Option to switch off 'view recentering' when in edge view mode

[sgordon]

Although you guys suggest vorpX is a seated experience; I have a little suggestion that might make Alien Isolation ( and all games where ege peek is regularly needed) a better experience, and allow vorpX to be used as a standing experience in First Person View games, using your body’s orientation to look, and one joystick to move.

So here is how I tried to experience Alien Isolation.

– Hardware : VIVE + old Xbox controller (via xbcd)

– I have no native xbox controller support so I use joy2key to map the keyboard controls to my controller.

– Since AI is a stealth game more than a running game where necessary strafe could possibly cause sickness, I can play in the standing position and turn my body left and right depending on where I want to look and walk to. Besides it gives a much more natural feeling to the game versus sitting on a chair.
– Then I use the left thumbstick to walk in the direction I am facing.
– So far so good, the motion is natural and everything, but…

As you are well aware, the Motion Tracker is an essential kit which is not in view of the player and Edge Peek must be used. The disadvantage of Edge Peek is that it resets the camera position relative to the center of your screen, not to the center of where you were looking at.

It’s a bit hard to explain but here goes:

– At the start of the game I am facing North
– There is a corridor to the East and one to the West.
– I want to see if there is an alien in either corridor.
– Facing the east corridor (by turning my body in that direction) I trigger edge peek mode which faces me back automatically to North instead of keeping focus on the East.
– Can we have a setting so we can switch this behavior off ?

When using a program like xpadder or Joy2Key one can bind all these keys on the keyboard to one controller button.

So I tried to map 4 funtions to following 4 buttons to one controller button

– Motion tracker on
– Edge Peek mode on
– center positional headtracking (makes the edge peek cinema screen follow your orientation)
– center headtracking (gamepad) – on/off does not seem to solve the problem.

I have also set xbox controller override to partial (x-axis only)

Am I missing something here ? please advise.

Thank you

[sgordon]

So basically a setting where we can ‘slave’ edge peek (when triggered) to the direction our HMD is facing in 3d-view and not to the (in this case) unused ‘thumbstick view’ or ‘mouse view’ direction.

[sgordon]

Slaving the center of mouse look to the center of the focus of the HMD facing position would actually resolve this issue. Can this be achieved with the setting possibilities we are given in vorpX at the moment ?

[Ralf]

I’m not quite sure why you would want to use EdgePeek mode for playing standing. EdgePeek is meant for using menus or looking at HUD elements in corners, not being bound to the view direction is actually the main characteristic and purpose of EdgePeek mode.

Unless I totally misunderstand what you are trying to achieve, you can easily play standing in normal Full VR mode. If you recenter the view while standing, you can look arround using head tracking and use the gamepad to move, which to my understanding is what you would like to do.

vorpX has a built in gamepad emulation BTW., so joy2key isn’t strictly required. An external tool does the job too, of course.

[sgordon]

Hey Ralf

Playing standing in normal VR mode is perfectly possible and looking around to choose a direction and virtually stepping forward using the controller in that direction as well. Like I said above.

In VR mode however (no matter how you set the FOV or at what resolution) the Motion Tracker in Alien Isolation is positioned to0 far off the center of the view screen, thus it is not visible in normal VR mode without using Edge Peek.

That is the reason why I activate Edge Peek momentarily even while standing so the screen zooms out enough so I can see the Motion Tracker.

However, as mentioned above Edge Peek has not memorized the direction I was facing in normal VR mode, it stays stuck on the initial point of view for example North. Since I don’t use the mouse to point my character in a certain direction, but face a certain direction using the HMD, the mouse keeps pointing at its original position and is not updated to my current facing direction in Edge Peek mode; So, whenever edge peek is activated, an invisible hand pulls my chin and my view direction back to that original mouse direction.

In short, in normal VR mode, I am facing west; when activating Edge Peek, my ingame viewpoint changes to facing north instead of facing West like in VR mode.

[Ralf]

OK, now I got it. I have to look into that. What you describe is actually intended behaviour, but I see that it can cause a problem when playing without a defined forward position. The reason for this behaviour is that otherwise you may end up looking into the wrong direction after exiting EdgePeek if you look around a lot while EdgePeek is enabled.

I will think about a way to achieve that without affecting your use case, but I can’t promise anything.

[sgordon]

Hey Ralf,

Thanks for the response. I understand that for a seated position, where you use the mouse to move around and play in 3D mode for immersion sake, this is not necessary.

However, this might be a good feature to implement as an on/off switch, because playing 1st person games (not just AI in particular) using the mouse to achieve movement and directional input feels a lot less natural than with the HMD. I feel getting nauseated more easily by using the mouse instead of pointing my head in the correct direction as explained above.

Anyways, I am glad that you understood what I meant, since it is no easy matter to explain or comprehend.

Well as I understand it the most straightforward solution would be to add an on/off feature to the Headtracking menu which would slave the mouselook view in Edge Peek to the centered position of where your HMD is facing at.

Anyway, I’ll stay subscribed to this post so please keep me posted if/when you were to implement this in the future.

Have a good weekend

[Ralf]

I will think about a way to achieve the intended behaviour without affecting your use case, which clearly will become more popular with Vive controller/Touch support. I just can’t promise anything since both have to work together. You wouldn’t want to use EdgePeek without the current functionality.

[Author]

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