Games Oculus Rift

[Tom]

Well since you know fire is hot and hot is bad then it stands to reason the instinctive part of your brain would keep you away from what it thinks is fire. After all, you know that falling from a great height will hurt a lot, so you stay away from cliff edges, safe or not.

 

[old.user4556]

Everyone I've shown it to and done the same thing reacts in the same way.

That aside, do they enjoy the experience?

 

[old.Tohtori]

Two things i'd want from oculus, outside the usual gaming experiences;

Dark souls and porn. Ther other way around so i can die of a heart attack happy.

 

[Chilly]

That aside, do they enjoy the experience?

Yeah. Some of them were scared of stuff like the rollercoaster, but that's because they dont like rollercoasters, not because they didnt like the OR. They liked it when I put them in the weird scifi jungle with strange lights and stuff and wandered about.

 

[Scouse]

Is there a demo of a pair of tits?

How do you feel about that Chilly? Still repulsed?

 

[Chilly]

Is there a demo of a pair of tits?

How do you feel about that Chilly? Still repulsed?

Not actually looked for any porn for it, I imagine I would feel something other than repulsion

 

[ECA]

Is there a demo of a pair of tits?

How do you feel about that Chilly? Still repulsed?

Well japan has certainly got you covered.

 

[rynnor]

Well japan has certainly got you covered.

Why is it always Gaijin schoolgirls?

 

[Scouse]

Loving Elite Dangerous. I reckon it'd be totally spanky on a rift.

However, I don't think my venerable old PC will run to two 1080p eyepieces at more than about 15 frames per second, if at all. It's a triple-core AMD Phenom II X3 and I've got a AMD 7870. Runs almost everything, including Elite Dangerous, at 1080p at perfectly playable resolutions with everything maxed out - but twice the res (and two separate feeds) are going to cripple it.

What do you reckon a minimum build would be to run the rift at acceptable (60fps+) framerates?

 

[ECA]

An i5 and a 970 is the best way to go.

 

[Mabs]

oculus rift is dev only atm, i dont see the point of end users buying it.
dont get me wrong, it looks mint, when the next gen is out, then get it

 

[Raven]

In agreement now, I have been umming and arring about buying one for a while, but now I think I have left it a little late and may as well wait for a finished product.

As for PC, I5 or I7, whichever and an AMD R290 or Nvidia 970

 

[Scouse]

In agreement now, I have been umming and arring about buying one for a while, but now I think I have left it a little late and may as well wait for a finished product.

As for PC, I5 or I7, whichever and an AMD R290 or Nvidia 970

It'll be a couple of years at least before consumer product is out tbh. The next iteration looks good (built in headphones, which were pretty much a necessity tbh) - and it's lighter and has better resolution.

But I don't think I can justify a new PC tbh. With limited funds I've got stuff I'd much rather be spending that sort of moolah on

 

[Jupitus]

Scouse - dedicated thread on the E: D forums for this kind of query:

http://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=21853

 

[Athan]

It'll be a couple of years at least before consumer product is out tbh.

http://venturebeat.com/2014/10/07/c...nths-out-while-designers-makes-it-more-comfy/

“Well, [the wait is] less than multiple years,” said Iribe. “We can’t say where we are on it, but more than a few months and less than a few years, but it’s pretty soon. We do want to get it right.”

 

[ECA]

It's gotta be christmas 2015.

The wait is painful though

 

[Scouse]

It's gotta be Summer 2016.

IMO.

It's prolly still worth getting the Dev Kit. And I hope valve are on board with Half Life 3 as a day-one product.

 

[Fweddy]

The main niggles I find with the DK2 are that it's tricky to read text in (navigating the galaxy map in Elite is a real pain, though I haven't had chance to try beta 2 yet to see if they've improved it.) and it seems like every other game or demo needs different settings to get it working in the Rift so there can be a bit of fiddling every time you change games. This is improving though.

Flying around in a spaceship is bloody brilliant though

 

[Scouse]

Flying around in a spaceship is bloody brilliant though

I would have thought with HD that it wouldn't be that hard to read stuff but a lot of people are saying that...

So, is the 3D effect, the sense of scale, freedom of movement etc. worth overlooking the niggles? The sense of scale because of the 3d is one of the things I'm most interested in.

Tell us more mate

 

[Fweddy]

@Scouse The trouble is what's known as the screen door effect. With the LCD so close to your face you can see the gaps between the pixels so it seems like you're looking through a screen door. Not a major problem most of the time but for details with thin lines like text you generally have to lean towards it to make it large enough that they're not obscured. From what I've heard the latest prototype is a high enough resolution to solve this.

The 3D and the sense of scale is incredible. If you misjudge your speed when docking or scooping cargo it's hard not to panic when they start rushing towards you. It's easy to forget how big everything is because of the huge amount of space between it all but when you find yourself rushing into an asteroid belt and the pebble in the distance is suddenly looming over you in every direction then you remember again real fast. There's enough freedom to lean round your chair and make out some of the rest of the ship behind you. And if you ditch your sidewinder for a hauler you'll genuinely miss the visibility the extra windows a combat ship has, you get used to looking up and around that much. Even just turning your head and looking at your ship's menus to expand them instantly becomes natural.

Even with the niggles and the way it judders when I turn my head (not sure if that's my underpowered PC or a problem with Elite) I wouldn't play it on the monitor. I think I'd struggle to play any flying game without Rift support now, it would seem strange to not be sitting in the cockpit. A friend with more spare time than I has been replaying Doom and Quake in the Rift and he says he couldn't go back to playing them on a monitor ever again too. It's that much better. But it's not so good that you wouldn't want to immediately replace it with a CV1 first chance you get. And you'll want a decent HOTAS, or at the very least a control pad. It's really hard to use the keyboard when you can't see it, your hands or how far you've twisted round in your seat to keep eyeballs on the idiot pirate that thinks he can get on your six. If you can live with the rough edges, the current lack of games and can afford to fork out for the DK2 and then a CV1 then it's well worth it. Otherwise just wait for the CV1

Incidentally if you or anyone else on here finds themselves in the Newcastle/Gateshead area, you're more than welcome to pop in and give it a go. Just no commenting on the awful state of my house

 

[Athan]

@Scouse The trouble is what's known as the screen door effect. With the LCD so close to your face you can see the gaps between the pixels so it seems like you're looking through a screen door. Not a major problem most of the time but for details with thin lines like text you generally have to lean towards it to make it large enough that they're not obscured. From what I've heard the latest prototype is a high enough resolution to solve this.

http://arstechnica.com/staff/2014/1...t-sessions-are-doing-weird-things-to-my-eyes/

 

[strangely brown]

I must admit, I've been getting addicted to Elite Dangerous recently... Whilst ultimately, the Occulus Rift will be the best toy to play Elite Dangerous with, I'm wondering whether it's worth purchasing a trackIR thingy as a stopgap until the Rift is officially released?

 

[Athan]

I got a TrackIR 5 this week, and it is so much better than FaceTrackNoIR with a PS3 Eye Cam. Although admittedly my issues with the latter were due to using only facetracking and poor lighting depending on the time of day. The best I could manage was light from my window on the right side of my face and a bedside lamp to increase the light levels on my left side. Even then, despite best efforts to get the camera working at the 120Hz it's allegedly capable of, response was jerky and jittery. I might have had more luck trying a multi-point IR reflector or LED target with it, but I just didn't want to faff with that and still not have it work so applied money to have someone else solve it for me.

Track IR 5 just simply works, although keep in mind I splurged the extra for a bundle with the Pro Clip, so there are absolutely no lighting issues (I have no bright lighting behind me to cause an issue).

The one small issue I ran into was that by default the TrackIR5.exe will always run as Administrator (via UAC prompt if needs be), and this then means that any game you want it to communicate with also has to run as Administrator, something I prefer not to do. There is, however, a workaround using the Microsoft Compatibility Toolkit to set the "RunAsInvoker" flag for TrackIR5.exe, then it'll happily run as a Limited user and communicate with Elite: Dangerous also running as that Limited user. Some links and details in this FD forum post of mine.

If I happen to play without TrackIR now I feel so constrained in not being able to look around naturally.

 

[TdC]

based on your reccy I may get one Ath. any niggles other than what you described re the user thing? I am also one of those who enjoys the least-privileged model by default.

 

[Athan]

Just the need to tune the response curves to exactly how you like. I think size of head might come into this, and/or size of glasses if worn as my housemate wasn't getting on with the curves I had programmed. The software is a little esoteric in some regards, but nothing you won't get used to in a few minutes use. By that I mean exactly how the UI works for adjusting some things, like if you have it showing the 3D feedback then mwheel zooms that rather than scrolling in the options pane, unless you selected a curve point then it WILL zoom that bit.

 

[TdC]

hmm nothing I can't get around I think. it is like minimal head movement aye? I mean, I suppose you can program/tune it or something

 

[Athan]

Yes, it's as much head movement as you program it for. So long as the TrackIR camera can see what it's sensing it'll detect whatever movement got it to that position. So it's not going to do 180degrees yaw, but it'll do 90+ degrees either side.

Given your monitor isn't moving I find it best to tune the curves so that when I'm looking as far left/right as I can, and still see the monitor comfortably by moving my eyes the other way, it moves the in-game camera as far as I could possibly need it to.

For ED note that you won't be able to open the side panels with keypresses whilst TrackIR is active (you can have a keybind to pause it, but takes a second or so to propogate to the game). Instead you will need to look at them, and to do so you have to not only look left/right but also slightly down. This is so that you can simply look left/right out the windows without triggering the panels.

 

[Scouse]

I thought the DK2 had head tracking already. Ah well, waiting for the proper verion then tbh.

 

[ECA]

The one after dk2 that isn't buyable has better tracking.

Really they need to stop fannying around and just get the consumer version out.
It doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be good enough.

 

[Scouse]

Really they need to stop fannying around and just get the consumer version out.

I bet Sony'll beat them to it, and do it cheaper.

It'll be a bit shit compared to the rift, but it'll be like VHS and Betamax - and the shit one'll win.