- This topic has 7 replies, 2 voices, and was last updated Jul 4, 2016 7:06pm by
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Hello,
I’be got my Vive yesterday and I’ve spent so far about 8 hours discovering what and how it does. First I tried some of the VR apps on Steam and then concentrated on the main reason I got it in the first place – playing older AAA games. In the past months I’ve been playing on a big 3D TV on SBS 3D (TriDef) and I had some hopes and expectations on how the games will look and behave in VR.
The result is somewhat confusing and I have faced several serious problems that I need to resolve if I’m not going to go back to the 3D TV setup. The VR experience, while problematic in many aspects, felt really promising and exciting.
As a fresh Vive user I’m overwhelmed by the complexity of the system and the multiple options that need to be tweaked – on the hardware itself as well as different software applications. So I’m afraid I’m missing important steps/points/tweaks that can make the games actually playable. And maybe I’m missing an obvious solution for them.1. The first problem is of course the frame rate / motion sickness. I’ve seen different solutions for the FPS problems and I’m going to experiment with them. I tried Skyrim, FO4 and Witcher 2. It seems the motion sickness is not really related to the frame rate as such. For example out of the 3 games Witcher 2 gave me the less dizziness which was completely unexpected as this game has terrible FPS even on a normal 2D playthrough. In Skyrim (and FO4) I was unable to make more than 3 steps walking or running before feeling dizzy. However I had no problems whatsoever with the killmove cutscenes that people usually complain about. So I guess my question is – what exactly causes the dizziness and how can I minimize it?
2. I’m using ENB Boost (as injector) with Skyrim, FONV and Oblivion which allows them to run without constantly crashing. I’ve read several speculations that ENB interferes with the performance of Vorpx and if you use it you are doomed to suffer low FPS no matter what. Is this true and are any considerations about running them together in terms on setting them up?
3. Menus and other HUD elements – impossible to see. Yes, there is the mouse-wheel solution but while you see the HUD while it is pressed there is nothing you can do with it. What I did was – press the mouse wheel, look at the option that I need to select and then trying not to move my hand or head at all release the wheel and click. This is quite annoying and what is even worse it reflects the dialogue interface of Skyrim making even talking to NPCs a tedious experience. I can’t even imagine trading with a NPC. Is there a solution for this?
4. Direction of movement – you walk and run wherever you are looking at. This will create a lot of problems for me as I’m used to constantly looking around while my character moves. I haven’t really tried it fully in Skyrim and FO4 because of the motion sickness issue. But it makes W2 completely unplayable because Geralt keeps running against the invisible walls in this half open-world game. Because the view is quite zoomed-in it is impossible to fully asses the terrain and predict where exactly the path lies. Is it possible to have the option to look around by moving your head while not influencing the direction of movement?
Thanks!
Seems I can’t edit the post anymore. Just wanted to add I have ran the configuration app and have applied the recomended settings. The FOV for both Skyrim and Fo4 is 120.
OK, so I’v found the answers to some of my questions.
On point 3 I was confused by the “peek” in name (EdgePeek) that it is only active while the mouse wheel is pressed. I’ve found out that the view will persist if the wheel is pressed and quickly released. This helps a lot with using the game’s interface.
I’ve also discovered the setting to zoom the HUD elements which also helps. But there are some problems with it. I’ve only tried it in Skyrim and it seems the notifications are not considered part of the HUD and are still not visible. And the bigger problem is if I zoom the HUD enough in order to it to fit in my view it gets unreadable. I can’t find a zoom level that makes the HUD both readable and fitting the view (so I don’t need the EdgePeek) at the same time.On the motion sickness point I have found out that zooming the HUD so the compass is always visible helps a lot. So is zooming out the whole game.
I understand that until now VR was mostly a field for advanced users and the default Vorpx settings are made for them – it throws you in the deep immediately. But there are more and more users like me who will have problems understanding how to set it up and use it.
My first 3 days trying to use it all follow the same pattern – 10 minutes in experimenting ended by strong feeling of dizziness and followed by hours of real world headache. It was on the 3rd day that I discovered the arrows on the top of the Vorpx in-game interface to change the pages with the settings…Testing and tweaking Vorpx is different from any other software I have used in my life in the fact that it has real life health consequences.
I would like to suggest that there is a “noob preset” or change to the default settings that is friendly to the new users. For example start with zoomed-out game and visible HUD and let people discover that they can change that to more immersive levels. As opposed to now where the default settings are quite extreme and hostile to novice users.P.S. I tried solutions for the screen resolution but I still can’t make Skyrim run at more than 25-30 FPS.
If you are prone to motion sickness, you should always favor a high frame rate over image quality. I would consider 50-60fps the minimum unless you are largely immune. That’s enough for timewarp tp be able to compensate for the rest largely unnoticable for most. The closer to the optimal 90fps for Rift/Vive, the better of course. The best way to achieve that in Skyrim is switching to Z-Buffer 3D, which doesn’t look as good, but is a lot faster.
HUD: Try a higher resolution than the default suggestion, which is a general compromise between quality and performance. Since Skyrim is largely CPU bound with vorpX, 1600×1200 or even 1920×1440 may be possible without a large performance hit (check with ALT+F) depending on your GPU. This will not only enhance image quality, but also help tremendously with HUD readabilty when scaled further down than the default.
Regarding enhancements for novice users: the Essential Hints Guide in the vorpX help which explains the two most important things (field of view and head tracking sensitivity) will open automatically with vorpX on every launch in the future. It is already linked from many places in the config app and also highlighted in multiple ways, so it should be almost impossible to overlook it, but apparently that is still not enough for everyone to find it.
Thanks for the reply.
About the Essential Hints and the novice users. If you look at my OP all the points that were the biggest problem for me are not covered there. It is not that I didn’t read it, I didn’t find the answers to my problems there (FPS, motion sickness, HUD, head tracking complications) . The information it has is really helpful, but it needs more. As I said, until now the VR was a field for people with more knowledge and experience but this is changing. I understand there are things that are considered “obvious” but they are not obvious for me and the others like me.
My suggestion for a “noob” preset is mostly one that includes zoomed out game and zoomed in HUD. The main confusion and feeling that “everything is too zoomed in” (I understand this is not true because of the higher FOV) comes mainly from the fact that when you switch between EdgePeek and full VR it changes quite a lot. You can feel you are actually zooming in on a small portion of the image that was visible before and on top of that the HUD goes away. This HUD disappearing add quite a lot to the feeling of been lost in this very “zoomed in” view.
That’s why I believe it will help new users to start with settings that give them more familiarity and allow them to expand to better immersion at their own pace.
This wouldn’t be a big issue for other types of software, but in this case the novice user has to deal with way to many other stress factors.Head tracking. Is it possible to have it enabled in full VR mode but off in EdgePeek? The way it is now there are many things that can’t be done in some games. There are lots of cases where hovering (selecting) something shows relevant information on a different part of the screen. It is impossible now to read this information because when you move you head to do so it unselects the thing.
Going to continue fighting the FPS problems later today. I’m going to experiment a bit more with the resolutions and see what happens. This only adds more to my confusion ( :-) ) as it seems there are different frame rates measured at different points.
Switching off head tracking in EdgePeek mode introduces an issue where you regularly end up looking in a different direction in reality than in the game after leaving EdgePeek mode if you look around while it’s enabled. Especially in regard to the up/down axis this is very disorienting. An idea how to potentially avoid that is on the experiments list for a long time, so this *might* get adresses eventually, but no promises. Apart from that: in the future there will be more games that have Direct Head Tracking like Fallout 4. In these cases this will be avoidable.
There are two different frame rates because two different rendering processes are happening in parallel: the game itself and a second render thread that pushes the image to the headset.
Ideally both should show 90fps, but that will seldomly be possible with more demanding games. Primarily you should make sure that the game frame rate stays above 50fps for smooth gameplay. If that is the case, the direct mode frame rate usually also is OK automatically.
In Skyrim you will need to switch to Z-Buffer 3D and/or lower the game’s graphics settings for a significantly better frame rate. If you are prone to motion sickness, *always* prefer a high frame rate over image quality. Always!
If I understand correctly, the intended optimal FPS combo (shown via Alt+F) is 45/90.
All the tweaks with resolutions, 3D mode, graphics quality, mods and so on should revolve around that.
Also switching the resolution to the non-16:9 ratio helps a lot.I decided to test with FO4 as it is a somewhat more “modern” game. 1920×1440 resolution helped a lot not only to make the HUD readable but also to prevent dizziness as it makes the world sharper. At Z3D (Adaptive) and 80 image zoom I was able to run up and down a hill with no discomfort or dizziness so that’s quite cool :-)
There are two problems I found about FO4. The dialogue wheel is too low on the screen, but that can be fixed with a mod. The other one, that is also valid for Skyrim, is that in 3-rd person the player character is quite on the left side of the screen. This is very confusing when you try to walk or run around obstacles as you need to keep in mind that the correct position is the one of the character and not yours. But it is harder to access it as you only see half of him/her. I haven’t noticed this left offset by now, I wonder if there are mods to fix it.To answer my own concern about the player character positioning – there are ini fixes for this. If someone is interested a Google search for centered 3rd view camera about the game in question will return all the relevant links.
I guess with this all my questions are answered ( for now :-) ). Thanks for your help!
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