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Public VR Critique #1: Nighttime Terror

64 points by jrbedard 10y ago

petercooper 10y ago
He did some others as well: Dreadhalls - https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1652934931607684&id=100006735798590 https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1652934931... Playhead - https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1663414923893018&id=100006735798590 https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1663414923... Bazaar - https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1717273305173846&id=100006735798590 https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1717273305... Viral - https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1725972060970637&id=100006735798590 https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1725972060...
rocky1138 10y ago
I feel like the value of this article would be greatly increased by including a video of gameplay of the game in question. I have no idea what Nighttime Terror is or what it looks like.
- simoncion 10y ago
  > I have no idea what Nighttime Terror is or what it looks like. Dude. http://nighttimeterror.com http://nighttimeterror.com is the first Google result for "nighttime terror". I know that phones and tablets make it awkward to use the Internet, but it's likely far more work for the guy who's cleaning up and posting Carmack's critiques to embed a video (that could suffer linkrot (or -even worse- "api"rot) at any time) than it is for you (and any other interested party) to do a quick search. :)
  - MBCook 10y ago
    Oh good. A site that's totally unusable on an iPad.
  - kalleboo 10y ago
    That page... doesn't have a video of the game though. It DOES have a video of one of their other games, oddly enough...
- wyldfire 10y ago
  I misunderstood "Nighttime Terror" to be some kind of description of a misfeature/bug/side-effect of VR.
  - Aelinsaar 10y ago
    Same here, and I was very confused at first. I thought maybe it could also be some kind of desirable state for a VR horror game dev?
  - civilian 10y ago
    Same here. It would've been far more interesting if VR was causing night terrors. For those of you who haven't experienced them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_terror https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_terror I've had a combination of Sleep paralysis and Night terror and it's not fun. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis
- jimrandomh 10y ago
  As I understand it, this was a technical critique of a VR game intended for the developers to take and iterate with, and maybe for other developers to learn from as an example. It wasn't intended for people considering whether to actually play the game.
  - joshschreuder 10y ago
    But without seeing the examples mentioned in the critique, it's hard to visualise exactly what he's talking about and learn from it
bradhe 10y ago
These are really hard to understand without some associated images or videos.
- bigiain 10y ago
  I guess it depends on who the intended audience is - I doubt too many people who follow Oculus' developer blog weren't immediately picturing all of the flaws he describes while reading that. I'm only a dilettante in 3D VR, but I didn't need any images/videos to understand exactly what he was describing. I suspect Carmack was going for information density for people who'd understand here, rather than "3D VR games dev errors 101 for beginners", and he's pretty good at writing for his audience.
Animats 10y ago
Carmack's critiques are interesting for what they don't say. There's very little about how VR interacts with the gameplay. VR doesn't seem to have been exploited much in these first person shooters. They seem to have standard game mechanics. One could have a VR game where you're being followed, and have to keep looking behind you to try to spot your tails. But when you look back, your tails notice if you;re too obvious or look too long, and take evasive action or swap with a different tail. None of the mentioned games seem to tie where you look with game mechanics like that. The detailed discussions of aliasing vs stereo vision would apply to any 3D display. Any artifact that's different for each eye is really annoying. Also, why did someone release a 30FPS VR anything? There are arguments over minimal acceptable frame rate in VR, but the numbers are around 100FPS and this is well known. Menus in VR suck. No surprise there. It probably would have been better to ship the thing with a game controller, so the user could use the controls without looking at them. Carmack seems to like a dark world. Grey borders good, white clouds bad. Whether that's his Doom bias or a problem with the Oculus Rift isn't clear. In GTA V, you can climb a mountain and see the whole game world, clouds and all. That should look good in VR. If it doesn't, the current headgear has a problem.
- throwaway2873 10y ago
  You have your numbers on the "minimal acceptable frame rate" wrong. Oculus Rift and HTC Vive are both 90 FPS devices. At the time of the gear vr's release, it was only compatible with the Note 4, which could only display in 60fps (Not sure about the newest compatible phones, but I would think they're still 60 FPS max)
- tgb 10y ago
  He's critiquing a Gear VR game, not an Oculus Rift one, FYI.
- bigiain 10y ago
  The "framerate" discussion gets kinda complex in the context of head mounted displays. You're right that high frame rates are essential for head tracking updates to the viewport - but that's a different number to the rate at which the elements in the scene in your very-quickly-animated viewport need updating. You _do_ want t attempt to get 100fps in response to me swinging my head around, but you don't need (so much) to try to get your player and explosion animations up quite that fast (although all my adderall-enchanced fast-twitch fps gaming friends will sneer at you and blame your slow game for them getting headshot all the time if you don't manage 60 fps...) I don't know quite enough about how the GearVR (or Oculus) manages the framebuffer that the head tracker chooses it's viewport out of, but I suspect there's a way to render a 30 or 60fps scene at two or three thousand pixels cylindrically, then have the viewport update faster than that up around 100fps in response to the head tracking sensors.
NKCSS 10y ago
I had a chance to play with the HTC VIVE for a few hours yesterday, and I can tell you, my mind was blown. I was ready to do away with the whole VR thing as just another gimmick like 3D TV, but boy, was I wrong. It's very responsive, fairly high resolution and 90Hz framerate; the two controllers make the whole experience complete. A few things to recommend if you can try a HTC VIVE: AudioShield Space Pirate Trainer Hover Junkers Paper Cuts
rajacombinator 10y ago
I have no context on the game but it's awesome for such a prominent figure to share public feedback like this.

64 points by jrbedard 10y ago

He did some others as well: Dreadhalls - https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1652934931607684&id=100006735798590 https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1652934931... Playhead - https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1663414923893018&id=100006735798590 https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1663414923... Bazaar - https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1717273305173846&id=100006735798590 https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1717273305... Viral - https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1725972060970637&id=100006735798590 https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1725972060...

rocky1138 10y ago

I feel like the value of this article would be greatly increased by including a video of gameplay of the game in question. I have no idea what Nighttime Terror is or what it looks like.

simoncion 10y ago
> I have no idea what Nighttime Terror is or what it looks like. Dude. http://nighttimeterror.com http://nighttimeterror.com is the first Google result for "nighttime terror". I know that phones and tablets make it awkward to use the Internet, but it's likely far more work for the guy who's cleaning up and posting Carmack's critiques to embed a video (that could suffer linkrot (or -even worse- "api"rot) at any time) than it is for you (and any other interested party) to do a quick search. :)
- MBCook 10y ago
  Oh good. A site that's totally unusable on an iPad.
- kalleboo 10y ago
  That page... doesn't have a video of the game though. It DOES have a video of one of their other games, oddly enough...
wyldfire 10y ago
I misunderstood "Nighttime Terror" to be some kind of description of a misfeature/bug/side-effect of VR.
- Aelinsaar 10y ago
  Same here, and I was very confused at first. I thought maybe it could also be some kind of desirable state for a VR horror game dev?
- civilian 10y ago
  Same here. It would've been far more interesting if VR was causing night terrors. For those of you who haven't experienced them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_terror https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_terror I've had a combination of Sleep paralysis and Night terror and it's not fun. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis
jimrandomh 10y ago
As I understand it, this was a technical critique of a VR game intended for the developers to take and iterate with, and maybe for other developers to learn from as an example. It wasn't intended for people considering whether to actually play the game.
- joshschreuder 10y ago
  But without seeing the examples mentioned in the critique, it's hard to visualise exactly what he's talking about and learn from it

bradhe 10y ago

These are really hard to understand without some associated images or videos.

bigiain 10y ago
I guess it depends on who the intended audience is - I doubt too many people who follow Oculus' developer blog weren't immediately picturing all of the flaws he describes while reading that. I'm only a dilettante in 3D VR, but I didn't need any images/videos to understand exactly what he was describing. I suspect Carmack was going for information density for people who'd understand here, rather than "3D VR games dev errors 101 for beginners", and he's pretty good at writing for his audience.

Animats 10y ago

Carmack's critiques are interesting for what they don't say. There's very little about how VR interacts with the gameplay. VR doesn't seem to have been exploited much in these first person shooters. They seem to have standard game mechanics. One could have a VR game where you're being followed, and have to keep looking behind you to try to spot your tails. But when you look back, your tails notice if you;re too obvious or look too long, and take evasive action or swap with a different tail. None of the mentioned games seem to tie where you look with game mechanics like that. The detailed discussions of aliasing vs stereo vision would apply to any 3D display. Any artifact that's different for each eye is really annoying. Also, why did someone release a 30FPS VR anything? There are arguments over minimal acceptable frame rate in VR, but the numbers are around 100FPS and this is well known. Menus in VR suck. No surprise there. It probably would have been better to ship the thing with a game controller, so the user could use the controls without looking at them. Carmack seems to like a dark world. Grey borders good, white clouds bad. Whether that's his Doom bias or a problem with the Oculus Rift isn't clear. In GTA V, you can climb a mountain and see the whole game world, clouds and all. That should look good in VR. If it doesn't, the current headgear has a problem.

throwaway2873 10y ago
You have your numbers on the "minimal acceptable frame rate" wrong. Oculus Rift and HTC Vive are both 90 FPS devices. At the time of the gear vr's release, it was only compatible with the Note 4, which could only display in 60fps (Not sure about the newest compatible phones, but I would think they're still 60 FPS max)
tgb 10y ago
He's critiquing a Gear VR game, not an Oculus Rift one, FYI.
bigiain 10y ago
The "framerate" discussion gets kinda complex in the context of head mounted displays. You're right that high frame rates are essential for head tracking updates to the viewport - but that's a different number to the rate at which the elements in the scene in your very-quickly-animated viewport need updating. You _do_ want t attempt to get 100fps in response to me swinging my head around, but you don't need (so much) to try to get your player and explosion animations up quite that fast (although all my adderall-enchanced fast-twitch fps gaming friends will sneer at you and blame your slow game for them getting headshot all the time if you don't manage 60 fps...) I don't know quite enough about how the GearVR (or Oculus) manages the framebuffer that the head tracker chooses it's viewport out of, but I suspect there's a way to render a 30 or 60fps scene at two or three thousand pixels cylindrically, then have the viewport update faster than that up around 100fps in response to the head tracking sensors.

NKCSS 10y ago

I had a chance to play with the HTC VIVE for a few hours yesterday, and I can tell you, my mind was blown. I was ready to do away with the whole VR thing as just another gimmick like 3D TV, but boy, was I wrong. It's very responsive, fairly high resolution and 90Hz framerate; the two controllers make the whole experience complete. A few things to recommend if you can try a HTC VIVE: AudioShield Space Pirate Trainer Hover Junkers Paper Cuts

rajacombinator 10y ago

I have no context on the game but it's awesome for such a prominent figure to share public feedback like this.