Thirith on 20/4/2018 at 16:21
It gets better: apparently there's a program called Natural Locomotion (available on Steam) that supports Skyrim (among other games) and that allows for walking around in VR by swinging your hands like you're walking. The handful of posts I've read about this make it sound like it works surprisingly well with the Bethesda games. It's relatively cheap, so I might check it out at some point.
Thirith on 22/4/2018 at 10:26
I did get that Natural Locomotion program, and while I couldn't get it to run with Rec Room (at present it doesn't work with Oculus-native software, and I've not got the Steam version installed), the simple demo it's got as a proof of concept works pretty well, at least when walking forward. You can even jump by, well, jumping! Definitely curious to try this out with Skyrim VR once I've got it.
I also played about an hour of Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin. The game itself is pretty standard (and not terribly difficult) point & click, and it shows that it was developed in the early days of VR, e.g. in terms of the Touch controllers not really being made very good use of, but it is very cool to be *inside* the Psychonauts world, and the visual upgrades compared to the original game make it feel even more like you're in a Laika stop-motion animation.
Edit: Natural Locomotion offers a demo on Steam, which I assume is the demo I played. Worth checking out for any of you who are interested in alternative means of locomotion in VR.
Shoshin on 24/4/2018 at 21:12
So I've been playing a bit of Skyrim VR (as a Thief/Archer naturally) and all it's done is make me want a Thief game in VR even more than before, and that's saying something. The slower pace of Thief, coupled with good bow mechanics & reaching out to actually pickpocket someone or thump them on the noggin would be *so cool*.
catbarf on 26/4/2018 at 15:58
I 3D printed some GearVR lens adapters for my Vive, then got a Gear for $25 off Amazon. With the new lenses, all the distortion and god rays from the Vive's fresnel lenses are gone, and it's much clearer outside of the narrow center 'sweet spot'. I can actually read text without looking directly at it now.
Also, seconding Jeshibu's recommendation for Dead Effect 2. It looks like a low-budget ripoff game because it is a low-budget ripoff game- a particularly shameless one at that, full of weapon and art assets taken from other franchises. But despite that, it's implemented pretty well and the co-op is fun. If you want to run around the labs from Doom 3 carrying the bow from Crysis 2 while your buddy zaps zombies with a District 9 lightning gun, well, this is your game.
Thirith on 29/4/2018 at 10:17
Just finished Rhombus of Ruin. Definitely enjoyed this one and how it built on the original Psychonauts, especially towards the end, but I also wish the game was a better adventure with more interesting puzzles. There was one sequence that showed what could've been, but other than that you're mainly playing this for the style, humour, characters, and for the opportunity to immerse yourself in the Psychonauts world, not for the great puzzling.
Thirith on 30/4/2018 at 12:21
So you can go home and do your second (third, fourth, fifth...) job in VR, eh? :p
Does Spintires have a VR mode?
henke on 30/4/2018 at 14:51
Exactly! Alas Spintires does not have a VR mode, though I'm not sure it'd work well in VR either, as it does rely heavily on the outside-view, and swinging the camera around a lot.
henke on 2/5/2018 at 06:20
Y'ALL SEEIN THIS SHIT???
[video=youtube;gV1sw4lfwFw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV1sw4lfwFw[/video]
Apparently it doesn't do auto-generated tracks from songs like Audioshield does, but of course that means more finely-tuned custom-made tracks for the built-in music library instead, so I think I might be ok with that trade-off. This thing just got released and it has a near-perfect 5-star rating out of 139 user reviews on the Oculus Store. I think I might have to get it.