Struggling with Silme Rancher

[Gus_Smedstad]

Slime Rancher is the first game I’ve tried to play with VorpX. Perhaps it would be smarter to start with a game with a known, working profile, but anyway this is where I started.

I started by copying the profile for Life Is Strange: Before the Storm, because that’s also a Unity 5 game. I’m using an XBox 360 wireless controller, because I’ve found it impossible to use a keyboard with my Vive.

I set the game’s resolution to 1280 x 1024, because higher resolutions are all widescreen. I tried higher (16:9, 16:10 aspect) resolutions and they made the HUD problem worse. I set the FOV to 90. Which is actually around 110, supposedly, because the FOV setting is the vertical FOV, not the more usual horizontal FOV.

Geometry 3D works, but there are FOV and scale issues. The biggest issue is the HUD elements, such as the hot bar and current tutorial pop up. If I set the scale to 1:1 and the zoom to 100%, the HUD elements are in the far corners of my vision, and unreadable. If I set the zoom to the minimum of 40%, the HUD elements are in comfortable positions, but the view is severely bounded, like playing in Cinematic mode or with Letterbox 2.

I understand games with Direct VR support can scale the HUD elements separately. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to do that with a Unity 5 game.

Menus are nearly impossible to use. They don’t select properly with the thumb stick unless I push it to the left as well as up and down, and the (A) label indicating which menu item is selected flickers in and out.

I had to disable head positioning, because otherwise turning my head causes the screen to effectively cut out. More accurately, the models turn flat monochrome silhouettes. Head rotation sensitivity of 0.5 appears to be correct.

The camera is very low to the ground, but raising it (by specifying a negative camera vertical offset) results in severe distortion if I tilt my head up or down. Nothing seems to be the right scale – everything seems to be too small. Presumably this is because of the zoom, but the game’s unplayable if you can’t see the HUD elements.

Locking yaw doesn’t work. Presumably that’s only for mouse input, not controllers. For the life of me, I don’t know how anyone plays a VR game with keyboard and mouse, since acquiring the keyboard blindly is difficult.

[dellrifter22]

If you know typing and played PC games for years, you can feel your way around a keyboard just fine ;)

As I understand it, DirectVR HUD is handled on a per game basis, as it requires specific back-end work, when even possible. Like modding.

I’m guessing that headtracking is important to you, otherwise I’d suggest playing with the immersive cinema mode – since you could just use your neck to view HUD. I play a lot of games this way. It is still quite immersive.

For FullVR, I’d use edgepeek button when looking for HUD. Or, if I needed it constantly in view, I’d compromise by zooming the screen out just enough as you mentioned. However I might try a widescreen resolution in this case – to reach the sides of your view better, and bring HUD from top and bottom closer to the center.

At first seeing those letterbox “black bars” might seem disgusting, but change them to Ambient color and you start to get used to it fine.

You can increase appearance of scale by turning down the 3D strength. The stronger the strength, the smaller things appear. Decreasing FOV can also make things look bigger. Getting a comfortable FOV is important, but try not to over do it if you want things to look larger.

A trick to test FOV: look straight down at the floor, then drag your gaze up to the horizon. if the floor appears to stretch and move faster than your gaze, you need more. It should flow naturally as you look up. You can’t always get it perfect, but close enough counts.

Getting a new game to work takes some trial and error, and usually compromise, but is generally still a neat experience.

[Gus_Smedstad]

I really don’t agree about the keyboard. I’ve been a touch typist and PC gamer for 30 years, and my take is that keyboard and mouse is unusable in VR. To take the simplest example of why, if you have to take your right hand off the mouse – which is pretty common – finding the home position on the keyboard is slow and error prone, and then finding the mouse again is also slow and error prone.

It might be OK if you’re playing a turn-based game, though I still wouldn’t like it much, but it’s a definite dealbreaker in any game where speed of response is important.

Yes, headtracking is important to me. I’ve used the Vive for 10 months now, and I don’t think I’d bother with VR without it. It’s like the difference between mouse aim and joystick aim, it’s so much faster and more accurate.

VR is a blurry experience compared to a monitor. I’d just as soon use a real monitor for a sharp image as use the blurry simulated large screen monitor of Cinematic mode.

Look at it this way – the Vive is essentially like shoving your nose up against a 1080 x 1200 monitor, since that’s the per-eye resolution. If you mask that off so you’re at normal monitor viewing distance, it’s like looking at a 540 x 600 window. Which is why text is so difficult to read at a distance, and why a 1920 x 1200 monitor looks so much sharper. It’s pixels per degree of view, not just pixels.

I initially tried widescreen, but as I said it made the HUD problem worse. The pop up messages are in the upper-left corner, so they move further out in widescreen resolutions.

“Disgusting” isn’t exactly the word I’d use for the border bars. Maybe disappointing or distracting? VR has a bit of a goggled tunnel view as it is, and the bars are significantly worse in that regard.

[Gus_Smedstad]

I tried again, this time using the Vive controller support, mapped to keyboard and mouse. That seemed better in many ways until it simply stopped registering input entirely. I don’t know why.

After messing with Edge Peek (Vive right grip button), I decided it wasn’t really a substitute for having the HUD within the easily visible area. Sure, it worked, but I found I was using it constantly because the HUD information was too important. That rather defeats the “heads up” part of Heads Up Display.

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