The best tracks are also pretty hard if you haven't mastered normal difficulty yet.
It's not that I 'haven't mastered normal difficulty yet', it's that some of these tracks have a "normal" difficulty that's harder than Hard on a bunch of the original tracks from the game. Like, no warning, no lead up, just SURPRISE MOTHERFUCKER GOOD LUCK WEAVING THIS BULLSHIOH YOU FAILED. On "normal".
I don't know if there's a set of requirements/checkmarks a track needs to qualify for a given difficulty (beats per min, total cubes and whatnot seem like obvious markers) but some of the ones I'm getting have say Normal/Hard/Expert difficulties and the Normal one still destroys me while most of the original Beat Saber tracks on Normal are flat out easy for me.
Frankly I think it's basically 'power creep'; people who have 500 hours in game and play so well on Expert that what they perceive as "normal" difficulty is skewed.
I should just use No-Fail more for those, but in a sea of Expert only tracks, having one with Hard and under difficulties is a welcome surprise, until it's actually a Hard+ track in disguise (from my meager experience at least).
I really enjoy the ones that clearly put thought/effort into accounting for your momentum, getting a good flow back and forth or whatnot. Others just seem to relish in "SURPRISE YOU WERE ON THE LEFT BUT NOW IT'S AN AMBUSH FROM YOUR FLANK" kind of shit. Those I'm less a fan of, at least so far.
But that all aside, thanks for the suggestion. I've looked up a bunch of Benny's work and downloaded some of the Normal ones to hopefully give me a fighting chance at least.
Yeah, that sounds like the second thing I mentioned. There are a lot of bad custom tracks that are difficult for totally bullshit reasons. It's partly power creep and partly a warped idea of what elements are required for "difficulty".
Oh man that makes me remember how DDR was superior to PIU (Pump it up) specifically because the dance tracks in DDR were made to be fun and danceable. PIU was just throwing combinations at you in an almost random manner that made it more about stepping the pad as fast as you could and not actually try to dance.
I've never heard of anyone being susceptible to motion sickness just from simply being in VR. Usually happens only with experiences that involve artificial movement. Something like Beat Saber, or Job Simulator, shouldn't have any negative effects on anyone.
If the tracking has any judder that will trigger motion sickness without any other inputs. When I was playing Eagle Flight I had no issues at all... until one day when the conditions were just wrong and the headset detection was juddering around just a little tiny bit. It wasn't even noticeable in gameplay (I only could see tiny motions in static scenes) but man-oh-man did it mess with my equilibrium!!
I've never heard of anyone being susceptible to motion sickness just from simply being in VR. Usually happens only with experiences that involve artificial movement. Something like Beat Saber, or Job Simulator, shouldn't have any negative effects on anyone.
If the tracking has any judder that will trigger motion sickness without any other inputs. When I was playing Eagle Flight I had no issues at all... until one day when the conditions were just wrong and the headset detection was juddering around just a little tiny bit. It wasn't even noticeable in gameplay (I only could see tiny motions in static scenes) but man-oh-man did it mess with my equilibrium!!
That's roughly my experience.
When psvr first debuted, a lot of people got this swimmy, forward and backward motion on the tracking, even when completely still.
I haven't always been 100% comfortable in VR, but that was the only time I felt straight up nauseous.
I need to watch another tutorial on installing yet another mod for Beat Saber cause I always seem too stupid to do it and once I finally do it switches services and I have to do it all again and feel frusterated.
My Rift S is in at the store. I don't really have time to "jack in" tonight.
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ChaosHatHop, hop, hop, HA!Trick of the lightRegistered Userregular
I managed to figure out how to sideload songs onto Beat Saber and by god the game is at least twice as good when you know the songs. Also people have put a lot of care and attention to these, I could recognize the dance moves from the music videos for Shake It Off and Bubble Pop.
What is a cool thing I should try first with the Rift S?
I would start without locomotion. Maybe a VR movie like Henry, stationary games like Beat Saber or Super Hot.
Did it come with anything?
Yeah. I don't think it came with anything. Picking it up after work.
A lot of the headset bundles come with printed coupons for a free game or a trial subscription or something like that.
Other stuff that I liked starting out but is maybe old hat (and possibly cheaper?) by now:
Space Pirate Trainer - super basic premise, very arcadey, no persistent campaign or progress, but very solid.
Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes - party game, you need at least two people, but it's super fun without any challenging motion
I Expect You To Die - It's kind of a cross between Keep Talking and a single-player VR escape room. I like that kind of thing, but I've gotten more hours out of Keep Talking overall.
The Lab - I don't know how to play Valve stuff on Oculus, hopefully an Oculus user could speak to that. This is mostly just a bunch of tech demos, but I actually still boot up Xortex occasionally, it's a uniquely VR take on bullet hell.
Moss - it's a super well made 3d platformer, but from the perspective of a kind of diorama. It's not revolutionary, but it's very solid, friendly to all ages. Lucky's Tail does a similar thing but just doesn't come together as well; prefer Moss unless Lucky's Tail is absolutely stupid cheap.
Everything I've heard indicates that the Rift works completely fine with The Lab, and that one's a great starting point. Free on Steam, Valve polish/charm, and it's just a tour of stuff they found out was neat in VR as they were developing it.
I still love The Blu as a demo game and experience, but the three experiences combined last less than 30 minutes. It's great if you want to start with more passive experiences before getting into more interactive stuff, and doubly so when introducing someone to VR and wanting to show them the range of experiences it offers, but not a great $/hr investment if it's just you. It's definitely quality over quantity.
If you're completely fresh to VR, I'm sure Oculus has some 360 degree 3D photos and videos for free on their storefront and that stuff is a lot of fun for a bit.
Space Pirate Trainer is great, Super Hot is great, Gorn is great, Blade & Sorcery is also great.
If you're into weird VR psychadelia stuff, My Lil Donut is also free on steam and is easily the best LSD donut simulator on the market.
To play valve stuff, just boot it up, it should work fine (I haven't specifically tried The Lab but it's true of every other Steam VR game).
Job simulator is a wonderful and simple example of the power of VR. I wouldn't suggest paying full price for it but if its on sale (which it often is) it's well worth a play.
It's one of the titles I use to show VR off to people.
Concerning the earlier discussion: I've not played Pistol Whip much, but my first experience with it was nice. My first experience with Superhot was: Wow. I'd still consider it one of the games that showed what VR could be. In fact, it reminds me of Portal: it's short but unique and an undoubted masterpiece.
Thirith on
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Do you really need the Vive tracking or is it fine with the Rift S?
Nah you'll be fine. There are certain scenarios and use cases where the tracking differences may come into play, but you shouldn't have any real issues. It's mostly just occluding the controllers by holding them in spots where they can't be seen by the trackers you have, but apparently they've done a lot to help with that on the Rift S and it's going to only affect certain pretty specific stuff.
It's a bit grainy, but the scene with the elephants and then the one with the Mongolian family really took my breath away as it really made me feel like I was there.
I think running SteamVR software in the Rift requires you to go into the settings and allow content from unknown sources, unless they got rid of that.
There was actually a little bit of jank in The Lab when I tried it for the first time about two months ago. Movement and/or object interactions weren't working right in Secret Shop and Robot Repair, and Longbow isn't intuitive since just touching the trigger counts as a pull - you want to take your finger completely off the trigger to release.
But I think that was pretty soon after the Index update. Valve might have fixed these problems since then.
The Oculus Introduction to Virtual Reality and Oculus Dreamdeck are good first experiences. The museum in Dreamdeck still makes me pretty happy. Google Earth VR on SteamVr.
I'd get Aircar from either the Oculus Store or Steam and try that pretty early on. There's not a lot to it, but it's very pretty and intuitive.
Some Steam titles have free VR ports, so if you already have any of those, they usually feature good content but sometimes wonky VR implementation. Subnautica, No Man's Sky, Rise of the Tomb Raider (if you have a certain DLC), Zone of the Enders, Hellblade, Obduction, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes (not a single player game), Dirt Rally, Distance, Elite: Dangerous, DCS, Everspace, Overload, Payday 2, Project Cars, Prey (if you have the DLC), Sublevel Zero, Tabletop Simulator (this wasn't great in VR when I tried it).
From my time with GearVR long ago, sadly not all 360 degree videos are also 3D. 3D 360 videos are super cool, while 360 videos are....okay. National Geographic had a few free 3D 360 videos on the oculus storefront where a leopard walks up to you and sniffs you in the jungle, and it was amazing. It would be cool if Youtube had a decent amount of 3D ones!
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Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
Yeah, a 3D stereoscopic 360 video can be a really good experience if the scale is done well, it's good quality, and an interesting subject, but if it's not stereoscopic, it feels a little bit like you're sitting inside a sphere with an animated wallpaper plastered to the interior walls
Well, it was a whole ordeal picking up the rift and they ripped the packaging. So, we will see how this goes. Good thing I wasn't buying this for someone.
Thinking about catching up on all the vr thread stuff I've missed over the past few years and realized I left off during a heated Oculus vs Rift argument (which is probably why I bailed) and someone started bringing up Palmer Lucky quotes and, man, a lot can happen in three years. :rotate:
Anywho, I bring this up because of talk about Oculus having asynchronous time warp; what wound up happening with that technology?
ChaosHatHop, hop, hop, HA!Trick of the lightRegistered Userregular
So I got superhot on the recommendations here and by god is that game trippy. I've put a few hours into it on PC but it doesn't prepare you for this. This feels like I've hacked into the matrix but instead of freeing mankind I'm being forced into murder training until I get it right.
Like at the end of the game will some guy come to my house and say the code phrase which will send me into some gun fu assassin mode that dilates time and I'll wake up in like eighteen hours covered in blood?
The experience is so interesting on so many levels, like how even though it looks like it does it gives a sense of urgency, or realness. I think it's because it is so intuitive, yes you can hide behind the desk and fire around it. Or the way it rewards mastery. Hey, there's a gun hiding over here, and then when you use it it's like cheat codes. It's almost like being in a real time training montage, by the third or fourth attempts through a sequence you're just acting out of instinct, your optimal moves already planned in the early going.
Like at the end of the game will some guy come to my house and say the code phrase which will send me into some gun fu assassin mode that dilates time and I'll wake up in like eighteen hours covered in blood?
AFAIK... nothing. I don't remember any of that in the new Rift. Closest it came was tracking failures behind the headset, but that was fixed in software within, like, a week.
Palmer Lucky's still a fascist, though. That hasn't changed. He got fired a couple years ago.
Oh I'm well aware of the fate of Palmer Lucky and now I feel bad bringing him up because he really doesn't have anything to do with modern VR, so forget I said anything about him specifically.
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Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
AFAIK... nothing. I don't remember any of that in the new Rift. Closest it came was tracking failures behind the headset, but that was fixed in software within, like, a week.
Palmer Lucky's still a fascist, though. That hasn't changed. He got fired a couple years ago.
ATW and ASW are still in all the new headsets. They're good things, not bad things.
This may seem like a lot, but I was thinking about how awesome it would be to play Rocket League with a KBAM or controller, but in full VR. You'd still sit 3rd-person behind the car, but the ability to look back or wherever you want would be amazing. I image it would be like a 360-degree version of those flight games in Dave and Busters. It also could be a recipe for full-blown VR sickness without recovery.
And by VR, I don't mean Big Screen. I'm talking full 360-degree looking around.
Le_Goat on
While I agree that being insensitive is an issue, so is being oversensitive.
The best tracks are also pretty hard if you haven't mastered normal difficulty yet.
It's not that I 'haven't mastered normal difficulty yet', it's that some of these tracks have a "normal" difficulty that's harder than Hard on a bunch of the original tracks from the game. Like, no warning, no lead up, just SURPRISE MOTHERFUCKER GOOD LUCK WEAVING THIS BULLSHIOH YOU FAILED. On "normal".
I don't know if there's a set of requirements/checkmarks a track needs to qualify for a given difficulty (beats per min, total cubes and whatnot seem like obvious markers) but some of the ones I'm getting have say Normal/Hard/Expert difficulties and the Normal one still destroys me while most of the original Beat Saber tracks on Normal are flat out easy for me.
Frankly I think it's basically 'power creep'; people who have 500 hours in game and play so well on Expert that what they perceive as "normal" difficulty is skewed.
I should just use No-Fail more for those, but in a sea of Expert only tracks, having one with Hard and under difficulties is a welcome surprise, until it's actually a Hard+ track in disguise (from my meager experience at least).
I really enjoy the ones that clearly put thought/effort into accounting for your momentum, getting a good flow back and forth or whatnot. Others just seem to relish in "SURPRISE YOU WERE ON THE LEFT BUT NOW IT'S AN AMBUSH FROM YOUR FLANK" kind of shit. Those I'm less a fan of, at least so far.
But that all aside, thanks for the suggestion. I've looked up a bunch of Benny's work and downloaded some of the Normal ones to hopefully give me a fighting chance at least.
What I've find that helps me prepare for the next level of difficulty is to go down one difficulty (if I'm prepping for Expert, go to Hard), then select the mod for faster song. Once I complete that with minimal (or no) misses, then I feel like I'm ready to try that next level of difficulty (obviously without Faster Song turned on).
That may not help a ton with what you're talking about, but it may help a wee bit?
Le_Goat on
While I agree that being insensitive is an issue, so is being oversensitive.
AFAIK... nothing. I don't remember any of that in the new Rift. Closest it came was tracking failures behind the headset, but that was fixed in software within, like, a week.
Palmer Lucky's still a fascist, though. That hasn't changed. He got fired a couple years ago.
ATW and ASW are still in all the new headsets. They're good things, not bad things.
Yeah. Getting up to speed on this was....incredibly confusing because even dedicated VR websites can't seem to consistently use timewarp/spacewarp and they're all very futuristic crazy tech names, but this article has a good summary if you're feeling adventurous.
Shortish version: ASW and ATW are super cool and can kind of magically make your low framerate games feel higher framerate and it's sweet. Valve was being a bit silly upon launch of SteamVR/Vive and their feature was noticeably less good because something something not wanting developers to get lazy and rely on it. They have since changed their position and did a few updates, and as of the Motion Smoothing update they achieved parity with ASW and ATW at the time in SteamVR -- non oculus headsets or oculus headsets running games through steamVR get the benefits. Then earlier this year, Oculus came out with a 2.0 update that makes the image better when...spacetimereprojectwarping....(pictures in the article), so they're currently ahead of the curve on that again.
This may seem like a lot, but I was thinking about how awesome it would be to play Rocket League with a KBAM or controller, but in full VR. You'd still sit 3rd-person behind the car, but the ability to look back or wherever you want would be amazing. I image it would be like a 360-degree version of those flight games in Dave and Busters. It also could be a recipe for full-blown VR sickness without recovery.
And by VR, I don't mean Big Screen. I'm talking full 360-degree looking around.
It would probably make it playable to me because tracking the ball and driving never worked for my primitive brain.
Tracking the ball I don't know where I'm going if I'm not heading directly at the ball.
If I wasn't then I knew where I was going but no idea on the ball.
I know the trick is to switch back and forth as needed but it never clicked for me as I would get too wrapped into one or the other.
I'm not sure what most people do, but I pretty much always leave it on ball tracking. It's a lot easier to maintain the shape of the field in your mind than a moving ball. And until you get better, you're pretty much just trying to make contact in vaguely the right direction anyway.
Oh cool, I didn't know Blaze Rush had a VR mode. I'll have to check that out.
And since it seems like a lot of people are newly getting into VR these days, once you have your legs and want to check out a more movement-intense game (seriously, make sure you can handle movement, have at least a good few hours under your belt in stuff like Skyrim or Fallout) check out Jet Island: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2xRVq1sijQ
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Yeah, that sounds like the second thing I mentioned. There are a lot of bad custom tracks that are difficult for totally bullshit reasons. It's partly power creep and partly a warped idea of what elements are required for "difficulty".
This video talks about the weirdness of difficulty in Beat Saber and gives a few examples of good creators:
That's roughly my experience.
When psvr first debuted, a lot of people got this swimmy, forward and backward motion on the tracking, even when completely still.
I haven't always been 100% comfortable in VR, but that was the only time I felt straight up nauseous.
Dammit I want to love the way I move once more.
I would start without locomotion. Maybe a VR movie like Henry, stationary games like Beat Saber or Super Hot.
Did it come with anything?
Yeah. I don't think it came with anything. Picking it up after work.
A lot of the headset bundles come with printed coupons for a free game or a trial subscription or something like that.
Other stuff that I liked starting out but is maybe old hat (and possibly cheaper?) by now:
I still love The Blu as a demo game and experience, but the three experiences combined last less than 30 minutes. It's great if you want to start with more passive experiences before getting into more interactive stuff, and doubly so when introducing someone to VR and wanting to show them the range of experiences it offers, but not a great $/hr investment if it's just you. It's definitely quality over quantity.
If you're completely fresh to VR, I'm sure Oculus has some 360 degree 3D photos and videos for free on their storefront and that stuff is a lot of fun for a bit.
Space Pirate Trainer is great, Super Hot is great, Gorn is great, Blade & Sorcery is also great.
If you're into weird VR psychadelia stuff, My Lil Donut is also free on steam and is easily the best LSD donut simulator on the market.
Job simulator is a wonderful and simple example of the power of VR. I wouldn't suggest paying full price for it but if its on sale (which it often is) it's well worth a play.
It's one of the titles I use to show VR off to people.
PSN: SirGrinchX
Oculus Rift: Sir_Grinch
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Nah you'll be fine. There are certain scenarios and use cases where the tracking differences may come into play, but you shouldn't have any real issues. It's mostly just occluding the controllers by holding them in spots where they can't be seen by the trackers you have, but apparently they've done a lot to help with that on the Rift S and it's going to only affect certain pretty specific stuff.
The demo with Cirque du Soleil is probably this one: https://www.oculus.com/experiences/rift/1006887936048510
It's a bit grainy, but the scene with the elephants and then the one with the Mongolian family really took my breath away as it really made me feel like I was there.
There was actually a little bit of jank in The Lab when I tried it for the first time about two months ago. Movement and/or object interactions weren't working right in Secret Shop and Robot Repair, and Longbow isn't intuitive since just touching the trigger counts as a pull - you want to take your finger completely off the trigger to release.
But I think that was pretty soon after the Index update. Valve might have fixed these problems since then.
The Oculus Introduction to Virtual Reality and Oculus Dreamdeck are good first experiences. The museum in Dreamdeck still makes me pretty happy. Google Earth VR on SteamVr.
I'd get Aircar from either the Oculus Store or Steam and try that pretty early on. There's not a lot to it, but it's very pretty and intuitive.
Some Steam titles have free VR ports, so if you already have any of those, they usually feature good content but sometimes wonky VR implementation. Subnautica, No Man's Sky, Rise of the Tomb Raider (if you have a certain DLC), Zone of the Enders, Hellblade, Obduction, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes (not a single player game), Dirt Rally, Distance, Elite: Dangerous, DCS, Everspace, Overload, Payday 2, Project Cars, Prey (if you have the DLC), Sublevel Zero, Tabletop Simulator (this wasn't great in VR when I tried it).
The box seems light.
Anywho, I bring this up because of talk about Oculus having asynchronous time warp; what wound up happening with that technology?
It turned into asynchronous space warp, which extended the tech to depth movement as well as rotational movement, and is, as far as I can tell, magic.
Good summary of where we stand with it today.
https://uploadvr.com/reprojection-explained/
Like at the end of the game will some guy come to my house and say the code phrase which will send me into some gun fu assassin mode that dilates time and I'll wake up in like eighteen hours covered in blood?
The experience is so interesting on so many levels, like how even though it looks like it does it gives a sense of urgency, or realness. I think it's because it is so intuitive, yes you can hide behind the desk and fire around it. Or the way it rewards mastery. Hey, there's a gun hiding over here, and then when you use it it's like cheat codes. It's almost like being in a real time training montage, by the third or fourth attempts through a sequence you're just acting out of instinct, your optimal moves already planned in the early going.
Throwing is really unintuitive though.
Not quite, but you'll know what to do.
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
Palmer Lucky's still a fascist, though. That hasn't changed. He got fired a couple years ago.
Penny Arcade Rockstar Social Club / This is why I despise cyclists
ATW and ASW are still in all the new headsets. They're good things, not bad things.
And by VR, I don't mean Big Screen. I'm talking full 360-degree looking around.
That may not help a ton with what you're talking about, but it may help a wee bit?
Yeah. Getting up to speed on this was....incredibly confusing because even dedicated VR websites can't seem to consistently use timewarp/spacewarp and they're all very futuristic crazy tech names, but this article has a good summary if you're feeling adventurous.
Shortish version: ASW and ATW are super cool and can kind of magically make your low framerate games feel higher framerate and it's sweet. Valve was being a bit silly upon launch of SteamVR/Vive and their feature was noticeably less good because something something not wanting developers to get lazy and rely on it. They have since changed their position and did a few updates, and as of the Motion Smoothing update they achieved parity with ASW and ATW at the time in SteamVR -- non oculus headsets or oculus headsets running games through steamVR get the benefits. Then earlier this year, Oculus came out with a 2.0 update that makes the image better when...spacetimereprojectwarping....(pictures in the article), so they're currently ahead of the curve on that again.
It would probably make it playable to me because tracking the ball and driving never worked for my primitive brain.
Also yeah I've had the same fantasy.. I wish the VR userbase was much bigger, so many games would be unbelievable with VR mods.
If I wasn't then I knew where I was going but no idea on the ball.
I know the trick is to switch back and forth as needed but it never clicked for me as I would get too wrapped into one or the other.
In VR they got the scale perfect and it feels like racing around micro machines.
probably hard to find a MP game these days but for the $5-10 they're probably asking it's a great SP experience too.
I'm not sure what most people do, but I pretty much always leave it on ball tracking. It's a lot easier to maintain the shape of the field in your mind than a moving ball. And until you get better, you're pretty much just trying to make contact in vaguely the right direction anyway.
Oh cool, I didn't know Blaze Rush had a VR mode. I'll have to check that out.
And since it seems like a lot of people are newly getting into VR these days, once you have your legs and want to check out a more movement-intense game (seriously, make sure you can handle movement, have at least a good few hours under your belt in stuff like Skyrim or Fallout) check out Jet Island: