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[Seanspeed]

Which one? Nurburg has no hospital. Adenau does. I know, because I was born there . And grew up in a village right next to it (also on the map, a certain part of the track is named after it.

Nuremburg.

Pretty awesome to grow up right by Nurburg, though!

I really hope they announce official PC support for the Morpheus. I can't see it surviving solely on the PS4, and I'd love to have a single VR headset work on both my PS4 and my PC.

I think Morpheus going 120hz would really make that difficult now. You could lock something to 60fps, but it's not going to have any reprojection on PC to get it to 120fps. So you either do 60fps and it would be kinda lousy, or you do the full 120fps, which.........well, it's 120fps. Good luck with that.

Don't see it happening.

 

[Ferrio]

google cardboard ("virtual reality in a simple, fun, and affordable way") costs ~$15.00

https://www.google.com/get/cardboard/

It's pretty crap even compared to the first OR devkit, so anyone who thinks cardboard is good should be on board.

 

[tanooki27]

Ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Hopefully it is minimal at the actual conference.

if they devoted a big chunk of booth to Morpheus, you can expect some prominence.

 

[JAYSIMPLE]

This could put Sony right at the bottom of interest for me at this e3. I hope they don't push it too much

 

[Man]

Mere 19hours until Oculus unveils what their three year-build up and $2billion Facebook acquisition has amounted to.
Then Sony & Morpheus next on Monday.

 

[klaushm]

This is a weird question, lol. Are you really just asking if people are 'hating' because it's Sony and not Nintendo?

Nope. I'm asking people if they just don't see a game they like, or don't see the full length of possibilities, which are most of the cases.

Soo, calling an oportunity of a big game such as Pokemon and a dream most of us all had, is a good point in favor of VR. Don't you think? I would love that hehe.

 

[viveks86]

I get condescending because people hand wave over real world technical limitations of these devices like these limits are nothing, when I can give hard numbers to back what I say. Let me give an actual, in the real world example of how limiting VR can be - the VR application we are making right now for gear VR - we are using a note 4 currently. In stress tests, outside of a VR application, we were able to push about 500k polygons in about 400 draw calls a second at an acceptable frame rate. Trying to stress test inside of VR, however? For one, we had to eliminate environmental shadowing and reflections entirely, because those post effects were too latent. All of our texture sizes needed to be extremely reduced - we wound up using 128 x 128 8-bit textures. We had to constantly micromanage unity's garbage collector just to get the thing to run without running out of memory.

In the end, how much did we have to work with? We had about 20k polygons a second and about 40 draw calls to work with.

Extrapolate that performance difference to other hardware, because it's applicable. Virtual reality isn't a simple task to achieve at all, it's not merely "dialing things down," it's not something trivial to pull off. Every demo sony has shown off has been extremely well designed to hide all the very real, very obvious short comings. This isn't simply the PS4, either, it affects all VR devices. A Vive headset on a titan X SLI setup isn't going to look like modern-gen gaming. I see people left and right saying "I'll be fine with PS4 games running at PS3 specs." What does that even mean? There are numerous things the PS3 did which will not be feasible in VR without a massive increase in power behind the hardware that the PS4 has. They point to things like the shark demo:

And you look at it and start asking "what exactly is going on in this scene"? There is nearly no lighting, there is maybe 10k polygons going on screen at once. The entire thing takes place in a blue foggy void. So people push the luge demo - a demo which is built in a world where they can very aggressively cull everything around you to make it run faster because it goes down linear paths. No real lighting, no advanced shader calls. It's all primitive stuff.

What's left, people ask. Well, stuff like Luckey's Tale? The Mario 64-esq platformer for the rift? I don't expect the PS4 to be able to pull it off, for all the reasons I put forth above. I don't doubt there will eventually be a PS4 VR platformer, probably from MM, but it won't be anything like Mario 64. Anything with a true sense of freedom - a complex world to interact with more than a room at a time - these kind of experiences will not be possible. And it's not just sour grapes.

I'll take it back even further - Half Life 2 VR? The game we work on? It stresses my PC like hell. Our lead modeler, Jazz, is constantly redesigning things like the gun models to remove additional polygons to get it running acceptably. This is a game from 11 years ago, and it can barely run in VR with a ton of reworking. VR is so hard to work with that people honestly would be surprised what little power you actually have left over once you begin designing your game.

But let's keep going. So with the limited amount of calls I'm making, just how much script execution time do I have? VR development feels almost like retro console development in that you must carefully manage your remaining execution time down to the milisecond in order to keep things running at an acceptable framerate. With everything I said I did to reduce complexity, I still only had about 1.5 ms of script execution time to work with. Thats 1.5 ms to do everything I could possibly need to do to actually run my game. All my AI pathfinding execution, all my hardware polling. Things like audio mixing, logic updates... everything in 1.5 ms of execution time.

Again, this is extremely limiting.

And before people jump in with "but but but optimization!" This is already AFTER batching had been done, to a ridiculous level. This was AFTER we were already using multithreaded rendering. This was AFTER we were already disabling android performance throttling. In other words, we were already optimizing.

This is the first time I'm reading about VR having such a huge overhead. Holy shit. I'm not even sure how to react.

 

[wanderingprostheyltite]

Mere 19hours until Oculus unveils what their three year-build up and $2billion Facebook acquisition has amounted to.
Then Sony & Morpheus next on Monday.

If they have a decent lighthouse like input solution it's gonna be hard deciding which hmd to get come holidays/early 2016. Looking forward to the stream.

 

[ironcreed]

I don't speak for all VR enthusiasts, but I feel that many of us are even more excited by uses outside of gaming that would hit the "masses" right in the center, like live sports events (or any type of live event) just to mention one example.

I also think that what might be in the category "games" today will be elevated to an "experience" via VR and not be looked at as games anymore.

The Apollo 11 demo for the DK2 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrsT5W9DpkQ (if you haven't tried VR, you still might not get the video..)) is in my opinion another hint (production value is low for now, but as a vision of the future of VR it's brilliant) of the future of VR.

Like I said earlier, uses outside of gaming would be more likely to sell me on it. Stuff like vacations, walking on Mars and that sort of thing. Of course I would have to try it first.

Take notes, Sony. If you want to sell a doubter on one, then make sure you focus on a lot of stuff like that.

 

[gamechanger87]

I get condescending because people hand wave over real world technical limitations of these devices like these limits are nothing, when I can give hard numbers to back what I say. Let me give an actual, in the real world example of how limiting VR can be - the VR application we are making right now for gear VR - we are using a note 4 currently. In stress tests, outside of a VR application, we were able to push about 500k polygons in about 400 draw calls a second at an acceptable frame rate. Trying to stress test inside of VR, however? For one, we had to eliminate environmental shadowing and reflections entirely, because those post effects were too latent. All of our texture sizes needed to be extremely reduced - we wound up using 128 x 128 8-bit textures. We had to constantly micromanage unity's garbage collector just to get the thing to run without running out of memory.

In the end, how much did we have to work with? We had about 20k polygons a second and about 40 draw calls to work with.

Extrapolate that performance difference to other hardware, because it's applicable. Virtual reality isn't a simple task to achieve at all, it's not merely "dialing things down," it's not something trivial to pull off. Every demo sony has shown off has been extremely well designed to hide all the very real, very obvious short comings. This isn't simply the PS4, either, it affects all VR devices. A Vive headset on a titan X SLI setup isn't going to look like modern-gen gaming. I see people left and right saying "I'll be fine with PS4 games running at PS3 specs." What does that even mean? There are numerous things the PS3 did which will not be feasible in VR without a massive increase in power behind the hardware that the PS4 has. They point to things like the shark demo:

And you look at it and start asking "what exactly is going on in this scene"? There is nearly no lighting, there is maybe 10k polygons going on screen at once. The entire thing takes place in a blue foggy void. So people push the luge demo - a demo which is built in a world where they can very aggressively cull everything around you to make it run faster because it goes down linear paths. No real lighting, no advanced shader calls. It's all primitive stuff.

What's left, people ask. Well, stuff like Luckey's Tale? The Mario 64-esq platformer for the rift? I don't expect the PS4 to be able to pull it off, for all the reasons I put forth above. I don't doubt there will eventually be a PS4 VR platformer, probably from MM, but it won't be anything like Mario 64. Anything with a true sense of freedom - a complex world to interact with more than a room at a time - these kind of experiences will not be possible. And it's not just sour grapes.

I'll take it back even further - Half Life 2 VR? The game we work on? It stresses my PC like hell. Our lead modeler, Jazz, is constantly redesigning things like the gun models to remove additional polygons to get it running acceptably. This is a game from 11 years ago, and it can barely run in VR with a ton of reworking. VR is so hard to work with that people honestly would be surprised what little power you actually have left over once you begin designing your game.

But let's keep going. So with the limited amount of calls I'm making, just how much script execution time do I have? VR development feels almost like retro console development in that you must carefully manage your remaining execution time down to the milisecond in order to keep things running at an acceptable framerate. With everything I said I did to reduce complexity, I still only had about 1.5 ms of script execution time to work with. Thats 1.5 ms to do everything I could possibly need to do to actually run my game. All my AI pathfinding execution, all my hardware polling. Things like audio mixing, logic updates... everything in 1.5 ms of execution time.

Again, this is extremely limiting.

And before people jump in with "but but but optimization!" This is already AFTER batching had been done, to a ridiculous level. This was AFTER we were already using multithreaded rendering. This was AFTER we were already disabling android performance throttling. In other words, we were already optimizing.

Great post. Appreciate all the insight. People need to listen to this man.

 

[Krejlooc]

I don't see anything bad about this

I am not making a case for "good" or "bad." Eve Valkyrie is probably my most anticipated VR game.

I am discussing the reality of VR development, something many people don't want to hear. I see lots of DBZ power-level like development talk in these threads and it's grating. It's not as simple as just "turning down the graphics." This is going to be a real big change in game design, because as developers many will be going from an era with virtually unlimited resources to do whatever they could dream of, back to an era where your creativity and design is again restrained by the hardware.

And, again, I'm not just talking about morpheus. I'm talking about all VR for the near future. But, specifically with regards to morpheus, there will be experiences a very high end PC can pull off that the PS4 cannot.

I said earlier in this thread, what will re-usher in that era of unbridled design decision back into VR will be foveated rendering and a rolling asynchronous time warp display. We are already starting to move towards the type of rendering pipelines that will enable foveated rendering in the future. For those unfamiliar with foveated rendering - it's a technique to enable us to mimic more accurately how our vision actually works. We don't see with clarity but save for a very tiny area in the center of our vision. This area - about the size of a pin-head - is where our fovea is centered. Extending from that point outword to the extents of our vision, we get progressively blurrier. Most of our vision and what we see is our brains filling in the gaps with the limited amount of extremely blurry visual data we are getting from our eyes.

By contrast, the view ports we use in VR maintain clarity throughout the entire area. We render the extents of our view ports at the same clarity as the center. This is because we cannot tell which area of the view port our eye is actually looking at. Once we get extremely low latency eye tracking down, we can track our eyes in the headset and figure out which area of the view port we need to be clear. We can render that in normal resolution, then render the rest of the scene in multiple passes at, say, reduced resolutions and levels of detail. This would massively speed up our ability to render scenes in VR.

Beyond that, rolling asynchronous displays will turn our displays from entirely progressively updated screens to something more resembling rasterline displays of the past, where entire vertical bands of resolution will be independently and constantly updating. In essence, we would stop updating the display in frames, and start updating in blobs of up-to-date visual data many times a second. Again, this more closely resembles how our eyes actually operate, and, most importantly, it would decrease rendering latency considerably.

Both of those advancements are still many years away, however. For the time being, we just have to live with the hardware limitations.

 

[amnesiac]

Anything with a true sense of freedom - a complex world to interact with more than a room at a time - these kind of experiences will not be possible. And it's not just sour grapes.

So games like No Man's Sky won't work well with Morpheus?

 

[Buggy Loop]

I've got to agree with Krejlooc here. I think peoples will be shocked when they'll see the graphic difference between a "VR experience" and a "VR game". What makes VR attractive is the sense of scale and immersion, but at the cost of visuals. When i was on DK1 i was already impressed by the sense of scale, even with the screen door effect, low resolution & no low persistence, but i know for damn sure that when the consumer units would be out with high res screens and needing to keep 95fps, that it'll kick my PC in the nuts.

The games that will immediatly benefit from VR will be space sims. Elite Dangerous on PC is already indicative of that, it looks beautiful, for sure, but its not stressing hardware too much. That game is already considered like "the" VR experience to have with DK2. Racing games will follow, but again, its a bit harder to render than a space sim if the terrain and physics are anywhere near advanced.

In a nutshell, if you expect a The Last of Us VR @ 120fps on PS4, you'll likely be disapointed, so keep expectations low.

 

[tanooki27]

rolling asynchronous time warp display, holy shit

 

[RiverKwai]

Krejlooc is sometimes like VR Santa Claus, bringing hope and fun and presents. And sometimes he's Krampus, and he terrifies you, and then throws you in a sack to take you to the river for drowning.

 

[Krisprolls]

This is going to be a real big change in game design, because as developers many will be going from an era with virtually unlimited resources to do whatever they could dream of, back to an era where your creativity and design is again restrained by the hardware.

You mean like it was during the golden age of gaming ? Thanks man, nothing could have hyped me more about VR. Welcome back, creativity !

 

[gundamkyoukai]

I really don't see the big deal if VR games don't look to great .
VR is about the experience , in fact i go so far to say that VR needs more than games for it to become big .

 

[Krejlooc]

I've got to agree with Krejlooc here. I think peoples will be shocked when they'll see the graphic difference between a "VR experience" and a "VR game". What makes VR attractive is the sense of scale and immersion, but at the cost of visuals. When i was on DK1 i was already impressed by the sense of scale, even with the screen door effect, low resolution & no low persistence, but i know for damn sure that when the consumer units would be out with high res screens and needing to keep 95fps, that it'll kick my PC in the nuts.

The games that will immediatly benefit from VR will be space sims. Elite Dangerous on PC is already indicative of that, it looks beautiful, for sure, but its not stressing hardware too much. That game is already considered like "the" VR experience to have with DK2. Racing games will follow, but again, its a bit harder to render than a space sim if the terrain and physics are anywhere near advanced.

In a nutshell, if you expect a The Last of Us VR @ 120fps on PS4, you'll likely be disapointed, so keep expectations low.

I've been saying it for a long while now - early VR will have a major focus on "VR Film" because it's computationally inexpensive. Everything I've been saying above applies to realtime rendering. VR Film, by which I mean omnidirectional film (contrast to a lightfield display or triangulated 3D scanned environments), are not real time rendering beyond the "sphere" of video you stitch together. These kinds of experiences are pretty cool. Things like David Attenborough's documentary in VR on the evolution of marine life - that'll be a huge hit for VR early on, because it'll be able to run on everything from google cardboard up to the VIVE. It requires very little hardware cost.

My message has really never wavered - games are definitely not what will push early VR. Being able to sit courtside at an NBA game is.

So games like No Man's Sky won't work well with Morpheus?

I don't think what No Man's Sky does is really all that complex save for the stuff on the ground. I think they'll ultimately announce a VR mode, but I expect it to be massively reworked.

 

[Afrikan]

So what do some think games like ARK: Survival Evolved will look like on Morpheus?

I mean, why even take on a project if it will look embarrassing? (edit- in comparison to PS4 and PS3 games)

I don't know, I guess I have faith in Sony's 1st Party developers, as well as 3rd Party developers.

 

[Zeuanimals]

Its not hard to understand - you're cutting yourself apart from the rest of your home.

That's a pretty convincing argument against sleeping, showering, listening to music/playing games/watching movies in your room with headphones on, etc. too, I guess. Know what I see when everybody's together? They're on their phones and don't even interact with each other. I don't see what problems adding VR to the mix will bring that aren't already established in plenty of households.

Also the talk about looking silly. I know people who walk around their houses naked (people without kids at least, I don't know any nudists), wearing really dirty clothes that don't fit them, etc. They dress how they want in the comfort of their own home. And I don't think looking silly will matter at all to people who live alone.

 

[ironcreed]

I've been saying it for a long while now - early VR will have a major focus on "VR Film" because it's computationally inexpensive. Everything I've been saying above applies to realtime rendering. VR Film, by which I mean omnidirectional film (contrast to a lightfield display or triangulated 3D scanned environments), are not real time rendering beyond the "sphere" of video you stitch together. These kinds of experiences are pretty cool. Things like David Attenborough's documentary in VR on the evolution of marine life - that'll be a huge hit for VR early on, because it'll be able to run on everything from google cardboard up to the VIVE. It requires very little hardware cost.

My message has really never wavered - games are definitely not what will push early VR. Being able to sit courtside at an NBA game is.

Could the PS4 and Morpheus handle something like a tour of the pyramids or a small experience of different locations like that? As that is the kind of thing that might actually make me buy one.

 

[ChronotriggerJM]

I'm definitely ready for some morpheus! VR is going to be so damn awesome lol, that said, I'm definitely ready to admit they'll need to focus on art over power on the PS4, but I don't think it's anywhere near as bad as some will have you believe. I've always thought games were going to look much more like No Man's Sky, and some much cleaner, simple color, poly style graphics, but I'm totally fine with that, and I think the bulk of content they show off will be very compelling in VR. It's going to be the new Indie Frontier in my opinion, and I can't wait.

 

[Krejlooc]

So what do some think games like ARK: Survival Evolved will look like on Morpheus?

I mean, why even take on a project if it will look embarrassing?

I don't know, I guess I have faith in Sony and 1st Party and other developers.

Who really knows? I haven't seen the game running, I've never talked to the devs before. I can't really know how every VR game or pitched project works, or what sort of obsticles they are running into during development. The first time I jumped into VR development, I was like "omfg I am god, creator of worlds, destroyer of reality." Then I started playing more with the hardware and the limitations on design smacked me right in the face. A lot of design ideas I've had were shelved until hardware advances.

VR is a process, this is just day 1. These problems will not be longstanding, by next generation, I expect the PS5 to again be able to return developers to a place where hardware doesn't dictate their design decisions. I keep comparing the PS4 and morpehus to the Super FX chip, because I honestly think the comparison is apt. I think morpehus and the PS4 are juuuuuust enough to give people a taste of what VR has to offer - get them acclimated - before the full VR offering next gen.

Could the PS4 and Morpheus handle something like a tour of the pyramids or a small experience of different locations like that? As that is the kind of thing that might actually make me buy one.

Sure, they have a demo made by nasa using captured omnidirectional film from mars to make you feel like you're standing on mars. It's not realtime rendering, it's film.

 

[Impeccable]

Oh man, this E3 is going to be boring if the presser copies the booth.

 

[Karspankey]

So what do some think games like ARK: Survival Evolved will look like on Morpheus?

I mean, why even take on a project if it will look embarrassing?

I don't know, I guess I have faith in Sony and 1st Party and other developers.

Doesn't look like you have faith Don't worry, Morpheus is still in development. ARK is also in development. Both are probably mid-2016 releases. Lots of time in the industry to make progress.

 

[gamechanger87]

So what do some think games like ARK: Survival Evolved will look like on Morpheus?

I mean, why even take on a project if it will look embarrassing? (edit- in comparison to PS4 and PS3 games)

I don't know, I guess I have faith in Sony and 1st Party and other developers.

Faith doesn't make games. He's a VR developer. If there is anyone whom understands the limitations of the hardware and the required design he would be your guy.

 

[TheGuardian]

I get condescending because people hand wave over real world technical limitations of these devices like these limits are nothing, when I can give hard numbers to back what I say. Let me give an actual, in the real world example of how limiting VR can be - the VR application we are making right now for gear VR - we are using a note 4 currently. In stress tests, outside of a VR application, we were able to push about 500k polygons in about 400 draw calls a second at an acceptable frame rate. Trying to stress test inside of VR, however? For one, we had to eliminate environmental shadowing and reflections entirely, because those post effects were too latent. All of our texture sizes needed to be extremely reduced - we wound up using 128 x 128 8-bit textures. We had to constantly micromanage unity's garbage collector just to get the thing to run without running out of memory.

In the end, how much did we have to work with? We had about 20k polygons a second and about 40 draw calls to work with.

Extrapolate that performance difference to other hardware, because it's applicable. Virtual reality isn't a simple task to achieve at all, it's not merely "dialing things down," it's not something trivial to pull off. Every demo sony has shown off has been extremely well designed to hide all the very real, very obvious short comings. This isn't simply the PS4, either, it affects all VR devices. A Vive headset on a titan X SLI setup isn't going to look like modern-gen gaming. I see people left and right saying "I'll be fine with PS4 games running at PS3 specs." What does that even mean? There are numerous things the PS3 did which will not be feasible in VR without a massive increase in power behind the hardware that the PS4 has. They point to things like the shark demo:

And you look at it and start asking "what exactly is going on in this scene"? There is nearly no lighting, there is maybe 10k polygons going on screen at once. The entire thing takes place in a blue foggy void. So people push the luge demo - a demo which is built in a world where they can very aggressively cull everything around you to make it run faster because it goes down linear paths. No real lighting, no advanced shader calls. It's all primitive stuff.

What's left, people ask. Well, stuff like Luckey's Tale? The Mario 64-esq platformer for the rift? I don't expect the PS4 to be able to pull it off, for all the reasons I put forth above. I don't doubt there will eventually be a PS4 VR platformer, probably from MM, but it won't be anything like Mario 64. Anything with a true sense of freedom - a complex world to interact with more than a room at a time - these kind of experiences will not be possible. And it's not just sour grapes.

I'll take it back even further - Half Life 2 VR? The game we work on? It stresses my PC like hell. Our lead modeler, Jazz, is constantly redesigning things like the gun models to remove additional polygons to get it running acceptably. This is a game from 11 years ago, and it can barely run in VR with a ton of reworking. VR is so hard to work with that people honestly ould be surprised what little power you actually have left over once you begin designing your game.

But let's keep going. So with the limited amount of calls I'm making, just how much script execution time do I have? VR development feels almost like retro console development in that you must carefully manage your remaining execution time down to the milisecond in order to keep things running at an acceptable framerate. With everything I said I did to reduce complexity, I still only had about 1.5 ms of script execution time to work with. Thats 1.5 ms to do everything I could possibly need to do to actually run my game. All my AI pathfinding execution, all my hardware polling. Things like audio mixing, logic updates... everything in 1.5 ms of execution time.

Again, this is extremely limiting.

And before people jump in with "but but but optimization!" This is already AFTER batching had been done, to a ridiculous level. This was AFTER we were already using multithreaded rendering. This was AFTER we were already disabling android performance throttling. In other words, we were already optimizing.

First of all, a PS4 is nothing like a Note 4, and a decent engine is nothing like Unity.

Second, your assumptions about the "shark" demo are completly incorrect. It has a ton of polys, various types of fish and a big environment. All the lighting is realtime, with various light sources like spot lights from salvage drones, that just like the main sun light are fully volumetric and use a realistic underwater light scattering model. The shark is also very high poly and uses very complex animation.
No, Morpheus games will not look like the order, but if people think they will look shit, they are going to be very surprised.

 

[Krisprolls]

Faith doesn't make games. He's a VR developer. If there is anyone whom understands the limitations of the hardware and the required design he would be your guy.

He also doesn't work for Sony. You already have demos like the Heist to judge morpheus (hint : they look pretty good and run pretty well), you just have to believe your eyes, it seems PS4 VR will do fine.

 

[Leko04]

Hey Krejlooc just because you don't know how to make something work doesn't mean that someone smarter/better skilled can't.

 

[Pandy]

VR is just a niche product though. only the most hardcore are going to care about it.

/s

Only the most hardcore are going to buy any of the first wave of VR. No one with any common sense will.

It's going to be an absolute cluster-fuck of software and hardware compatibility matrices, poorly optimised experiences, shitty controller schemes, and irregular bouts of motion sickness for at least the first couple of years. By the time we're on to v2.0 of the various consumer hardwares, we'll have a much better user experience, at a lower price, and you'll have a better idea by that point whether the headset you'll be buying is going to have any future support after a year through market obselesence.

Any time spent on Morpheus at this year's conference is automatically dead time. But then Sony generally have a surplus of dead time in their conferences anyway, so it won't really change much.

 

[Cyborg]

If they spend more than 5 minutes on it I consider it a failed conference.

 

[Krejlooc]

First of all, a PS4 is nothing like a Note 4, and a decent engine is nothing like Unity.

A) I said extrapolate the differences because they apply, and they do, because I've worked on both high end VR and low end VR. I was giving hardware numbers because the note 4 is a fixed spec and I have my notes here with me at my desk.

B) I have worked with many engines. LOL at implying unity is not a decent engine, first up, and second up, the things I described are not faults with Unity. I worked with the raw API using Half Life 2 VR, not unity, and we still had those problems.

Second, your assumptions about the "shark" demo are completly incorrect. It has a ton of polys, various types of fish and a big environment. All the lighting is realtime, with various light sources like spot lights from salvage drones, that just like the main sun light are fully volumetric and use a realistic underwater light scattering model. The shark is also very high poly and uses very complex animation.
No, Morpheus games will not look like the order, but if people think they will look shit, they are going to be very surprised.

How many polygons do you think a fish has? That shark is not high poly, and the lighting is not nearly as complex as you think.

 

[jaypah]

Nope. I'm asking people if they just don't see a game they like, or don't see the full length of possibilities, which are most of the cases.

Soo, calling an oportunity of a big game such as Pokemon and a dream most of us all had, is a good point in favor of VR. Don't you think? I would love that hehe.

Oh, ok. Well I couldn't even answer because I never really got into Pokemon. Also it's a moot point because I already love VR. Have 2 VR kits but I can't wait for the consumer versions! Getting close now.

 

[GustyGardens]

I'm pretty stoked for VR, Morpheus in particular. I can't believe we live in a time where we can have virtual reality in our homes. The 90's me is doing backflips right now.

Also, I'm pretty sure this going to take up a good portion of their conference. I'd say the bottom half of it would be devoted to it and some of the experiences. Of course, we'll have a price and release day. I'm also pretty sure the price is 199.99. I also think we'll see some notable Sony games on it, some that we probably wouldn't think to consider. Whether they work or not is beyond me.

 

[ironcreed]

Only the most hardcore are going to buy any of the first wave of VR. No one with any common sense will.

It's going to be an absolute cluster-fuck of software and hardware compatibility matrices, poorly optimised experiences, shitty controller schemes, and irregular bouts of motion sickness for at least the first couple of years. By the time we're on to v2.0 of the various consumer hardwares, we'll have a much better user experience, at a lower price, and you'll have a better idea by that point whether the headset you'll be buying is going to have any future support after a year through market obselesence.

Any time spent on Morpheus at this year's conference is automatically dead time. But then Sony generally have a surplus of dead time in their conferences anyway, so it won't really change much.

I agree with nearly everything said, but am curious to see what they are doing with it. I sure as hell don't think the masses are going to rush out to buy these devices anytime soon, but I am leaving the door open for myself. If only for some bite-sized experiences outside of using it for games.

 

[Cru]

Krejlooc is sometimes like VR Santa Claus, bringing hope and fun and presents. And sometimes he's Krampus, and he terrifies you, and then throws you in a sack to take you to the river for drowning.

lol

 

[Ferrio]

The VR shenanigans has the most crow eating potential in a very long time, for either side.

 

[Krisprolls]

How many polygons do you think a fish has? That shark is not high poly, and the lighting is not nearly as complex as you think.

All I know is it looks great and so does the Heist demo, so why should we worry ?

You don't need top graphics to make great games anyway. Limitations will boost creativity, which can only lead to better games (see the older games if you have any doubt that).

 

[ironcreed]

Sure, they have a demo made by nasa using captured omnidirectional film from mars to make you feel like you're standing on mars. It's not realtime rendering, it's film.

Well then, I am suddenly more interested. Thank you.

 

[viveks86]

This discussion deserves a dedicated thread. Let's move here
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1060677

 

[Sorral]

Who really knows? I haven't seen the game running, I've never talked to the devs before. I can't really know how every VR game or pitched project works, or what sort of obsticles they are running into during development. The first time I jumped into VR development, I was like "omfg I am god, creator of worlds, destroyer of reality." Then I started playing more with the hardware and the limitations on design smacked me right in the face. A lot of design ideas I've had were shelved until hardware advances.

VR is a process, this is just day 1. These problems will not be longstanding, by next generation, I expect the PS5 to again be able to return developers to a place where hardware doesn't dictate their design decisions. I keep comparing the PS4 and morpehus to the Super FX chip, because I honestly think the comparison is apt. I think morpehus and the PS4 are juuuuuust enough to give people a taste of what VR has to offer - get them acclimated - before the full VR offering next gen.

I think my main issue with your argument is that you're saying it is flat out impossible and that maybe MM in some years will be able to do it.

Not all developers are the same and certainly not all of them will face the same exact issues for whatever different stuff they are making.

I might as well not build a new PC for either the Vive or OR CV and wait five years to a decade for anything complex that is VR related, which I still plan on building, but your logic and experience with it say that it will be crap or at least not that good because no one will be able to do it for a long time.

 

[Pandy]

I agree with nearly everything said, but am curious to see what they are doing with it. I sure as hell don't think the masses are going to rush out to buy these devices anytime soon, but I am leaving the door open for myself. If only for some bite-sized experiences outside of using it for games.

Yeah, I don't want to sound too down on it. I'm looking foward to VR, when we get some standards developed, and it's positive that Sony are giving a lot of floor space to Morpheus, will make for lots of hands-on impressions.

Watching that stuff at the conference is going to be Kinect levels of dull, though. Pretty much cements my decision not to watch it live as I have done in previous years. (UK)

 

[RoadHazard]

I get condescending because people hand wave over real world technical limitations of these devices like these limits are nothing, when I can give hard numbers to back what I say. Let me give an actual, in the real world example of how limiting VR can be - the VR application we are making right now for gear VR - we are using a note 4 currently. In stress tests, outside of a VR application, we were able to push about 500k polygons in about 400 draw calls a second at an acceptable frame rate. Trying to stress test inside of VR, however? For one, we had to eliminate environmental shadowing and reflections entirely, because those post effects were too latent. All of our texture sizes needed to be extremely reduced - we wound up using 128 x 128 8-bit textures. We had to constantly micromanage unity's garbage collector just to get the thing to run without running out of memory.

In the end, how much did we have to work with? We had about 20k polygons a second and about 40 draw calls to work with.

Extrapolate that performance difference to other hardware, because it's applicable. Virtual reality isn't a simple task to achieve at all, it's not merely "dialing things down," it's not something trivial to pull off. Every demo sony has shown off has been extremely well designed to hide all the very real, very obvious short comings. This isn't simply the PS4, either, it affects all VR devices. A Vive headset on a titan X SLI setup isn't going to look like modern-gen gaming. I see people left and right saying "I'll be fine with PS4 games running at PS3 specs." What does that even mean? There are numerous things the PS3 did which will not be feasible in VR without a massive increase in power behind the hardware that the PS4 has. They point to things like the shark demo:

And you look at it and start asking "what exactly is going on in this scene"? There is nearly no lighting, there is maybe 10k polygons going on screen at once. The entire thing takes place in a blue foggy void. So people push the luge demo - a demo which is built in a world where they can very aggressively cull everything around you to make it run faster because it goes down linear paths. No real lighting, no advanced shader calls. It's all primitive stuff.

What's left, people ask. Well, stuff like Luckey's Tale? The Mario 64-esq platformer for the rift? I don't expect the PS4 to be able to pull it off, for all the reasons I put forth above. I don't doubt there will eventually be a PS4 VR platformer, probably from MM, but it won't be anything like Mario 64. Anything with a true sense of freedom - a complex world to interact with more than a room at a time - these kind of experiences will not be possible. And it's not just sour grapes.

I'll take it back even further - Half Life 2 VR? The game we work on? It stresses my PC like hell. Our lead modeler, Jazz, is constantly redesigning things like the gun models to remove additional polygons to get it running acceptably. This is a game from 11 years ago, and it can barely run in VR with a ton of reworking. VR is so hard to work with that people honestly would be surprised what little power you actually have left over once you begin designing your game.

But let's keep going. So with the limited amount of calls I'm making, just how much script execution time do I have? VR development feels almost like retro console development in that you must carefully manage your remaining execution time down to the milisecond in order to keep things running at an acceptable framerate. With everything I said I did to reduce complexity, I still only had about 1.5 ms of script execution time to work with. Thats 1.5 ms to do everything I could possibly need to do to actually run my game. All my AI pathfinding execution, all my hardware polling. Things like audio mixing, logic updates... everything in 1.5 ms of execution time.

Again, this is extremely limiting.

And before people jump in with "but but but optimization!" This is already AFTER batching had been done, to a ridiculous level. This was AFTER we were already using multithreaded rendering. This was AFTER we were already disabling android performance throttling. In other words, we were already optimizing.

Could you explain a little further what this absolutely ridiculous overhead stems from? I understand real-time 3D rendering rather well, and while I've never done VR I thought I had a decent understanding of what additional processing is required. But here you're saying that you're getting 1/25 the polygons and 1/10 the draw calls out of the hardware every frame in VR, and that just leaves me dumbfounded. How can there possibly be such a massive difference? This makes no sense to me.

 

[TheGuardian]

A) I said extrapolate the differences because they apply, and they do, because I've worked on both high end VR and low end VR. I was giving hardware numbers because the note 4 is a fixed spec and I have my notes here with me at my desk.

A mobile device, although being a fixed spec is not a good example of how a console works. Both in terms of priorities when the hardware was developed but also in terms of software.

B) I have worked with many engines. LOL at implying unity is not a decent engine, first up, and second up, the things I described are not faults with Unity. I worked with the raw API using Half Life 2 VR, not unity, and we still had those problems.

Unity is pretty crap performance wise. That's a fact. I guess I'm spoiled from not having to work with an off the shelf engine.

How many polygons do you think a fish has? That shark is not high poly, and the lighting is not nearly as complex as you think.

You talk like you know what's behind the demo, which you don't. Whether you believe me or not is up to you, but trust me when I say I know it better than you do.

 

[Sandfox]

I don't really expect much from VR until the next generation or so, but I'm curious to see what kind of games they will be releasing on Morpheus I guess.

 

[Helznicht]

Interesting stuff Krejlooc. Could you comment on the 100s of youtube vids with people playing Project Cars on youtube through Occulus and 970s or less? With stuff turned down (but still high res), I get around 90fps outside of VR. With what you say, VR could take this way down. Are people really playing with the Dk2 with framerates between 30-60 fps? Is that what I can expect when I get my VR?

 

[Officerrob]

Unless Sony discovered some new way to demo VR that no longer makes it boring for the audience, spending a sizeable chunk of the conference on Morpheus would be a mistake from a viewer point of view

 

[ironcreed]

Unless Sony discovered some new way to demo VR that no longer makes it boring for the audience, spending a sizeable chunk of the conference on Morpheus would be a mistake from a viewer point of view

Probably. I just want to get a good look at what they are doing with it and hope they quickly move on.

 

[wanderingprostheyltite]

You talk like you know what's behind the demo, which you don't. Whether you believe me or not is up to you, but trust me when I say I know it better than you do.

Unless my short term memory is failing me, you're with Sony right?

 

[M0nochromatic]

INSANE KNOWLEDGE DROP

Damn. It's very enlightening to read what someone with actual hands on experience has to say about the reality of working on VR. I always thought, like you said, that it would be a "downgrade" for VR implementation in games, but man.