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Comment by thenomad | Hacker News Reader

Additional workout suggestion: try Thrill Of The Fight ( http://store.steampowered.com/app/494150/ ). It's the most physically intense experience I've had in VR so far - I'd say even more intense than Holopoint, although the two are close. Obviously you will have to enjoy boxing for it to be much use or fun, mind!

You might also enjoy Climbey (http://store.steampowered.com/app/520010/ ) - it doesn't look particularly physical at first but it uses a decent amount of slow muscle movement. I was surprised at how sore I was the morning after a long play session with it.

(Oh, and given you love Dark Souls - you have heard of Left-Hand Path ( http://store.steampowered.com/app/488760 ), which keeps getting described by users as "Dark Souls VR", right? If not, I seriously need to work on my marketing. It's also at least somewhat physical, particularly if you decide to use the dodging mechanics a lot. Full disclosure: I'm the developer of that one.)

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I have played Left Hand Path a lot, very intense esp. the boss fight. I can't seem to complete the ruin sequence to get past the end of level one so I put that one on hold until it gets patched, I'm pretty sure I am doing the ruin sequence right... but yeah great Dark-Souls like experience in VR. Can't wait to see what From does in VR.

Climbly is good too but it's tough because you still have to move around with their locomotion technique and I find it quite vomit-y unfortunately the way it currently works.

Thrill of the Fight is on my list to check out this weekend... new release, looks great :)

Oh, sorry to hear that! The end of that level does seem to stump people - I'm working on making it much more accessible.

If you'd like to either email me (email in my HN profile), reply here, or put up a post on the Steam forums (http://steamcommunity.com/app/488760/discussions/0/) I'd be more than happy to help you past that, as there's lots of good stuff beyond!

Climbey - yeah, the locomotion does get a little nausea-inducing :( I'm bulletproofed to it after months of VR development!

Oh great, thanks man! And I have to tell you it's impressive as hell what you have create with Left Hand Path esp. considering you are a single developer. Simply amazing man! I will definitely take you up on your offer this weekend.

Thank you! It's been a very fun and rewarding shift in career from what I was doing before. Glad people are enjoying my work!

And please do! We'll get you on the path through the Well again...

What background did you have before you went into VR? Anywhere you would point beginners who want to get started?

I've been making Machinima films using game engines for the past 20 years or so, including working with people like EA, the BBC, et al.

(I'm actually the guy who coined the word "Machinima", with a colleague, because we needed a better way to describe what we did than "Quake Movie".)

So I had a lot of game engine experience before I jumped in.

As for beginners getting started: Unity, Unity, Unity. Grab Unity and start learning - you can get a simple VR experience going in a fairly minimal timeframe.

Do you mostly use Blender to create the actual environments? I've started to do a little reading on this stuff too and it's a daunting hill to climb coming from primary a web-dev background (at least I know C# like the back of my Left Hand haha couldn't resist...).

I'm mostly using the Unity level editor, in actual fact, although I use 3D Studio Max for my detailed 3D modeling when I need to.

The Unity editor's very powerful, and you can extend it with tools like ProBuilder and Gaia, which are all available in the Unity Asset Store.

(I heartily recommend both of those for simple geometry creation and landscape creation, respectively.)

I've been coming at it the other way - I know game engine graphics and assembly like the back of my sinister hand, but I've been on a rapid C# learning curve :)

Just wondering what tools or techniques should you specifically learn to make VR games in Unity? I can make desktop games in Unity, is a VR game just like a FPS with different physical controls?

From another Quake veteran big kudos for Quake Done Quick(er). The good old days :)

Terrible graphics. I'm not up-to-date but are we still at this level?

Yes. Even the best VR headsets still have incredibly low pixel density. According to Michael Abrash, "the per-degree pixel density of a 1k by 1k, 110-degree VR display is... actually lower pixel density than the original Quake running at 320x200."[0]

And when you call the graphics "terrible" do you mean they actually look bad to you from inside a VR headset, or just looking at the screenshot on some other device?

Because what looks amazing in a traditional game can look cartoony and fake within VR, and incredibly simple things can look startlingly real.

[0] https://youtu.be/G-2dQoeqVVo?t=14m30s

It's just barely good enough to be a compelling experience.

VR games are a lot of fun, but this is going to drive GPU development for a long time to come.

I welcome it! Admittedly I have enjoyed the past few years of not having to upgrade my graphics card. It would seem thanks to consoles, that shader technology and performance has been a focus of game development for a little while. The result being better and better visuals still running on the same hardware just fine.

But I am also behind an escalation of the chipset manufacturers duelling it out. Some market impetus would surely bring about some great new engineering.

This is exactly why I'm not jumping into VR right now. Once we have hi-res VR headsets and GPUs that can handle it comfortably, then I'll be interested. Give it five years or so, probably.

Depends. Remember a lot of this stuff is driven by small dev houses and in some cases - one man bands. Sometimes the graphics aren't up to scratch.

Also - there's a tendency towards flat shading as an aesthetic choice - it actually looks great in VR and frame rate is king.

However - check out something like Valve's "The Lab" to see how skilled devs can produce stunning graphics that run really smoothly in VR. It shows it's possible...

(self-reply) I found this compilation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yW8om7lcNpg

On reflection I don't think VR graphics are looking bad at all...

I'll take horrible graphics over awesome gameplay any day. Take a look at 'Onward' - just shows how simple can equal awesome!

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