Neverball and Neverputt for the Oculus Rift (Page 1 of 3)

Right on, thanks!

It's my birthday today. Best present ever ^_^

I'll have a fiddle and offer some feedback this evening

Now I need to buy an Occulus Rift... thank you, awesome

Missed it, by THAT much... Happy Birthday d00d !!

It'll do the Rift's stereoscopic rendering and lens distortion even if you don't have a rift (if you're way super excited to, you can go crosseyed and not quite get the effect )

As a part of the VR Game Jam, Oculus are apparently setting up "playtest hubs" in cities around the world. If there ends up being one close enough, it could be worth taking a peek at if you have an opportunity.

Well, it's still yesterday in some parts of the world, so I'm happy to consider it on time.

Edit:

I should probably highlight that this is all rlk's work. I've been poking around a bit over the past month or two, but hadn't really had time to get anywhere. By contrast, rlk pulled this together in a day or two.

I had meant to share some impressions last night before I hit the hay, but it seems I closed the tab without posting. I might pop something something up later this evening ^_^

It's worthy now as far as I'm concerned.

The Windows side is completely untested, and Windows users are going to be the largest group of Rift testers. I want to get some binaries out and allow for some testing before declaring the branch mature.

Yeah, it is. There is, of course, a screen shot (the first one, above) textured onto the inside of the Rift model, and the ball is looking at it through a pair of lens cones, but you can't see it in-game. I considered trying to fix that, but there are so many passes and transparency layers in the ball renderer that I was unlikely to improve this case without breaking another one somewhere.

I've been running it without the basic ball mesh. It's amusing to me in that not seeing the ball mirrors the disconnect from the real world you suffer when using HMDs (not being able to see your hands, your input devices, etc.).

I was originally considering doing a ball with the Rift floating inside, but I think the ball actually wearing it is a better idea.

I'm also wondering if it might not be a bad idea to make the Rift ball default in Rift test builds.

I'm not really familiar with the Boost licence. Are there any GPL compatibility concerns to be aware of with this?

So, I promised some ramblings, and here they are!

First up, it's awesome to have this. I've been on and off poking around with it in what little spare time I've had, and though I'm still intending to mess around an experiment with different control/presentation stuff (most of which I expect to be completely unusable), what we have feels pretty solid and hopefully will generate some good enthusiasm for the project.

I don't have much interest in running it fullscreen, but I had a go using SDL_VIDEO_FULLSCREEN_HEAD and didn't have much success (possibly because I'm running Twinview?). I prefer to have it windowed and make the Rift a clone of a portion of my screen that I can just put an application over, allowing me to see what's going on regardless of whether I'm wearing the device or not. This ends up resulting in potential misalignment thanks to window borders, but that's only one or two pixels and it's not visible to me when using the device.

Having never had a "motion sickness" experience with HMDs or headtracking, I can't really comment on this aspect (I did seek out every twisty, loopy level I could find to see if I could get something that would make me feel awful though), but I can argue that Neverball has aspects which make disorientation less likely (providing you've already mastered not feeling disoriented in the game itself or are using manual camera).

Unlike first person shooters, Neverball's main focus (the ball) is always in the same direction. If you glance away, you always know where to look to find the ball. Since the position of the ball is always known, the direction of apparent world movement is always clear, which I believe makes it easier to keep track of what's happening within the game.

After watching Mim play (it does make her feel a bit queasy), her biggest issue was when a replay started playing on the main menu without warning - I think this is to be expected, as people generally seem to experience motion sickness less when they have a sense of control over whatever movement is problematic. I think I'd lean towards disabling automatic playing of replays when idle, but I'd be happy to hear other thoughts.

I have noticed that blurring/juddering/whatever you want to call it feels more present than the other stuff I've played with on the Rift. I'm going to guess that this has to do with our bright colour palette (and perhaps it's more noticeable when solid red, green or blue are dominant? I don't know enough about how the Rift's LCD screen works to say for sure), but it could also be to do with the way in which the camera moves independently of head movement when rotating.

The UI feels good, although I wouldn't mind tidying up the mouse cursor (its edges are pretty noisy), and perhaps experimenting with some rotation or shift to bring UI elements closer to the camera when looking left or right, or perhaps when moving the mouse cursor.

So far as the gameplay HUD UI goes, having to glance at the coin counter to bring it into focus feels pretty awkward to me (but I don't feel that shrinking the HUD as well as the non HUD GUI elements would be a good move).

I'm also interested in seeing how the game would feel if head movements rotated the view around the ball rather than around the camera's location, keeping the ball in-frame at all times and giving a more solid point of reference. I'm not certain that this would be preferable to what we have now, but it's all possibility space that I'm personally interested in exploring.

Similarly, I'm also interested in seeing how the game feels with headtracking pitch and roll controlling the world's tilt - I fully expect this to be cumbersome, uncomfortable and inaccurate, but again, I'm keen to experiment with different implementations, not only for my own interests, but also for potential insights into what's good and bad about the current mechanisms by having something to compare them to.

I wouldn't mind seeing us have some "virtual headtracking" controls so that camera movement could be controlled without a Rift.

All up, it's super neat, and I totally agree with rlk's assertion that this is potentially a "big deal" (both for us and for OpenHMD), and though it's still early, what we have feels solid and playable.

It's really interesting to see the different perspective this gives on the game. It also highlights how glaringly bad the shooting star animation is in the Volcano background (though the environment as a whole feels much broader/more impressive)

Great work, rlk!

Edit: I've got a little bit of time off work that I'm trying to fit a lot of stuff into. I was hoping to hack around with HMD support a bit, but if nobody else is willing to put together pre-release testing builds for Desura/IndieDB (which gives us some space for "beta" builds that I think we should take some advantage of), I guess I can spend my time doing that instead (I also have a Mac now, but haven't looked at what's involved with building on that yet)

No. Sorry about that. I knew I would be stepping on one of your toes there. I'm completely willing to revert that for our future deployments.

My MinGW setup is organized to favor static builds because this eases the distribution of some of my other projects. I felt it would make sense to take the same approach for beta-testing of the HMD code, since it's very convenient to unzip and run a beta, while a full-fledged installer implies greater permanence.

I'm not advocating any change in distribution policy.

Elviz, if you're looking at carrying Rift support across to Nuncabola (I don't know of anybody working on OpenHMD bindings for Java though), I'm happy to do testing on Mac OS and Linux

I understand entirely and agree with the measure you took.

As for the optimization part, after the discussion with jammnrose last year I did some more tests, and the reported issues were basically all due to OptiPNG's "lossless image reduction" step. As long as we disable that, everything should be fine. Nothing wrong with -o4'ing the iCCP-stripped files.

Thanks, Cheese. I don't have (and haven't pre-ordered) a Koronis Rift – I mean, Icculus Rift – so there aren't any plans at the moment really. Once that changes, I'll be sure to take up your offer.

What I wonder about is whether the Oculus Rift will give the player enough of a feeling of orientation and balance that serious playing becomes possible. I mean, will you be able to finish the more difficult levels that require very careful movements and camera rotation?