Preparations for Oculus Rift (Virtual Reality) support

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Preparations for Oculus Rift (Virtual Reality) support

Postby Zerofool » Tue Feb 19, 2013 2:45 pm

Hi,
First, I'd like to apologize if this is not the right forum section for my post.

I'm a long-time stereo-3D gamer, and I can honestly say that URU and Myst V are some of the best 3D experiences I've had (they were some of my favorite games since before I started playing everything in 3D - around the end of 2008). That's why these would be some of the first worlds I'd like to explore in Virtual Reality with the Oculus Rift HMD/headset/visor. (If you're curious, other world's I'd like to explore in VR are these created by Valve, as well as Dear Esther, Mirror's Edge, Fallout 3, Skyrim, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. ... and many others.)
It's great that MOULa is still being maintained, by talented fans.

I saw this thread about the Rift, but not many specifics has been discussed there.
So I'd like to propose the implementation of few small changes/additions to the Gehn shard client, to make it Oculus Rift-friendly.

1. Support for 4:5 aspect-ratio resolutions/modes, starting from 640x800, and including 960x1200 and 1280x1600. /The dev kit features 1280x800 display, 640x800 per eye/

2. In these 4:5 modes, set horizontal FOV (hFOV) to 90 degrees. Or include a FOV slider in the options menu. /the HMD's optics offer 90 deg hFOV/

3. In first-person view, currently there's a limitation to head pitch - you can't look straight up or straight down, so please, remove that limitation and make it possible to pitch the view the whole 180 degrees.

4. In first-person view, during a jump (in mid-air), you can only change the pitch of the view, not the rotation (yaw), and this would be very distracting in VR. The player should be able to control both pitch and yaw during jump, but only for viewing, the movement of the character should remain in the same direction as when the jump was initiated.

The first three points (or even just 1. and 2.) would be sufficient for a decent initial support. There are solutions for stereoscopic rendering and image distortion (although through 3rd party middleware).
And once the Oculus SDK becomes available, some of the features may be integrated in the game as well.
Starting from most important to less important features:

5. Head tracking support with full pitch/yaw/roll representation.

6. Image warping/distortion.

7. Stereoscopic rendering.

I hope you are as eager to experience the world of MOUL(a) in VR as I am. And hopefully it won't take long to make it possible.
I really would like to hear your thoughts on this!
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Re: Preparations for Oculus Rift (Virtual Reality) support

Postby CalumTraveler » Tue Feb 19, 2013 2:58 pm

As someone who's been following the Oculus Rift for a while now, I'd love to see some kind of compatability between the Rift and URU show up in the future! :)
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Re: Preparations for Oculus Rift (Virtual Reality) support

Postby Sirius » Wed Feb 20, 2013 2:56 am

Just put the words "Oculus Rift" in a post and you'll get my +1.

It might take a bit more work to get the Rift in Uru in a way it wouldn't suck. Usually in FPS you would look around with the Rift, and aim with the mouse (which means you can't look around 360 degrees with the Oculus). In Uru, it might be a bit less intuitive, considering the way the cursor currently works.

Other problems:
- written chat... (unless you know enough your keyboard to type with the headset on).
- 3rd person camera: although Uru has impressive camera movements, I think it could easely make people feel a bit dizzy when the camera flies too fast, or is too high. Plus cameras tend to change FOV quite often, which can be annoying.


Personally I've always thought it would be a lot easier to port Uru to another game engine (do you know Unreal has support for Oculus ? 8-) ).
But I can understand Plasma geeks don't want to give up the job they are doing on Plasma !


(Some games might really be worth playing with the Rift, BTW - Portal, to look through portals (obviously), Mirror's Edge... best way to get the fear of heights !)
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Re: Preparations for Oculus Rift (Virtual Reality) support

Postby Mystler » Wed Feb 20, 2013 10:04 am

Well, URU for Oculus Rift? I want it for Google Glass too!
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Re: Preparations for Oculus Rift (Virtual Reality) support

Postby Zerofool » Sun Feb 24, 2013 12:49 pm

CalumTraveler wrote:As someone who's been following the Oculus Rift for a while now, I'd love to see some kind of compatability between the Rift and URU show up in the future! :)

Same here, brother!

Mystler wrote:Well, URU for Oculus Rift? I want it for Google Glass too!

Sorry, I'm new here, so I don't know if you're joking, or if you're being serious. If you're serious, then you should know that Google Glass is totally useless for all games you know. What it basically offers is "HUD-space Augmented Reality", meaning that objects projected by the tiny projector will not follow any real object you see with your eyes, it's just a separate semi-transparent "layer" with info, like what's the time, what's the weather, arrow pointing in some direction (with huge latency)... that kind of useless stuff (IMO), it'll mostly appeal to fans of apple's i-products I suppose.
While Oculus Rift could in theory be used with all first person games available today, with little effort by the developers. And that's what we'll observe for the next year until the consumer version comes out.

Sirius wrote:It might take a bit more work to get the Rift in Uru in a way it wouldn't suck. Usually in FPS you would look around with the Rift, and aim with the mouse (which means you can't look around 360 degrees with the Oculus). In Uru, it might be a bit less intuitive, considering the way the cursor currently works.

Now that you've mentioned it, yes, the control scheme could use some tweaking for VR. But what you describe is useful mostly for "cockpit"-FPS games (Mech/flight/space/race sims), while in standard FPS games the gun is "glued" to your view point - that's how most devs has chosen to "port" their games for the Rift (for example Doom3 BFG Edition, which in earlier stages of research was using independent view and gun/aiming scheme, which was later abandon in favor of unified view/aim). It's up to the devs of each game to decide which control scheme works best (by experimenting with a lot of different possibilities, that's what this dev kit is for really). There's a fan-made mod for Half-Life 2, which makes the game work with gun peripheral (which have sensors strapped to it), and the player is able to aim with this gun in his hand, and look with the visor in a different direction. Someday I guess this will be the norm, but we're not there quite yet.
I think URU will benefit from an alternative control mode that's similar to one of the possible control schemes in Myst V, in which the cursor (hand) is always at the center of the screen, and moving the mouse/controller/head would instantly change the view. That would work as "click where you're looking at" in VR, just like the shooter games I described.
Thank you for the input on this one, totally missed it :).
But that is just an improvement, the experience won't "suck" without it, there are workarounds. Like for example leaving the cursor in the center of the screen, then using some software to map a key of your keyboard/controller to toggle "Right Mouse Button pressed" and using mouse emulation to "port" the head-tracking data into mouse movement, and there you have it. Free look (without camera roll, unfortunately) and when you need to interact with something, you just look at it keeping your head still, toggle RMB, press the "interaction" button, then toggle RMB again and continue.

Sirius wrote:Other problems:
- written chat... (unless you know enough your keyboard to type with the headset on).
- 3rd person camera: although Uru has impressive camera movements, I think it could easely make people feel a bit dizzy when the camera flies too fast, or is too high. Plus cameras tend to change FOV quite often, which can be annoying.

Correct, but all kinds of interfaces ruin the VR experience anyway, and the recommendations are to turn off all kinds of HUD whenever possible, for maximum immersion. Plus, with all stereoscopic drivers/middleware, the interface is unusable :) (it gets displaced so much, some of it disappears out of the screen :)). In other words - forget about chatting, you KI and so on, VR is for immersive exploration.
3rd person view scenes and cutscenes are really a rare occasion so I wouldn't worry about them much (plus, for VR, the recommendation is to completely avoid them) - forcibly locking to 1st person view should solve this completely.

Sirius wrote:Personally I've always thought it would be a lot easier to port Uru to another game engine (do you know Unreal has support for Oculus ? 8-) ).
But I can understand Plasma geeks don't want to give up the job they are doing on Plasma !

I'm not sure about that, porting to totally different tech sounds like an enormous endeavor, but who knows... UE and also Unity has support for the Rift. That's why I still hope that this iOS remake of realMyst in Unity from last year would make its way to the PC eventually, hopefully with full Oculus Rift support :).


The intent of my initial post was to get the devs interested, and with the smallest amount of work, to make the game explorable for the early-adopters/DIYers, who got the dev kit, and not to initiate work for complete Oculus Rift support in the game. There's a lot of time for that, until the consumer version arrives.
If someone is still interested in having one BTW, they still can pre-order a kit.

Now I'd like to add some clarifications. As it currently stands, URU is unplayable with the Rift. Fixing things in points 1. and 2. from my original post will make it playable. Currently, the games does not support resolutions below 800x600, and 640x800 is not in the list of the available modes. Now for the FOV - in 4:5 modes, it's so low, that when looking at the bookshelf, left-most and right-most books are outside the view area, making the game unplayable.
Here's how it looks - the shot was taken in 1280x1600 mode (per eye, total of 2560x1600), and downscaled to 1280x800 (640x800 per eye), to save bandwidth.
Image

When the SDK is released, adding point 6. will make URU compatible with the Rift. The rest of the points, and the things we discuss here are only improvements, but the game world will still be explorable without them. And that's what I would like to have as soon as possible - the ability to explore the game world in VR :).

There's another way to approach this problem - making a profile for URU in the open-source Vireio Perception driver, that takes care of almost all critical aspects of supporting the Rift (info here and here). But again, it requires a fan-programmer to do it (and I personally don't have the skills :().
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Re: Preparations for Oculus Rift (Virtual Reality) support

Postby Mystler » Sun Feb 24, 2013 4:09 pm

Sorry, but I was just joking. Imho, URU is definitely the wrong game for something like the Oculus Rift. I really doubt it would be worth the effort to make an adventure MMOG available for such a device. Furthermore, I believe this would look strange with the current graphics and thus require hard work on that front.
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Re: Preparations for Oculus Rift (Virtual Reality) support

Postby Zerofool » Sun Feb 24, 2013 6:50 pm

Mystler wrote:Imho, URU is definitely the wrong game for something like the Oculus Rift. I really doubt it would be worth the effort to make an adventure MMOG available for such a device. Furthermore, I believe this would look strange with the current graphics and thus require hard work on that front.

Well, everyone has the right to have their own opinion, nothing's wrong with that. But as they say, seeing is believing, so if you get the chance, try the Rift (if there's an expo or conference about 3D in you region in the upcoming months; check this page every once in a while), and then imagine that you are walking inside the world of URU. Don't be conservative, be open to new things, new ideas, that's what drives the world forward.
I don't understand why URU would be the wrong game for VR, VR is basically made for exploring virtual worlds, and what a better example of a believable world than URU (and the rest of the myst worlds). Game genre has very little to do as well. VR is a way to experience a world. What you do in that world is irrelevant.
Well, if you've always played URU in 3rd person, yes, I agree, the experience of playing in 1st person would be new, but not necessarily a bad one. I personally have always played URU in 1st person, and to me, VR is just the natural progression (2D->S3D->VR->Holodeck/The Matrix ;)).
Graphics are not the most important thing. Many gamers who have tried the Rift in a demo booth or have made a DIY kit themselves, are blown away by seeing Doom 3 BFG Edition and Half-Life 2 - games from 2004, and their graphics is not a "quantum leap" better than the one in URU. Also, the latest demo the guys from Oculus have shown is a tech demo in Unreal Engine 3, that was initially made to run on iPad (meaning it has relatively old-looking graphics).

I personally felt the same way about stereo-3D gaming, until I experienced it myself (in 2005). I was totally blown away. One of the first games I saw in 3D was realMyst, and it was amazing. But the crosstalk made me want to wait for better solutions, I wanted to wait for glasses-free 3D displays (how naive I was back then :)). In time, seeing how things progressed, I decided to make the sacrifice (in 2008), and play with the existing tech and the inevitable crosstalk, and I never regretted this decision (actually, I regret not doing it earlier :)). Since then, every game I've played, I've played it in stereo-3D. Believe me, almost every game is better in 3D (maybe some strategy games and ones with poor S3D-rendering are the exceptions). That's why I believe that most first-person games (mainly the old-school ones) will be better experienced and more immersive/compelling in VR (exceptions will be these that offer laser-sight aiming, and excessive post-processing and head-bob effects). And of course, the games that will be made for the Rift, with VR in mind.
So, Mystler, if you have a friend who's an experienced 3D gamer, ask them to show you URU in stereo-3D (it's best experienced on a huge 3DTV (42+")) in 1st person view. VR would be an order of magnitude better experience than that, mark my words ;).

The effort you are talking about isn't something that would cost much time/resources. Adding a resolution in the menu and a proper FOV for it should be like a walk in the park for these guys. Adding head-tracking would be more tricky, but I'm almost sure that someday there will be a 3rd party solution for that.
Well, if the majority of the devs feel the same way, it's a pity, I really hoped that things here would be better than they are over at OpenURU. I still hope that someone from the dev team will come and state their view on that matter.

Cheers!
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Re: Preparations for Oculus Rift (Virtual Reality) support

Postby Jojon » Sat Mar 09, 2013 1:39 pm

I'll just drop that Oculus just set up an interface, where people who have ordered a kit can update their data, prior to shipping, so there are a few more days, in which any able developer can pipe up, should (s)he think one devkit unit is sufficient payment for the committment of adapting Uru for VR (extent negotiable).
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Re: Preparations for Oculus Rift (Virtual Reality) support

Postby Zerofool » Sun Mar 10, 2013 7:09 am

I think they'll continue to offer the dev kit for some time, so it's not so urgent, but it doesn't hurt to order it as soon as you know for sure that you want one :). After all, it's not entirely clear for how long that ability to order a kit, post-launch, will last. Later, they will release an add-on for positional tracking, so I guess they'll also offer a dev kit + positional tracking add-on combo, for those who were hesitant early on or found out about it just recently, or were waiting for such a combo :).

A slight detour: a guy is reimagining the Myst island in UDK, made with exploration with the Oculus Rift in mind. Take a look at the development progress.
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Re: Preparations for Oculus Rift (Virtual Reality) support

Postby Jojon » Sun Mar 10, 2013 12:57 pm

Ah, I may not have been entirely clear... :7

My kit has been paid for and lying in queue to be built and delivered, ever since the Kickstarter campaign ended.

The limited time, that I mentioned, was for my offer of donating that kit to a skilled developer, with time on hand, who'd be committing to making Uru work well with it.
Until it ships; I can reroute it. :)
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