I agree with this in the sense that every game has an overall control scheme unique to itself - tailoring standard controller input into something recognizable even absent art assets is the hallmark of truly great games - but since the days of Threewave CTF the raw materials to build those schemes have always involved either a mouse and keyboard or a gamepad to control motion, turning, and strafing, and if you were doing anything other than WASD+mouselook or left-thumb moving/right-thumb looking you were doing it wrong. How else would you build the basic scheme for avatar movement given the state of PC peripherals throughout the past 20 years? I think a similar foundation is going to quickly arise for navigating VR spaces. Third-person games may be possible with the Rift but I can't see how it would add much that can't already be done with flat screens, and racing and vehicle simulation games already have a long history (and deep catalog of PC and console peripherals) - those will be enhanced by being able to look around your cockpit but the only serious paradigm shift in that game market is likely to be a marked rise in joystick sales as people begin rubbing up against the limitations of mice and gamepads. First-person games with humanoid avatars are going to be the dominant game type associated with the Rift - without digging up any sales figures I'm guessing first-person games are already the bread-and-butter of the games industry, and flat screens can't even do first-person games justice! And absent any bolt-from-the-blue innovations, the list of potential inputs for VR isn't a long one: You're either using thumbsticks for motion and turning (this includes gamepads, the Hydra, even Wiimote + nunchuck with lateral swings for turning), or you're using one thumbstick for motion along with a foot controller for turning (I'm still skeptical that foot controllers can do both turning and strafing well simultaneously, but I'd love to be surprised), or you're going down with the mouse+WASD ship despite your head tracker, or you're turning your virtual body with your head tracker and hating it, or you're using some Leap Motion/Myo/Kinect/PS Move/dataglove setup for gesture control that probably isn't as awesome as you'd like it to be. Forgetting aiming or sword swinging or virtual object manipulation, what other ways are there going to be to move an avatar through virtual space? I strongly suspect standing VR isn't even going to be a thing in three years - arcades aren't coming back no matter how good of a conceptual fit VR might be for them, anyone using a standing wobble board or somesuch is going to stop the first time they fall over, break something, or take a virtual sword to their real physical Rift cabling, and nobody without ties to DARPA will bother programming ODT experiences of any variety because Palmer, Carmack, and Gabe will be the only three people in the world both interested enough in VR to care and rich enough to buy one. Maybe people use vests or a decent Kinect script to control turning instead of a foot controller, but there's very little else that currently exists on store shelves or even on the immediate horizon. This isn't necessarily bad, either - PC gaming has been doing fine with far less for this long, and if gamers can be made to get used to these schemes and buy an extra controller or two, devs can get creative with the interaction/manipulation side and everybody wins.Aabel wrote:There is not going to be one input scheme to rule them all in VR
Is there a preexisting thread anyone can link to that discusses what input controllers and default schemes are going to be available for the upcoming "launch" of the dev Rifts? It's a resource that will come in handy if it doesn't already exist, so if we can't find something like it in the next few days it might be worth pushing this specific discussion into a new thread and have a go at compiling a definitive list. Balance Boards belong on that list, no question - you've convinced me it's time to track one down and see how they fit into all this.
I'm only aspirationally a game developer and I can't say I know any pros personally, but I'd be willing to bet at least the ones designing for the PC get over this pretty quickly. Console devs have it easy - everything nice and tightly controlled, standard controllers, one unified experience for everyone. By comparison, the PC as a gaming platform is a crazy ecosystem of mixed and matched parts, and no two gamers will ever have identical setups. As nice as it would be to be certain a game experience is similar for everyone, I think you just need to accept that this is impossible absent a unifying console and appeal to as many setups as possible with solid core gameplay. The "is Game X better with a mouse and keyboard or a 360 controller" threads will slowly be replaced with "is Game Y really that much better with a Hydra/pedals/whatever" threads and the only downside is that people who refuse to spend a dime on a new controller will have a somewhat less ideal experience. Any game that can be presented in multiple ways without totally shredding the gameplay should be just for the sake of overall adoption of VR; the few games that refuse to do this may be "better" but are unlikely to rise above cult-level popularity until Hydra-type inputs are as common as mice.Aabel wrote:I have a hard time seeing how a compelling VR experience can be developed for multiple control profiles and remain true to the designers intent.
Whoa...I've taken part in some other conversations here that centered around the apparent lack of exactly this; Chapel Hill is the place I'd expect it to grow out of, too. More investigation is definitely warranted here. Check this out, guys! Maybe a unified VR driver isn't a crazy idea!Aabel wrote:VRPN
Probably this interview with The Verge. I can't readily recall disagreeing with Gabe, but a big part of the reason Valve is "unconvinced" by motion control has got to be because Valve is focused on building games that will necessarily live inside computer monitors. The Wii is kind of gimmicky, and the latency is horrendous compared to most other controller types - we don't yet live in the world where motion control is really useful, and Valve isn't really in the business of imagining the future, particularly not where hardware is concerned (though evidence suggests this is changing). But consider a scoring mode for a game concept I'm working toward - fairly typical free-for-all FPS, Hong Kong wire-fu aesthetic, lots of jumping and diving around, weapon options are some variety of modern pistol in each hand, Rift and Razer Hydra required for akimbo gunplay, foot pedals optional but encouraged. Something like 8-16 players are placed in a map that is somewhat too small for that number by usual FPS standards, and the layout is such that players are constantly turning corners and encountering one or more opponents. The only way you can kill anyone is if you manage to deal lethal damage to two separate opponents within maybe a second, and this score is then multiplied by the distance in degrees between them, with 180 therefore being a perfect score for one kill. Now, this may be an extreme example and I'm not at all certain it would even be fun, but you can't even play this game on a computer monitor, with a mouse+keyboard, or in any other way we're used to playing video games. It demands full awareness of your virtual environment to excel (head tracking enables this in a way the world has never really seen), and is only possible using a "motion" controller like the Hydra. We'll see if it's any fun to play, but my brain is increasingly full of ideas like this - unlikely as it seems, I'm going to say Gabe's problem here is indeed a "failure of imagination".Aabel wrote:Gabe Newell recently had some harsh words for motion controllers, and I agree with his observation that motion controllers are less 'efficient' I don't necessarily see that as undesirable when aiming for deeper immersion and a greater sense of fun.
Did I just write all that? I need to watch myself, I'm slipping into old habits again!
TLDR: ~ FOOT CONTROL IS AWESOME WOOO GO FEET