay

I sold my racing wheel on eBay a few years back because I figured I'd want a new one at some point. Unfortunately it's kind of hard to find a decent one that isn't expensive as hell. Used a 360 controller to test the program out. Brought back some memories. I cranked the sound way up and my boy ran downstairs because he thought it was a real car.

I actually thought "you know what, I'll refrain from posting this thread anymore in 2017" but then the forums died, so I'm bringing it back.

Samsung 1 TB SSD (External) - 449 EUR

I think they should do this, and look into some kind of FOV based rasterization scaling method. Like maybe only render full resolution in the center of the screen, and up-sample the periphery. If you could get good eye tracking, you could probably get away with only rending 2 Megapixels at a time.



This. Here are some games that would be fantastic on VR, and sell well to non vr users as well:

Rouge Squadron 5 (or whatever they are on)
Crimson Skies 3
X-Wing Alliance 2
Forza 3 Horizon with VR.
ect.

You need AAA experiences to sell VR, and you need to include non-vr users to fund AAA titles. There is litterally no other way to do this. Stupid VR only prototypes developed by dumb wannabe game dev under-graduates on a shoe string budget aren't going to cut it.

It's so obvious, and everyone behind VR are being so insanely stupid about how they push it. It's maddening.