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CCP Games Explains Why Virtual Reality First Person Shooters Still Don't Work
An anonymous reader writes Icelandic studio CCP is better known for EVE Online, but its first foray into virtual reality with space shooter Valkyrie has caused a stir, and is widely seen as a flagship game for the Oculus Rift headset. In a new interview, Valkyrie executive producer Owen O'Brien explains what advantages the game will have when played with a headset — and gives his view on why a dogfighter is better suited to VR than a first person shooter: "People have hacked it together, but it doesn't really work," he says. "The basic problem is Simulator Sickness. In Valkyrie or any cockpit game or driving game, what you're doing in the real world, assuming you're sitting down, more or less mimics what your brain is telling you you're doing in the game. So you don't get that disconnect, and it's that disconnect that causes sickness. So, the problem with first-person shooters is that you're running or crouching or jumping in the game but not in the real world, and because it's so realistic it can make some people (not everybody) feel nauseated if they start doing it for extended periods of time."
You use it in a VR environment and to move forward, you walk forward on the treadmilll.
This should solve the simulator sickeness issue.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I'm sure the real reason is that it's not open source. Who is with me?
So, the problem with first-person shooters is that you're running or crouching or jumping in the game but not in the real world
Yeah, we know you're just trying to sell these.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
So put together some cockpit graphics and make the player models look like mechs instead of people. I'll admit that we'll probably never be playing quake/unreal style FPS games in VR*, but that doesn't mean that we can't have VR FPS-style games. They'll just have to be a little different from the shooters we currently play.
*Yes, there are omnidirectional treadmills, which will be great for getting gamers to exercise, but no one's going to be doing an all-day gaming session if they have to physically run the whole time.
Changes in the medium can have massive changes in the message that is best sent through that medium. Before TV radio plays were huge, but TV simply was a better medium. It wasn't that radio plays sucked but that telling episodic stories was done so much better on TV. Also when TV first started much of it was simply radio plays put back into a stage format and videotaped. Moving the camera through the scenery with lots of outdoor locations were a while coming and again the flat play like structure is still used in sitcoms.
Within even moving our internet browsing and gaming to mobile devices has resulted in wildly different usage patterns, there are the obvious ones such as using map tools more but Facebook does not seem to have translated to mobile as well as instagram, or twitter. Also the first person shooter largely has failed on mobile whereas I don't think that Angry Birds would have gotten much traction in a desktop only universe.
So surprise surprise VR goggles aren't turning out to be a screen you wear on your eyes but a whole new medium. I am willing to bet that there will be a genre that takes off on VR and that genre might not even really exist right now. Something really different. A simple example of different was that Wii games had a wildly different flavour than anything proceeding them. I don't remember a game prior to the Wii where I stood on a platform eagerly flapping my arms to propel what looked like a guy in a chicken suit though the air. Yet the Kinect games never caught my fancy as the games were often too serious and made me feel like a fool flapping my arms. The Just Dance game was close but was probably too late.
I am going to throw this one out there for free: Maybe the VR goggles will take off in Colorado and Washington with the blockbuster title being "The Stoner Olympics"
No, the grammar in the headline is correct. Shooters is plural, so "don't" is correct.
Wheelchair Hunter eXTreme
You're sitting down. You could even sell wheels that attached to the side of office char armrests... and a gun accessory that tracked position relative to your body to match the virtual version.
Or, a Battlezone clone where you are in an open cockpit.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Do you get motion sickness also from less fast-paced 3D games, such as Portal or Skyrim?
Visualization is incredibly powerful, but bad visualization is incredibly bad. I find that any kind of response time lag between my inputs and the real world, especially when it varies, is what makes me sick — and I can play descent without chunking without any trouble, so long as the frame rate is kept up.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I have high hopes that the movement won't bother me, I've never had a hint of the issues many report, though I haven't tried VR, per se.
I will say even if there is a problem for people who can stand it when it's a conventional screen but lose it at the threshold of VR, there is yet hope for FPS genre without cockpits. Imagine playing your game and the monitor having the appearance of a movie theater screen. An experience that is totally impractical in reality, but not really much of a big deal in VR. There is a lot of interest in things like VR Cinema and virtual desktop (https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=8182). In both cases, the medium is still fundamentally not motion sensing or surrounding in any way, but the concept of playing with screen size, curvature, and distance freely all while not imposing any particular posture is quite appealing.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Seriously - how many VR FPSes limit motion to anything resembling realistic speeds? Especially rotation. The average FPS has you running around at probably 20+mph and spinning 180* in a fraction of a second with a flick of the wrist. It takes me 3-4 seconds to complete a full rotation in real life at normal speeds, and if I spend much time turning quicker than that I start to get nauseous without any simulator needed. I can turn my head faster, but there's a lot more biofeedback maintaining orientation in that case. Spinning at FPS speeds should be generating massive accelerations of your inner ear, not to mention instantly launching from a complete standstill to a 20mph run - I'm not at all surprised that the absence of such accelerations throws people for a loop.
I haven't heard many complaints of nausea from the various VR first-person adventure games, and I can't help thinking tat that is largely because they are typically far slower paced than a twitchy FPS. An obvious solution would be more realistically paced FPSes. Or potentially even just considerably gentler accelerations. Maybe you can still run at 20mph, but it takes you 5-10 seconds to get there from a complete stop. Can't see any solution for faster spinning as radial acceleration is constant at constant speed, but then I'm not sure it's needed - being able to look around at a realistic pace should greatly reduce the need for instant spins, especially if you can aim independently from head tracking so that you can fire directly backwards at that guy just visible in the edge of your vision while looking over your shoulder.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
and because it's so realistic it can make some people (not everybody) feel nauseated if they start doing it for extended periods of time.
I had to quit playing FPS games for that very reason. I would get nauseous after a few minutes until I started taking ginger pills, which also work for me on boats. Can't rule out that it's not purely psychological but they worked whatever the reason.
Apparently ancient Chinese mariners used to use ginger for seasickness, but they all died anyway and didn't respawn. Obviously didn't do them a lot of good, did it?
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
While I know some people are very suspetible to gettin simsick, I just want to add that some arent. I have used a Rift DK1 to play Half-Life 2, and it is the best FPS experience I have ever had. It adds an unbeliable amount of spacial sense and experience. I would not play it again without the Rift.
That said, I do need to take breaks every 45 minutes or so, and cannot play for more than three hours or so. Still, its absolutely worth it.
There are two sets of muscles for eye movement - one for convergence, which rotates the eyes, the other for focus, which reshapes the eyes. These typically work in sync, allowing proper focus wherever one looks. In any given 3D system, however, the focus is fixed at the screen distance & never varies, while the eyes converge continuously for objects perceived at different depths. It is this disparity - one set of muscles attempting to remain fixed while the other changes continuously - that causes the brain to overwork, tire & cause headaches/discomfort, and is completely independent of any 'virtual disconnect' effects
It could be the frame rate. Other theories that come to my mind is using a controller instead of keyboard/mouse, input latency, your distance from the screen, flickery screen (PWM), lighting conditions, etc.
That might be. I would try one of the PC games that does make you sick, turn off the eye candy and get the frame rate up to see if it helps.
Used to play Doom II for hours on end. And then one day, it was like a switch turned on my brain. Now, any FPS makes me motion sick. Quake, Duke, etc etc, I try to play, and up comes whatever is in the stomach. Oh well. Back to RTSs for me. :)
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
they might come out with a sequel.
If Mr. Roberts had not started the biggest crowd fund raiser in gaming history ever and for his upcoming space game "Star Citizen", then CCP might never had started their Valkyre project. CCP would problably still be trying to create a perma-death vampire game, or worse, to try and push micro-transactions together with vanity items further onto their players. It then just makes completele sense to go public and explain what FPS games cannot do, but their upcoming game can. Those cute, smug icelandian bastards!
Honestly, I am more interested in why the player numbers of EVE Online are in stagnation for the past 5 years now. http://eve-offline.net/?server...
I could have let this one slide, but I have a few things to say:
1. Darl, Darl McBride, is that you? When will you be testifying against Mark Shurtleff and John Swallow? You have a chance to redeem your soul! Imagine that!
2. The myth that "you can't make money on open source" is a myth so debunked that you have entire industries built on it, from servers and supercomputers to cellphones and kids' toys.
3. The myth that people don't get paid (slaves) to develop open source is belied by the fact that small companies like IBM are major contributors and specifically pay for people to work on open source code.
And even Microsoft pays people to do it now.
You can take your 20 year old arguments, write them out on oaktag, fold it until it's all sharp corners, and shove it straight up your arse.
Have a great day.
--
BMO
wolfenstein 3D (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfenstein_3D) is the only shooter where i have ever experienced that. consistently after playing about 30 mins, and my gf as well. it never happened with rott, quake, doom or any other shooter until now, and i've played quite a lot of them. based on this personal experience and comparing w3d to all others i would say framerate, turn speed and color saturation combined might be a relevant factor. i don't think it had anything to do with a contradiction of virtual and real states. don't really know about hmds, though, so that could be a different issue.
I suppose a FPS would be possible providing the person can remain seated but there are obvious control issues to figure out. For example if I look around for real, e.g. turn my head to look over my shoulder, what does that mean in a game where I'm lying prone staring down an iron sight at the time? Or if I'm standing in the game and I I look right in real life and then click aim - does my virtual counterpart assume some ludicrous pose to accommodate my action, or does it reorient itself facing forward while my real self is still looking over to the right? How does it reset the camera afterwards? It could prove messy and just serve to increase the chance of disorientation.
On the plus side, I guess VR could pull of a very realistic FPS Saving Private Ryan game where the people puke their guts up on the virtual landing craft and stand a good chance of serious injury when they storm the beaches.
From my Crystalfighter blog
May 2nd, 2014: I just thought of a killer game with Occulus Rift. Imagine outerspace sports. Imagine one where if you extend your legs or arms out full, they have thrust. The thrust can propel you around, or push the ball around. You'd have to be in a sphere(suspended in a harness) which rotated around instead of the standard treadmill design. So this installation would only be good for amusement parks and... arcades(heh)? The downside of this game is that people will get HYPER sick. You got 3d vision of Occulus, and you're spun around by your waist. I don't even know if it is possible to suspend someone from their waist and spin them in 360x360 angles. There would be 2 variations of this game. One would be a plain ball. The other one might be a ball which is charged with a + or -. And people would have positive on one side of them and negative on the other. I didn't think it fully out... I do think your hand thrust could be weaker than your leg thrust. So the standard move will be to stretch out like superman, your arms in front and your legs in back, so you push the ball forward with your forward thrust. Another standard move will be to put your arms and legs straight in front of you to thrust in reverse. Or both legs behind you and arms behind you to get super forward thrust. I think starting out, people will just have trouble stabalizing themselves, so there should be an autostabalization "friction" that can be applied to new players, and slowly taken off the more skill the teams have.
God spoke to me
I would have similar issues. However I'd guess that a generation of kids growing up using them every day would learn to adapt.
That's because console games almost always have a terrible field of view. PC games are more likely to have a wider field of view and are more likely to let you adjust it.
Originally I couldn't play 3D games. They made me ill.
Most 3D movies STILL make me ill.
However, I was able to train myself to play without needing to puke.
But watching someone else play still makes me incredibly queasy.
Recently, I had the opportunity to try out an Occulus Rift.
It hit me the same way. I had to stop playing before it got too bad. One of my colleagues was visibly ill after just a few moments.
Now some of it IS simply a matter of resolution and framerate.
But, as mentioned, some of it is due to myriad physical systems feeding your brain inconsistent data.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The human body has three systems for balance - Inner ears (3-axis accellerometers and "rate gyros"), visual modeling, and muscle/tendon position & stress sensors - and needs any two to balance, stand, and walk properly.
It also has a reflex: When two of them disagree (particularly visual vs. ear), it is interpreted as "You just ate a neurotoxin! Get it out NOW and we MIGHT survive it!"
Thus nausea, projectile vomiting, explosive diahrrea, and clothes-soaking sweating if the mismatch is strong. If it's smaller - nausea. ("Whatever you just ate may have been toxic or spoiled. So you're not going to like it anymore.")
Of course other things than being poisoned can trigger it:
Diseases that temporarily incapacitate or permanently damage the inner ear are one class. (For instance, Meniere's Disease, where the pressure-relef valve for the inner ear sticks, the pressure rises, and the membranes with the sensory nerves tear. Result: Sudden extremem vertigo attack - hours on the floor - followed by days or weeks of gradually reduced incapacity until the brain maps out the change to the ear - followed by another tear and repeat indefinitely. Very high suicide rate.)
Vechicles, where you may visually fixate on the accellerating inside rather than the surroundings, are another: Cars, boats, ariplanes (and the corresponding car/sea/air sicknesses) are notorious, as are carnival rides and trains. For relief, make a point of looking at the horizon or otherwise the exterior. Eventually the brain may learn "I'm in a vehicle. Ignore the weird signals from the ears. (That's why vertigo sufferers may NOT have attacks in MOVING vehicles...)
And, of course, VR mismatches - to the point that there is a term of art: "Barfogenisis" (I hear the lengths of some of the rides at Disneyland are calibrated so they end and the crowd is out into the hall just BEFORE the effect would become pronounced.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
A problem that I think is bigger than motion sickness is the fundamental problem with locking vision and movement with where your gun is pointed. It doesn't come off as natural in the slightest, because your body is used to doing lots of different things at the same time.
I get seasickness from some fps games. Strange enough I always get them from console FPS games. Only sometimes from PC FPS games. Maybe it's the framerate?
No, more the rubberbanding. Consoles don't have mice that can easily change acceleration and start and stop instantly, so to make games playable with a controller, the movements are not synchronized with the stick - when you let go of the stick, you don't instantlly stop, but your movement slows down to a halt over a small period of time. So your actions don't match your movements.
That's also seen in bad console ports, by the way.
I played a lot of games and I always found that first person view games stood the best chance of giving me motion sickness. I think a console game called Spiral the Dragon was one of the worst. On the other hand racing games, space sim games and flying games gave me the least problems which to me proves that this statement makes perfect sense. Maybe this VR tech will bring back the popularity of these kinds of games considering they were my favourites when I was a kid.
On the other hand I remember reading about a tech which applied electrical shocks to alter your sense of balance. While this might be a little extreme, it might be the solution to this problem.
That's also seen in bad console ports, by the way.
I've long since overcome my motion sickness (mom's van came with multiple barf buckets), but watching the screen move like I flicked google maps and it slowly pans to a stop (especially in any kind of curved motion) tickles the part of my brain that says "stop that, it's trying to make you sick".
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
So don't sit down or run around in a 5x5 space and play. Augment the reality of running around a parking garage, the woods, whatever, with enemies, enhanced surfaces, objects, obstacles you won't be touching, etc., but let the player's motion be real. Then we'll benefit from the exercise, too. From the opposite perspective, that of making exercise less boring, wouldn't you run better if someone was chasing you or you were chasing someone? I know it's going to look hilarious to those around you without the AR gear, but that's a temporary situation. The funny part will be when you see an armed human coming toward you and another person sees you, a different type of dinosaur trying to steal the carcass they're dragging around.
I had that issue with Metro 2033. Even without VR (I do have a 27" monitor, so that was a factor probably) I got sick playing it.
I think it was because I'd be moving forward and my characters head (ie. camera) would be swiveling around looking at other things
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
I find that any kind of response time lag between my inputs and the real world, especially when it varies, is what makes me sick ...
My wife has vertigo. Her attacks can be triggered by fluorescent or high-pressure arc lights where the flicker rate is above the flicker-fusion rate of the eye. (This makes trips to warehouse stores problematic - they have to be short or she'll be down for the rest of the day. That's hard at, say, Costco.)
I used to wonder how this could be, and finally realized that the "strobe light" effect produces small, but significant, errors in observed position of the background items (shelves, etc.) that she uses for reference to balance despite the damaged inner ear.
When they first began using fluorescent lights in factories - in the days before guards over moving machinery were common - the worker injury rate went 'way up. Turns out the lights made the AC-powered motors, turning at or near an integer fraction of the line frequency, look like they were stopped or only moving slowly.
The fix was to build the light fixtures in two-tube versions, with a capacitor and an extra inductor in the balast, so the "lead lamp" and "lag lamp" would light at a quarter-cycle offset. In combination with suitably persistent phosphors this made them largely fill in each other's dim times, enough to make fast-moving parts blur and look like they were moving. For large arc lights, a similar fix was to arrange them so adjacent lamps were distributed among the three phases of the power feed, rather than having rows or patches of lights all flickering in unison.
Unfortunately, this lore has apparently been lost - at least outside the specialists wiring factories full of moving parts. Warehouse stores have rows and sections of arc lighting all wired to the same phase. I'm not sure, but I don't think the new electronic ballasts for flourescent lights do the lead-lag thing, OR have enough raw filtering capacitance to power the lamp through the phase reversals. (And then there's LED lamps...)
It's not a safety hazard these days, now that OSHA rules have all the fast-spinning machinery covered with guards. But for those with vertigo it's a big problem.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
There are two sets of muscles for eye movement - one for convergence, which rotates the eyes, the other for focus, which reshapes the eyes...
The latter system also reshapes the lens.
Unfortunately, as you age your lenses stiffen up and/or the muscles get weaker, and that system gradually degrades. (This "disease of age" (presbyopia) becomes significant pretty early - about mid 30s.)
(By the way: The eye rotation is actually THREE axis, although the motion around the line-of-sight is pretty limited. {Look in a mirror and rotate your head right-left to see it.} Apparently evolution found matching the image rotation by slightly rotating the eyes to be less expensive than a layer of image-rotation logic in the brain.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
C'mon, be honest, don't tell me you don't duck when trying to avoid bullets flying over your head, or leaning to the side when trying to make that tight bend in GTA.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
OF course, twitchy fps's such as CoD or CS would be horrible with VR, as the movement is way too quick. But slower games such as Red Orchesatra 2 or more survival-type games such as DayZ would be incredible with VR. While "e-sport" type FPS's like CoD an Halo might flounder, I think VR will be a boon for more realistic sims and tactical shooters. I look forward to the day where I can play a game and look around and feel like I'm crossing the scorching hot steppes of Russia in 1942, crawling through the jungles of Vietnam in 1967, or even combing through the passageways of a dark deserted space station not knowin if a horde of aliens or zombies (or alien zombies) are waiting around the next corner for me.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Of course as with any evolutionary biology explanation, the brain did not reason it out. It the past the bodies that had a nausea response to contradiction between visual and inner-ear cues of direction of gravity survived better and passed on their genes to us.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I don't see anything about being able to use a joystick to fly in this game; which was a disappointment for me with EVE online, flying by point and click isn't the same.
It's not that FPS games don't work, it's just that they have to be designed differently in order to create presence, and provide a pleasant experience, something that running around and jumping like crazy will not do.
arm the character with eyelasers (pew pew pew)
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
tend to get sick when exercising.
Please make it moddable. I want a chainsaw on my wheelchair. Woooo!
Now why would I make WHeX WITHOUT chainsaws!
A chainsaw on every corner. The footrests? Both chainsaws.
And then of course there's the Tow Saw, which is a chainsaw tied to a rope that bounces around randomly as you roll forward.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Can, sure. But pay attention to how fast your torso actually rotates when going around the average 90* corner during your normal daily activities.
And yeah - you can do that a dozen times or more without inducing nausea, when your inner ear is in complete agreement with your eyes as to how your body is moving. Now do it for an hour or two with a bad head cold causing your inner ear to insist that you're standing still. See how it could cause problems when gaming?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
i doubt many people accustomed to fps's get motion sickness when playing with rift. I certainly don't.
however the dude is peddling a space sim, not an fps.
so, fuck him and his opinion.
(for the record, there's some people who get motion sickness just watching someone else play fps on a normal screen.. so could just as well claim that fps's can't work at all)
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Me too. After my first marathon session of DOOM back in the day, I felt like I was having the worst drunk/hangover of my ife...lasted for three days, I couldn't close my eyes without getting the spins. To this day i cannot take more than about 2 minutes of an FPS.
Wasn't there a whole series of hacks, starting with Doom-2 and probably continuing to every FPS since, which hooked up treadmills (or bicycles on stands), barbells on springs, grip-strength testers and suchlike fitness equipment so that you HAD to do the exercise to make the moves in the game.
Weren't very popular, as I recall - people couldn't do a 20-hour session every day without ending up looking like they were Special Forces dudes willing to get shot at for a pittance.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"