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Here's a bit o' history of cars in video games:
From Wipeout to Ridge Racer to Motorhead, the original PlayStation marked the inflection point where home console hardware finally caught up with the outsized ambitions of simulation-minded developers everywhere. At the same time, the success of classics like Gran Turismo on the sales charts helped cement the genre as a commercial force. But it was 1994’s Road and Track Presents: The Need for Speed—a mouthful of a title, especially for the starting point of a much-vaunted franchise—that served as one of the very first truly excellent home driving games. Developed by EA and originally consigned to the doomed early disc-based machine known as the 3DO, art lead Markus Tessmann distinctly recalls working around both the strict hardware limitations of the ailing console and the somewhat-strained budget assigned to the unproven team.
According to Tessmann, EA had cajoled him out of his decade-long career making top-flight 3D graphics for feature films and commercials with the promise that his expertise would help them make cutting-edge 3D games. But after etching a handful of traditional pixel-art games for the Sega Genesis, Tessmann began to grow exasperated. That is, until he heard about their next project. “They told us that they wanted us to make a driving game for the 3DO, and I thought that was great,” he says. “But then they told us that they wanted it to be a 2D game similar to Sega’s OutRun, or the hit game of the time, Road Rash. Just 2D bitmaps of cars that we’d scale, to give the illusion of depth. I was like, are you fucking kidding me? That makes no sense. It’s the 3DO, not the 2DO.”
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Monday April 30 2018, @04:47PM (5 children)
I'm still very skeptical on VR for most games, but eagerly look forward to it for auto racing (and other cockpit games like flight sims). Your character sits still and the controls are easy to find, but glancing over your shoulder to check a blindspot really adds realism.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday April 30 2018, @05:16PM
Portal Stories (free) mod for Portal 2 is a very fun intro to VR. I've also enjoyed Child of Ault. It shows how a good Tower Defense for VR can be made. Star Trek: Bridge Crew can be a very fun experience, but you do rely on your team mates in multiplayer. The main issue is with games like Fallout 4 where you have free movement. The free movement can be a bit awkward in that you feel like you're moving in a way you shouldn't be. So, you end up a bit nauseated. Everspace is a lot of fun, but suffers from the same nauseous inducing movement when you're in an enclosed space. Some of it may be from not good enough resolution / tech, but some of it may be unavoidable. I.E. in the real world, you may be susceptible to getting vertigo in a sunken ship while diving kind of thing. VR has huge potential and I've found it was worth the money I put into it. Even the wife has had fun watching some 360 videos, experiening theBlu, and riding a Roller Coaster or two from the free games section. The Roller Coaster experience is quite fun and neither of us had any "vertigo" issues. The only thing that was missing was rumble for the seat, some mist spray when hitting the water, and the experience of wind blowing in your face.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday April 30 2018, @06:14PM (2 children)
SpaceEngine [spaceengine.org] and other space simulators are a good use case for VR.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3-lbPpxUEw [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smyMRzS9QQM [youtube.com]
http://spaceengine.org/news/blog180302/ [spaceengine.org]
http://spaceengine.org/blog180320/ [spaceengine.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday May 01 2018, @02:12PM (1 child)
I play Elite:Dangerous on a PS/4 mostly as an explorer sometimes other roles and there are several trivia points about space VR sims:
1) On the PS/4 HOTAS installation and configuration is a roughly 10 second task; on a PC you have more selection of possible controller devices than the single thrustmaster product the PS4 has, so the UI you use for PC VR supposedly takes people hours to get working, all the joy of windows drivers stacked on top of obscure configuration issues. My point is if you go VR you'll need controls like a HOTAS that are sensible for VR use, and a 10 second job on a console is a couple hour job on a PC, choose your poison carefully. You probably need more than just a VR display device.
2) Likewise above the mapping is strangely not 1:1 so Eve:Valkyrie is available (although I've never tried it, and I'm not into WWI biplane air combat thinly reskinned, so ...) for VR on PS4 and PC, but Elite is only available for PC in VR (using the SteamVR occuluous or vive, etc) and not available on PS4-VR. So the ecosystem of games for a 2D LCD monitor is "every PC game ever made" making life pretty easy when you pick out a monitor, but when you select a VR display, you select a very small closed and usually shrinking subset of the VR game ecosystem... for example linux support for steamVR and Vive hardware is extremely rough, but regardless how it improves (or they give up and abandon linux like occulous did a year ago) you'll never play spaceEngine using linux/vive hardware because spaceEngine is closed source PC only no mac no linux.
Of course #2 isn't solely limited as a problem to VR; I seem to recall reading the three mac-using Elite players using boring 2D displays are soon to be screwed because handwave handwave something about apple's openGL being ancient means future elite versions using the newer opengl api will never run on OSX after date X sometime in the future. Or maybe they retracted that (maybe) or apple caught up to the modern world (LOL nah, apple would never do that). I would guess Elite playing mac owners will simply run windows on their mac, its not a hardware limitation but an OS limitation AFAIK. Which sounds like a PITA, and if you don't like PITA then VR is not going to be fun.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday May 01 2018, @06:02PM
They have Mac and Linux on their to-do list, which apparently people have paid for (crowdfunding stretch goal). However I think some people can already run it in WINE [winehq.org].
I can't speak to Linux support for Oculus or Vive, but there are other headsets on the market and hopefully the release of OpenXR [wikipedia.org] will improve the situation.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday May 01 2018, @01:37PM
The irony is that's how DriveClub works on a PS4-VR, but cars with good enough visibility to check their blind spots usually aren't the cars people want to drive. Or maybe rephrased, I can drive a truck in Spintires almost as well as a professional truck driver solely because I have external camera view while a professional driver can back up and so on just as well solely using eyes in the driver seat, which is 1000x harder. So a VR version of Spintires would be much less fun than non-VR because only experienced CDL holders could actually drive the darn truck in the VR version.
I got to play battlezone for a couple hours with the same PS-VR I tried for Driveclub and the biggest immersion win seems to be micromovements of head (like less than 20 degrees) naturally should result in the picture changing, as it does. Battlezone was not a very aerobic game in the sense of flailing around like the "Job Simulator" VR game, but the VR made it much more immersive.
Right now the main issue with VR is no clear message from programmers, mfgrs, or gamers on what the want and how to answer the argument of VR is for funky dance aerobics like job simulator or if it should be a unfortunately very expensive immersion aid like drvieclub or battlezone.
I am unfamiliar with how the vivecraft project implements VR for minecraft. If they use the model of having to physically turn your body 180 degrees to turn around and physically jump in order to virtually jump, it'll be described as authentic and cool and nobody will tolerate playing it more than a couple minutes because oddly enough manual mining is exhausting work. Yet if they implement it for micromovements and you still use keyboard/mouse to move your in-game body and do stuff, then people will say its not as cool and not technologically impressive or maybe not even call it VR, but they'll play it for 100 hours per week because the immersion would be awesome.
Maybe a simplification of the problem is nobody involved in VR knows if VR is supposed to be driven as "mouse look" or "movement keys" and there's a lot of people throwing a lot of money into hardware designs assuming one or the other. For example a boring accelerometer is "good enough" for mouselook, but you need elaborate 6D IMU spatial positioning technology to do VR-as-movement keys. Or another example, PS4-VR from last year or years ago or whatever is wired... people into VR as mouselook think wired is fine, the wire never gets in the way and my neck doesn't have to support heavy batteries and the wire is more than adequate for motionless body while head turns around or looks up occasionally. But people into VR-as-movement-keys rightly freak out over wires as they're going to trip fall or otherwise destroy the wire or hurt themselves as they do VR zumba or VR aerobics.