Search Results for 'Just Cause'

[Heon_X]

Let me see if I understood the concept of Virtual Monitor correctly:
1. Launch desktop viewer
2. Put on your headset –> Virtual monitor kicks in, now Windows runs on a new monitor with the same refresh rate of your headset (which is good to avoid conflicts when your physical monitor has a different refresh rate) and a resolution set by the user (to be able to match it in game without messing around with custom resloutions)
3. Run a game –> vorpX hooks into the game normally (for supported games) like without virtual monitor, with the added bonus of being able to set the resolution in game to whatever you set as your resolution in Windows monitor settings. Plus having the game run on a monitor that has the same refresh rate as your headset greatly improves syncing issues and micro-stutters.

Is this correct? Cause so far I’ve been able to to make the virtual monitor work, but vorpX doesn’t hook and the game doesn’t even start (I tested Rocket League which is definitely supported and working on 21.3.3). If I pause the watcher the game just runs on Steam Theater mode and not in Desktop Viewer (my monitor reactivates and I see the game there too).
So I either understood wrong the utility of Virtual Monitor or I need to find a fix for the inability to hook…

[Ralf]

There already is a generalized way to actually aim with motion controllers, BUT: it only works good enough for games where head tracking is handled by other means than mouse emulation. A bit difficult to explain, but if head tracking is done via mouse emulation, head tracking and hand aiming interfere with each other in unwanted ways.

Works great however when it’s possible, and I’ll add it everywhere I can for sure before the final 23.1.0 release. You can currently try it e.g. in the standalone Cyberpunk mod, which does head tracking by changing the actual game camera and thus can do true hand aiming.

This Switch method sounds super interesting though, might work in cases where true hand aiming doesn’t. I’ll definitely look into it. Thanks for the hint!

On a sidenote: as soon as there are general shooting gestures, you more or less automatically start to move your hands while aiming, just because it feels right. So the usual head aiming doesn’t feel too different. No excuse though for not doing actual hand aiming whenever possible, of course.

[Ralf]

Just to be clear before this turns into a ‘will vorpX die?’ discussion: there is no reason for any such fear. Wouldn’t have been possible to provide a decade of free updates if vorpX had been at the verge of collapsing at any time, obviously. At some point there has to be some monetization of updates though, that was planned way, way earlier originally. Since the OP asked a related question and incidentally I’m currently weighing more concrete options anyway, I considered this a good opportunity to slowly prepare you for the unthinkable. :)

As far as the VR focus is concerned: that’s what vorpX has always been about. S3D output has been added because some of you wanted it. Maybe there will be a few extra output modes at some point that are currently missing, which would be easy enough, but not more. Unless something fundamentally changes in regard to popularity of S3D-gaming again that’s how far as I’m able to take things.

[mr_spongeworthy]

A complex subject for sure. I could see several routes, and am personally happy to pay a bit more for vorpX over time. Nobody here wants to see vorpX go the way of other 3D products. As a general rule I dislike subscription software, and even though it does make those companies plenty of $, it also drives away a lot of potential future users, as well as a lot of long-time users. Take Adobe as an example; no longer a part of any workplace I’m associated with, but was at one point absolutely dominant. Users have moved to products like Pixelmator Pro, which may not offer 100% of the functionality, but offer a very compelling feature set in a product that can be purchased for a reasonable price and then maybe have a small upgrade cost on a major revision only.

I’ll try to keep my thoughts brief (hahahahaha, right…)

1) Charge a small amount per-game for the profiles users actually use. It could be built into the vorpX client (a real PITA I bet). So a customer has bought the base product for a reasonable price, and if they don’t really use it for many games they aren’t out a lot more $. You could include an ‘out of the box’ base number (100?) of supported games, and then charge for the additional profiles. The user would click the game title, see “Basic Z3D Profile for Starfield: $1.99”, or “Advanced G3D & AFR support for Starfield: $5.99” or something like that. Enter the card data (have it stored) and *bang* they’ve got the profile. You could even figure out a way to monetize profiles created by users, IF they wish to take part. If RJK builds 10 perfect G3D profiles, maybe 50% goes to Ralf and 50% to the profile creator when a users buys a customer-created profile? You get the concept. (I expect implementation of this might really suck though.) This would also be a way for Ralf to feel like he isn’t wasting his time refining profiles, since those profiles would immediately produce at least a small return. (I would be happy to pay for perfected G3D profiles for games that already have Z3D only, or a less-than-perfect G3D experience.)

2) Charge for major product upgrade cycles. So much simpler than my first suggestion, but with some downsides. For example, no matter how good your product is, some people will have problems with the new revision, and/or simply like the prior version better for whatever reason. These people will be VERY vocal about their dislike to the new version they “paid for.”

3) Charge a very small subscription fee for a certain tier of the product only. For example, maybe all Z3D profiles are included, but all more advanced profiles (G3D) are subscription based. IMHO this would have to be a fairly low price-point as people are getting overwhelmed with subscription services of all kinds.

@RJK: I’ll try some more of your profiles if you get time. I admit that I notice rendering issues that many people overlook or just don’t seem to care about. I would be *overjoyed* to find properly working G3D profiles of some titles (no shadow issues, no disabled shadows, no lighting issues, etc.) If I use some profiles that work really well I’m absolutely happy to donate. If I haven’t donated already it’s probably because I haven’t found a G3D profile that works as I wish for any title for which I needed one.

@Ralf: You are basically the last 3D solution out there for old 3D systems as well. I know you’re full-speed-ahead into the VR experience, but there is an untapped / abandoned market out there. Add a few more G3D profiles and more 3D modes for old displays and projectors, and hopefully the word will get out in those communities that used to rely on other products.

[Ralf]

Thanks for the super nice ‘rant’! The forum software considered it spam first, but I could salvage it before it was gone. As an additional way of support maybe Patreon is worth thinking about, but as a sole way of distribution it just isn’t what I want to do.

Patreon is absolutely the right tool for artists, podcasters, YouTubers etc. But for selling software, and that’s what it is in the end, it’s just too close to today’s rental models because you pretty much force your customers (or followers if you like) to pay for even the smallest update or bug fix. Not my thing. Although I’m slowly starting to get old, so maybe it’s just me. ;) What looks like cynicism to me, apparently looks way nicer to others for some reason.

When I did more 3D and GFX work than programming back in the day, I happily paid Adobe, Autodesk etc. hundreds of Euros each year for updates, thousands in case of Autodesk actually, but the moment they decided it’s a good idea (which business wise it probably was) to enforce that via a subscription, I was out right away. Would feel odd to do something fairly close to that myself now…

If you want to invest some time creating profiles, shoot me a mail to support at vorpx com, I can help with that. Would be awesome.

[giant.turnips]

Honestly, Ralf, I don’t think anybody can logically complain about paying an upgrade fee for a major version release. With that said, I can understand when people get angry after paying the upgrade fee, and the new version is just a bug-fix release. This is where it gets tricky, the aforementioned anger is understandable on a surface level, but in reality, they are paying for another 12 months of rolling updates.

As you’ve mentioned, Vorpx requires constant updates in order to maintain ‘lights on’ with existing games. So if they stop paying, eventually the games that once worked will stop working, this could be viewed as a bit of a shafting too!

My two penneth:

I’m a firm advocate of the pay-what-you-can philosophy, some people just can’t afford to pay money for software. Acknowledging this and giving it to them for free is a nice thing to do but will also gain you a cheerleader, not only in them but any reviewers that pop along. On the other side, some people will be doing OK at work and want to pay more than the asking price.

I would suggest this approach, pay-what-you-can with the option for one-off donations and/or recurring payments. I genuinely think this will generate more money by simply opening the software to a wider audience. I’m not sure how the profiles are made, could these be created by the community (aside from copying another profile of course). There are loads of people out there that would definitely get involved in creating new content for Vorpx if they can. I digress.

My personal experience with Vorpx has been awesome. In the short time I’ve had Vorpx I have already lined up loads of old games which have been given a new lease of life thanks to VR and/or immersive mode. Deus Ex – awesome. Dying Light 1/2 – yes! Cyberpunk – Judy! Days Gone – eternally grateful. All of these feel totally different now. Thanks to you and Vorpx’s Immersive Mode, my games catalogue has more or less doubled in size. I have some spare cash, so I want to give extra to keep this train rolling. I suggested Patreon because services such as that mitigate any technical limitations.

There are other mods out there that add stereoscopic rendering or VR to flat games, but they all require you to edit the game files or run through some obscure instructions. I think Vorpx could become the one-stop shop for VR/Immersive mods. This would require it to become more community driven though if external developers such as myself could be given the ability to add profiles for new games, we would have Week 1 support for most games.

Just a thought. The bottom line is that Vorpx is great and I, like many others, would like to support you/it.

[mr_spongeworthy]

Ralf wrote:

The next beta will auto switch to the virtual monitor by just launching the desktop viewer and putting on your headset. vorpX will take care of switching off physical displays. Was quite an endeavour to ensure that the display config can’t get messed up permanently under various worst case scenarios when doing that, but now I’m reasonably sure to have that covered.

That sounds great Ralf. I really look forward to giving it a try. Sounds massively useful for games like FO3 (which I still routinely play through vorpX), in-which I have to continually muck about with the ini files and manually edit my preferred mode and resolution (because FO3 will “auto detect” and overwrite your edits over and over again due to perfectly normal activities such as updating your drivers.)

I guess I haven’t really looked yet, but my understanding is that the gesture system will be semi-universal? I’ll be able to create my own gestures if I wish, in titles like the aforementioned FO3? Or am I better off waiting until you have added custom gestures on a title-by-title basis? (Speaking of Aliens and gestures. I still have a working AvP on my Atari Jaguar. Someone needs to remake that for VR. Scary.)

Finally; as long as the vorpX virtual monitor isn’t loaded at windows start, wouldn’t a hard restart (not that we want to have to do that very often) always fix any “worse case” monitor config issue? Bios would detect the physical monitor as usual and Windows should automatically choose the only detected monitor to display on? At least, that would be the behavior I would expect.

[giant.turnips]

ToxicMike wrote:

The industry is generally GARBAGE and too scared to try other formulas let alone trying something rather NEW and so we have dozens of GTAs, hundreds of CODs, thousands of FAR CRYs, millions of ASSASSINS CREEDs and billions of PUBGs.

The big/huge games companies are like this yes (Ubisoft, Bethesda, RockStar EA) but we have loads of great titles coming out too. These big companies don’t consider games as art, they don’t make to be fun, they make games that tick the most money-making boxes which formula will be the easiest to digest for most people.

ToxicMike wrote:

Also, people always complain about UBI, but what is actually ROCKSTAR doing so great, besides releasing “GTA Games” every couple of years while improving graphics but sadly not the games, so then you have an open world game with great graphics but repetitive and boring gameplay.

Ubisoft are on a whole new level though. All Ubisoft open-world games are copied/pasted with terrible cohesiveness. They don’t introduce enough mechanics or variations of the same mechanic to fill an open world. FC6 is a perfect example, every single roadblock is exactly the same, the same number of guards, the same patrol routes, the same buildings, and the same rewards. The only difference is that the level designers just rotate the model slightly. RockStar at least put some effort into the filler content, I’m sure Ubisoft just pick the first 3 mechanics they like and then say stick 50 of those into the world, 100 of those, 30 of those. Done – ship it!

A good example of an open world done right (although not without some repetitiveness) would be Horizon (ZD & FW), and my personal favourite Days Gone. The world in Days Gone was much smaller than FC6 but each base was designed specifically for the location it is placed, FC6 just flattens the terrain and plonks the generic base there.

Ubisoft arent just repeating the formula, they are taking the formula and stretching it out to four times its sustainable size, then filling the gaps with repetitive garbage. The world would be better without them IMO.

/rant.

ToxicMike wrote:

Regarding RDRII

You know, I really appreciated the visuals of that game, the detail of the environment, the thought they put into every single area. However, I could never get into it, it just didn’t click for me. I felt no connection to any of the characters except the horse, I finished because I wanted to finish what I had started, but after the first 4/5 hours I played only the main missions just so it would end sooner.

ToxicMike wrote:

So INDIES are our only hope, forget those AAA franchises and companies, those titles take 180 hours to complete with 100%, but are actually fun for approx. 3 hours.

Again, I will agree with what you say here. The only difference for me is that sometimes I just want more of the same. If a game style clicks with me I want more of it. Obviously, I would like to see advancements in that formula such as better AI, better branching stories, and so on and so forth. Perhaps a procedural generation algorithm which can produce a meaningful world that can also contain an actual story, I mean we have AI that can produce a fairly decent short story now, surely we can integrate something like that to give us more gameplay in the same world/universe.

[ToxicMike]

The thing is, when i am looking/focusing at the center of the screen (with maxed out size/distance settings) then i also can still “see a little too much” of the edges of the immersive screen and i got the idea if screensize could be inscreased by another 30% or even 40% percent of its current max size, then i guess the screensize would be perfectly right for the used max distance and the games where i am using those max settings (of course i am not playing all games on maxed out distance and screensize).

And well, the immersivescreen edges would be still there and visible but “less in my view” then.

MarcDwonn wrote:

Are you using a Pimax with a crazy high FOV, combined with RTX 4090

Oculus and a GTX1660Ti

MarcDwonn wrote:

Otherwise i don’t see how the current size would not be big enough.

Oh, it actually is big enough but I just can´t stop thinking of how certain games are probably an even better immersive-screen-experience if i could increase screensize for just those 30 or 40 percent.

MarcDwonn wrote:

I have tried a bigger size Immersive Screen and in the end i got back to a smaller one, because the resolution was just not high enough, and/or the FOV wasn’t high enough, and/or the FPS got too low.

I´d say that strongly depends on the game one is playing and of course also depends on each ones “taste”.

[MarcDwonn]

Are you using a Pimax with a crazy high FOV, combined with RTX 4090 or a very low resolution? Otherwise i don’t see how the current size would not be big enough.

I have tried a bigger size Immersive Screen and in the end i got back to a smaller one, because the resolution was just not high enough, and/or the FOV wasn’t high enough, and/or the FPS got too low.

BTW, i also realized that the default curve of the Immersive Screen distorts the image too much with a default camera projection (most games), so i dialed it back to be very slight.

Sometimes more is not better. :)

[mr_spongeworthy]

@Ralf. Thanks for your feedback. I work in K-8 EDU and admit that often leads to “thinking things through” out loud (here) instead of privately. I will try to avoid doing this so much in the future.

To be clear, even if I don’t go through my entire testing process I DO rigorously test with controlled benchmarks (in-game when possible). I *always* start at the basics when encountering a problem; Has something changed in my BIOS, have I installed anything new (even just a driver update), is my cooling still working properly? I use benchmark software (historically Cinebench and Furmark, but currently I usually just run 3D Mark to do the “extreme” GPU + CPU stress test) to double-check that performance has not degraded for some unknown reason or an instability crept in. I don’t believe anything I see just once.

I, do, however, keep coming back to Cyberpunk after long lapses in playing it, and I forget about all the Cyberpunk-specific foibles. Or maybe I’m just overly-optimistic that somehow they have finally been fixed. (hahahahaha, right…)

I have tested this particular behavior (GPU usage with the vorpX virtual monitor enabled) and although I noticed that in Cyberpunk I belatedly realized it’s a terrible title in which to do any testing. In Cyberpunk my performance will alter dramatically simply by switching from real screen to virtual, or back, or back and forth. Using the built-in benchmark I repeatably see my max fps drop by 10-20fps. Sometimes my minimum and average also simultaneously go up. I have to Quit and re-run the game and all is good again. It’s just a completely and utterly unreliable title to try and use to figure out anything (other than figuring out “this is a Cyberpunk problem”). Like many (everyone?) even in 100% vanilla Cyberpunk I see repeatable, slowly decreasing performance just from entering and exiting menus, or even when visiting certain locations which will then cause performance to drop everywhere until you reload or quit and reload. It’s just the worst.

BUT, I do also see performance differences in the only other title I currently have installed that has a built-in benchmark: Far Cry Primal. That title consistently and repeatably benchmarks FASTER on the vorpX virtual display than it does when on my physical monitor. Every time. Identical settings. Absolutely repeatable. As you’ve said, this does not seem to be vorpX related in any way. vorpX was just the first thing that came to mind because it’s been so long since I’ve run multiple screens on any game rig. I *think* what I’m seeing is typical of 3D acceleration on Windows machines with 2 or more monitors, especially if those aren’t running the same refresh. It’s been probably 12 years since I used multiple displays on a gaming rig, but it definitely used to cause a bit of unanticipated behavior.

(BTW; if you ever do implement a longer edit window I’m one of those forum users who will go back and edit my original posts with more concise info. For example, I would have edited the post where I initially noticed the differing performance with something like “EDIT: For anyone else seeing differing performance on the virtual monitor I have now tested further and this does not appear to be vorpX related but rather a game-specific issue with Cyberpunk, which was the title in use when I first noticed this behavior.”

Looking forward to the next Beta!

[sdd1965]

Far Cry 6. The depth in Z3D is uncommonly strong; just as strong as G3D in any other game, yet still very fast. Unfortunately, without an official Vorpx profile, the UI elements can’t be seen in Full VR mode. Cinema mode is still very fun, but full VR mode would be especially nice in this game because it has so much detail everywhere you look.

[Ralf]

All I can tell you is what I told you above anyway. The virtual display driver does not hook into a game’s graphics pipeline. If it would tax your GPU in any way, it would do so outside of games in the exact same way as in games.

So whatever your further tests may show, you have to look somewhere else to find what causes your issue. Also, as said above, if your ‘issue’ is in the range of 5% or so, you have to run a reasonable amount of tests to determine what you see is not just random fluctuation.

As much as I’d like to get to the bottom of stuff you report here, when it is neither replicable nor even sounds technically plausible, I have to prioritize other things.

Let me know if you experience any increased GPU usage outside of games with the virtual display enabled. Not being able to replicate your issue here aside, that would be the only valid indication the virtual display could be the cause for what you see. Until then I consider this matter closed.

[Ralf]

If what you see was caused by the virtual display driver, you would see your GPU usage go up by just enabling it without a game running. The display driver does the exact same things on the desktop as it does in games. It’s not something that kicks in when games are running, it’s not even aware of that. The amount of work it has to do doesn’t change when you launch a game, and it certainly doesn’t use a significant amount of GPU resources under any imaginable circumstances. Maybe some more PiTool quirks, a weird effect caused by having other tools hooked into the pipeline alongside vorpX or whatever.

[GhostRider087]

I dont really understand, why PSVR 2 is so much hyped, because there is so much lesser Content than PCVR, no 3D BluRay Support, you can only play games in a 2D Cinema Screen without any Zoom Option.
And this costs 600 Euros for an Headset, which cant used as Standalone Headset, the Controllers work only for 4 Hours.. There is only Gran Turismo 7 on PSVR2, i can play more than 10 Racing Sims on PC right now with better Graphics, thanks to Vorpx and i dont have to pay for Online Gaming ;)

With PCVR and Pico 4 (Just 430 Euros) you can play via Vorpx so many games in really great VR, there are so much more possibilities.

With Virtual Desktop or the Vorpx Desktop Viewer and the right Software, which shows the 3D Blu Rays Movie in SBS, you are able to watch them on your PC Headset easily in SBS Mode.
Or you could rip your own BluRays as SBS Movies and put them on your Standalone PCVR Headset and watch them, without any Console or PC.

PCVR is the future, PSVR2 is just for user, who just own a PS5 and dont like to play with anything else on PC or just want an Plug an Play Experience.

I think it wouldn’t have been difficult to add 3D BluRay support on the PS5…

But :)