Comment by bullen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bullen | Hacker News Reader

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I meant native as in compiled to fast/minimal native machine code, the other games are all Unity/Unreal potato VM games, all 263/266 of them... with GC = sickness. The Climbs are Cryengine which might not have GC but still is bloated to hell.

Should have said "custom", but then that could also be misunderstood.

In my experience (I made the first VR MMO: http://aeonalpha.com, with the wrong programming language!) high refresh rates in sensor reading (faked by Oculus/Valve) combined with locomotion that the brain does not immediately associate with human motion are the best solutions after hardware.

But I will make my 3D action voxel MMO 3rd person just to make sure, if your head is the camera you wont get sick as easily, specially at 120Hz.

120 FPS at low persistence is the bare minimum if you want to not get ill from any smooth movement during long sessions = Echo VR is the ONLY game that is playable on Quest 2.

Non-smooth movement games are more of a slideshow/shooting gallery; (see HL:A :S) akin to the early fixed space 3D games on cd-rom if you remember those, which funnily HL was the first (after quake that I never played) to break:

I fondly remember me and my brothers jaws dropping simultaneously when we by mistake moved the mouse during the intro, we both 100% thought it was pre-rendered.

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 have 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.

I think both your premise and conclusion is wrong.

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.

If that was true, I think adoption would be way higher by this point.

You seem to be implying that it's nigh-impossible to write games that can reliably run at 90+ FPS and no dropped frames with a game engine because the game scripting logic runs in an interpreter with garbage collection

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

Unity is a over-engineered pile of &%$#. And now I'm being too nice.

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.

> I meant native as in compiled to fast/minimal native machine code, the other games are all Unity/Unreal potato VM games, all 263/266 of them... with GC = sickness. The Climbs are Cryengine which might not have GC but still is bloated to hell.

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/

I get "Sorry, something went wrong." on that oculus URL.

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 GB of junk to even get started.

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