Thirith on 30/4/2021 at 12:04
... and I got Air Link to work - and I'm happy to say it works tremendously well, even though my PC isn't connected to the router by Ethernet cable. I played about an hour or so of The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, and not being connected by cable definitely makes a major difference in a game like this.
Thirith on 6/5/2021 at 12:20
I've been playing some Eleven Table Tennis and Star Wars Pinball VR on Quest 2. The latter is fun fan service, and it's also a pretty good pinball game, as far as I can tell, though I wish they'd make the environments and the pinball machines more tactile. It's serviceable, but it doesn't feel all that much like you're actually there playing on a real pinball machine.
Eleven Table Tennis is a fun throwback for me, because I used to play so much as a kid. What surprises me is how real it feels. When I first played the game about a year or two ago, it was good but there was still something off compared to the real thing. Perhaps it's just that on Quest 2 I can play untethered or perhaps they've tweaked the physics and feedback to a point where there's an actual risk of me wanting to lean on the table and falling flat on my face.
henke on 6/5/2021 at 16:54
I think one thing that helps with realism in Eleven is that IRL ping pong balls are so light that you don't really feel an impact from a hit. Simply having a small vibration-jolt in the controller and a convincing soundeffect is enough to make it feel like the real thing.
Thirith on 6/5/2021 at 16:58
I think that must be it, plus the controllers are reasonably close in weight to ping pong paddles. The game didn't feel this accurate when I first played it, but whatever the reason, it pretty much feels just right at this point.
Thirith on 8/5/2021 at 15:55
Just finished The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, playing the last few missions in untethered VR thanks to Air Link. It's a pretty good game, almost an immersive sim in some ways (though its systems are fairly shallow and not particularly interesting), and I hope that later VR games build on what it does - but the mission and environmental design is middling at best, and especially the final mission is muddled. I just about understood what my different options were, but I wasn't entirely clear on how to bring them about, and the game design and controls definitely could've done with more work. As a result, I ended up getting the two parties I was asked to decide between killed, not because I chose this option but because I accidentally clicked away a conversation prompt and a script kicked in.
Short P.S. concerning Air Link: On my previous USB wifi adapter, Air Link worked, but just about, as it seems that my wifi connection was patchy. I went and got a new adapter, and hey presto! It's stable and fast and I can even turn up the streaming bitrate to the maximum. Air Link has turned out to be a great surprise, considering how well it works and what a difference untethered play makes especially in games like Saints & Sinners that put you in a fairly open environment. Looking forward to returning to Skyrim VR like this!
Thirith on 17/5/2021 at 08:24
I returned to Dirt Rally 2.0 over the weekend. When I first tried it, I was unable to make it run smoothly for some reason, but in the meantime it seems that updates and new drivers have done their magic. Strangely, it seems almost impossible not to make the visuals look like there's a layer of Vaseline on the lens (the first Dirt Rally had a similar problem), but when you're driving this doesn't really matter, because the driving is damn good, even if I'm not damn good at driving. The environments are varied and interesting, and VR makes it all feel so much more tangible and tactile and dangerous. I don't enjoy racing games in which you mainly just drive around in circles, but I love the environments of these games because there's much more verticality.
Weasel on 20/5/2021 at 05:42
I was all ready to submit my VR game The Deep Above to Oculus App Lab, thinking it would start out in the Alpha release channel. It turns out I probably did more work than needed to get it ready for Production release!
I now have a version in the Alpha release channel. If anyone here has an Oculus Quest (1 or 2) and wants to try / test The Deep Above for me, you can send me your email address (the one associated with your Oculus account) and I'll invite you to the Alpha channel.
Thirith on 20/5/2021 at 06:02
The first few VR games now support DLSS 2.0, which can massively improve performance, though it needs to be implemented on a game-by-game basis. The first big title that offers this in VR is No Man's Sky. While I've enjoyed raytracing in games like Control, I'm starting to think that DLSS 2.0 will be much, much more of a gamechanger when it comes to the new GPUs - and if VR can benefit from this as well, all the better, because future VR headsets will need to offer higher resolutions and a wider FOV. If they can combine tech like DLSS 2.0 and foveated rendering, it'd be big.
Thirith on 21/5/2021 at 20:01
OMGOMGOMG! Gotta try this out.
[video=youtube;kTNot9jjEao]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTNot9jjEao[/video]
henke on 23/5/2021 at 11:08
Just wanna let everyone know that THE DEEP ABOVE alpha is GOOD and anyone with a Quest should definitely sign up to test it! :thumb: Its got some innovative ideas and Weasel could probably do with more people giving feedback on it.