A Path Beyond APB in VR?

[des1206]

This maybe a future topic, but would there be any significant work required to adopt existing 3D games like APB for VR tech such as the Oculus Rift or the HTC Vive? If not, it would be so cool to just put on a VR headset and play APB totally immersed!

 

 

[devilslayersbane]

That would require a lot of work, especially considering you'd have to separate the camera from the player character direction. Typically that's only reserved for sims. It'd be a challenge just to put in head-tracking support.

[FRAYDO]

that would be p. sick tbh

[SarahNautili]

It's almost guaranteed it'd be too much work for almost no return, for a number of reasons. Especially since, what percentage of the players of APB are gonna even have VR capable computers any time soon?

[des1206]

I am just asking if VR is simply getting hardware plugged into an existing FPS game, or does there need to be significant software in the game to complement it. If it's the latter, of course it won't be doable.

[Pyryle]

that moment when you're trying to aim in APB using VR head tracking

 

[devilslayersbane]

I am just asking if VR is simply getting hardware plugged into an existing FPS game, or does there need to be significant software in the game to complement it. If it's the latter, of course it won't be doable.

It is the latter. While it would be a neat feature, NVIDIA and Oculus have both released SDK's in order to help developers create new games for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. From what I've seen, the Oculus rift also takes advantage of motion controls as well. That would mean an entirely new animation system, as the current one is so rigid it requires button presses to change animations. While I don't doubt the skill of the guys at tiberian technologies, I seriously doubt a complete, VR-ready animation system is in the works or even in the scope of their scripting knowledge. And if it was to favor the HTC Vive as opposed to the OR, you would want to make sure that the motion controllers could give feedback if used. Shit, I'd like to see a limited, adjustable aiming deadzone put in place (not that I would use it, but it's a nice feature).

 

Long story short, while definitely possible, it would take too much development time. Without some sort of grant from EA to start working it, there would be no reason to do it.

[saberhawk]

That would require a lot of work, especially considering you'd have to separate the camera from the player character direction. Typically that's only reserved for sims. It'd be a challenge just to put in head-tracking support.

 

It's not much work to remove the one line or so of code that updates the camera direction at all. Using head tracking is slightly more complicated because nobody seems to agree on directions; is +Z up, into the screen, or out of the screen?

 

What's actually complicated is getting the engine to render twice as much content to a 2560x1200 screen at 90FPS. Failure to maintain frame rate could get people physically sick. Sudden camera movements need to be avoided, otherwise people get physically sick. Each eye uses a slightly different perspective, so any tricks that assume a single perspective need to be fixed, otherwise they will look weird and could also make people sick. A few things that immediately come to mind are certain particle systems, "billboards" (camera aligned objects), and the sky actually being a tiny sphere that's shrinkwrapped to the camera and nowhere close to where it should be physically.

 

After people can finally stay inside the virtuality for more than a few minutes, then comes the matter of controls and redesigning the HUD. The old trick of "put it in the corners" doesn't work anymore, as those are almost entirely outside your field of view and very difficult to see. Depth contrast also needs to be introduced because it's a lot more effective than color contrast. The trickiest thing will likely be compelling and fair gameplay for VR players vs non-VR players. A 24 player VR-only match would be cool, but that's years away realistically.

 

It's almost guaranteed it'd be too much work for almost no return, for a number of reasons. Especially since, what percentage of the players of APB are gonna even have VR capable computers any time soon?

 

This only holds true if you assume the desired return is something like X new players or Y more sales because of that VR mode. It's very likely that there are only a few players with VR capable computers, and APB is a free project. But it's run by volunteers. Some of which might see the experience of adding support for emerging VR technology to an existing game engine as rather valuable, even if only a handful of other people will see it at first.

 

I am just asking if VR is simply getting hardware plugged into an existing FPS game, or does there need to be significant software in the game to complement it. If it's the latter, of course it won't be doable.

 

Kinda. SteamVR has something called "Desktop Theater" which simulates a large screen for you to play games with. Potentially IMAX sized, pretty epic. That's probably the closest that you can get to running any existing game in VR and it's likely that it'll support a fake VR-like mode for games already supporting stereoscopic 3D rendering. But you can only count on it for the HTC Vive right now since it's still very early in the VR wars; it's unclear if Oculus will support SteamVR.

[delta]

Does VR actually have much of a future for gaming, or is it just more of a gimmicky "look at the cool stuff we can do" thing?

[saberhawk]

 

I am just asking if VR is simply getting hardware plugged into an existing FPS game, or does there need to be significant software in the game to complement it. If it's the latter, of course it won't be doable.

It is the latter. While it would be a neat feature, NVIDIA and Oculus have both released SDK's in order to help developers create new games for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. From what I've seen, the Oculus rift also takes advantage of motion controls as well. That would mean an entirely new animation system, as the current one is so rigid it requires button presses to change animations. While I don't doubt the skill of the guys at tiberian technologies, I seriously doubt a complete, VR-ready animation system is in the works or even in the scope of their scripting knowledge. And if it was to favor the HTC Vive as opposed to the OR, you would want to make sure that the motion controllers could give feedback if used. Shit, I'd like to see a limited, adjustable aiming deadzone put in place (not that I would use it, but it's a nice feature).

 

Long story short, while definitely possible, it would take too much development time. Without some sort of grant from EA to start working it, there would be no reason to do it.

 

 

What most people think about modding and "scripting" with this engine is wrong, especially when it comes to recent iterations ("scripts 5.0"). Yeah, there's probably a feature where a button press will play an animation (on what?) in a networked game. Some people use it. It's far from the actual animation system capabilities, it's an old "script" using a hacky interface put in place about a decade ago. Before we, you know, added a decade's worth of code and all the man-years of previous thought in the designs we cloned. Like all the one the ones required for defining the concept of a "script" in the first place, the input system to detect that button press, the netcode to send it to the server and synchronize clients, and the animation system to actually play it by sampling animation curves and feeding the also cloned/rewritten/rewritten again/and again rendering engine. All of these with many of our original hacks in place for backwards compatibility with ourselves and some other closed source projects and shared between a huge number of mods. Things are "laggy" because too much gameplay is written literally in scripts.dll in "script" form which is all server side scripting. Things are "ugly" because the tools suck and can't feed the engine better data, and I'm working as fast as I can to make better ones. I wish people would/could help, but they usually don't so I prioritize whatever I feel like doing. Taking a break from thinking about VR systems (which is part of my day job) and working on a simple 3D engine is supposed to be relaxing.

 

Does VR actually have much of a future for gaming, or is it just more of a gimmicky "look at the cool stuff we can do" thing?

Always, but it's going to be much broader than what is traditionally thought of as gaming and adding in other forms of entertainment and communication. It's also incredibly useful when it comes to jobs that deal with designing physical objects. Designs for "things" are growing increasingly virtual and the ability to visualize and manipulate those designs directly and easily is incredible.

[devilslayersbane]

 

What most people think about modding and "scripting" with this engine is wrong, especially when it comes to recent iterations ("scripts 5.0"). Yeah, there's probably a feature where a button press will play an animation (on what?) in a networked game. Some people use it. It's far from the actual animation system capabilities, it's an old "script" using a hacky interface put in place about a decade ago. Before we, you know, added a decade's worth of code and all the man-years of previous thought in the designs we cloned. Like all the one the ones required for defining the concept of a "script" in the first place, the input system to detect that button press, the netcode to send it to the server and synchronize clients, and the animation system to actually play it by sampling animation curves and feeding the also cloned/rewritten/rewritten again/and again rendering engine. All of these with many of our original hacks in place for backwards compatibility with ourselves and some other closed source projects and shared between a huge number of mods. Things are "laggy" because too much gameplay is written literally in scripts.dll in "script" form which is all server side scripting. Things are "ugly" because the tools suck and can't feed the engine better data, and I'm working as fast as I can to make better ones. I wish people would/could help, but they usually don't so I prioritize whatever I feel like doing. Taking a break from thinking about VR systems (which is part of my day job) and working on a simple 3D engine is supposed to be relaxing.

Listen, I didn't mean any offense from my earlier comment. However, while I don't have an in-depth knowledge of W3D's animation system, I also understand that very few things are dynamic in it and certain things won't work. However, my point was that there was an animation for everything available to do in the game. It's not dynamic. It can't adapt outside of it's boundaries. With Steam VR, the only way you're getting more than a glorified head-tracking system is with those hand controls. That requires an animation system that can track and control the position of the hands. That's not to say that it isn't possible, but I doubt it could be done overnight. Again, I don't doubt your coding skills. I doubt that the time needed to do this isn't worth the effort. Especially when VR sets are so expensive. Also, I never said things were ugly or laggy. Sure I encounter occasional rubber-banding and latency issues, no the rendering doesn't have the newest lighting effects. At the end of the day, I don't care. I just want to play a damn good game. APB is a damn good game without VR. It doesn't need it, and it isn't worth it. That's what I am saying.

Edited April 6, 2016 by devilslayersbane

[System Error Message]

I think that implementing the VR is only a programming job because everything will still work the same. Its more graphical programming and a few changes to player animation such as for turning the head or matching the character to the player's interface such as if there are virtual gloves and so on.

 

http://jobsimulatorgame.com/this game is made for this sort of stuff and you can see what it is like. This game would benefit from the virtual reality in the graphical manner for world immersion but in the interface manner it wont help. Have you seen any games that uses a VR with tanks?

[MechanicalThighs]

Honestly, I don't think this game would feel right with VR capability. I mean, the graphics, although heavily upgraded from their original Renegade state, are still far from what more modern games have. The handling of the weapons and vehicles is very simple; guns don't even have ADS. It just doesn't have the right feel. APB is an awesome game, but it's not super immersive, so adding VR capability would be more of a "we CAN do this" matter, rather than "we SHOULD do this". It would be more like a tech demo than an important game feature. So, fun as it is to think about, even if it was possible, I don't think it should be seriously planned for.

[MPRA2]

It's almost guaranteed it'd be too much work for almost no return, for a number of reasons. Especially since, what percentage of the players of APB are gonna even have VR capable computers any time soon?

You're right to a point. the minimum requirements for VR to work is to have the NVIDIA GTX 970 (which is a nice high end GPU thats just below the 980 and Titan X) and a good 4.0Ghz processor, which could take up to almost $1500-$3000 USD depending on what the computer is going to be fitted with. my computer ran me $1399.99 total, and that was with a $100 discount. Ontop of that, VR headsets go from $200-$1000 I believe. so you would be spending a lot just to meet the minimum requirements to use the headset/run it's programs.