There is also the issue of subjective motion sickness sensitivity that seems to conflate comparisons, some seem to get sick in any VR with certain games or environments, and everyone gets sick in some specific VR headsets. If you don't get motion sick easily, quest2 is pretty comfortable, and once you find some decent games it's unique and re-playable, more than a mere novelty.
Lots of folks on HN seem to have tried one thing once at some point in time - either got motion sick or got confused why the onboard graphics sucked, and then just relegated the whole category to "still broken". VR works if you can be bothered to do as little research as you do for your next PC.
> Unfortunately Echo VR (the ONLY native game) closes in August!
I don't get what you mean by native though, there are loads of native quest games.
In my experience (I made the first VR MMO: http://aeonalpha.com) high refresh rates in sensor reading (faked by Oculus/Valve, I used 120 FPS on DK1 in 2013, 150 FPS on DK 2 in 2014 and 180 FPS on OG Vive in 2016) combined with locomotion that the brain does not immediately associate with human motion are solutions.
But I will make my 3D action voxel MMO 3rd person just to make sure.
120 FPS at low persistence is the bare minimum if you want to not get ill from any smooth movement = Echo VR is the ONLY game that is playable on Quest 2.
Non-smooth movement games are more of a slideshow/shooting gallery; akin to the early fixed space 3D games on cd-rom if you remember those.
The difference is now we have permanently peaked in hardware, so we need to solve things with software.
I haven't tried "Tea for God" yet, kinda dreading the adb install since computers can get bricked when you do real work on them these days.
Baffling that in 6 years, 1 billion humans (that could bought a headset and built something) only managed to create 3 custom engines for VR: Source 2, Lone Echo and "Tea for God".
Odds are not looking good.
You make it sound like VR motion sickness is the norm, but it’s really not. Tons of people play VR games every day with smooth locomotion, on “potato VM” game engines, at 72 or 90 Hz without issue.
Even if perf were a widespread issue, building a custom game engine for VR probably shouldn’t be your first choice when there’s so many easier ways to optimize.
It's definitely worth being careful to avoid GC causing frame drops, but I'm pretty sure there are a lot of good-performing VR games written in Unity
And it's getting worse by the day.
The company is bankrupt, and when interest rates go up further all your invested time will go poof in a second.
Own your time, and control your future: when you use Unity you learn very little about how the GPU works, which kinda is the point, but since OpenGL 3 is the final 3D interface with VAO you only need to learn it once for eternity.
Fascinating info, thanks for sharing. I was aware of the two Cryengine games and the omnipresence of Epic’s engines, but I didn’t realize it was that lopsided.
Absolutely agree with the claim that “non-standard locomotion” is best for avoiding VR sickness - games like Gorilla Tag and Echo Arena really have a sort of “presence” factor that goes beyond 99% of VR titles.
Strongly disagree on the claim that VR sickness is a widespread issue - outside of Boomers/GenX who didn’t grow up playing video games. But I digress since I’m sure other posters will be jumping on the claim haha.
Btw, Tea for God is in the App Lab [1] so you shouldn’t need to mess around with ADB or Sidequest. If you enjoy the unique “pseudo infinite space” thing it has going on, you’d probably also enjoy “Eye of the Temple”. It’s currently on Steam[2] and in development for Quest, but it does the infinite spaces thing with an Indiana Jones style twist and is quite enjoyable experiencing the clever ways the dev came up with to trick you into thinking you’re physically exploring a huge space while actually remaining mostly still in reality.
[1] https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/3762343440541585/
[2] https://store.steampowered.com/app/589940/Eye_of_the_Temple/
Probably a temporary thing, but still I need to upload it with adb because that is how you develop for this thing.
Android is horrible now, I remember making something for the HTC Hero back in 2009, that was nice... now you have to install many hundred GB of junk to even get started.
I think there are only a couple headsets with pancake lenses at this point in time. Supposedly the PSVR2 has more advanced fresnel lenses than prior headsets of the same kind as well but I'm not versed enough in the technology to know.
HDR is the reason for this, they need more brightness, so they sacrifice low persistence.
Also all AAA experiences on PSVR2 run at 60 FPS and re-project to 120 FPS.
So it's actually worse then my initial comment. Echo VR does 120 FPS without re-projection on a 15W device vs. 60 FPS on PS5 at 350W!!!
I have been sucking in too much VR news lately after a 7 year hiatus (not counting 3 HL:A playthroughs) so I confused all the info, thx for setting me straight!
I don't get motion sickness from the PSVR2 like I would occasionally with the Rift CV1 but again, I'm not super knowledgeable about any of the underlying technology.
The top of the line is still Quest 2, the display (120Hz) and fresnel lenses are better than most more expensive alternatives.
And with DAS FrankenQuest you have comfort.
Unfortunately Echo VR (the ONLY native game) closes in August!
I do not expect the Quest 3 to deliver much benefit over the 2. Maybe the Quest 3 lite they are talking about.
Surprisingly the Quest 2 is still DDR4 and has the same GFLOP as a 1030.