Planetary Annihilation 2 in VR?

Since I got my Vive I missed good RTS the most, and after playing Dota 2 VR (it's mostly watching matches) or other games where you can look from above, I believe its possible to make RTS like PA in VR, and make it good.

It would need of course pretty smart UI design, and way to smoothly change the height, view, so you can easily view planets and entire system, but what was PA if not the most innovative RTS? I believe devs could do it in a long run.

To make building viable for controllers devs could use UI like in Cosmic Trip (http://store.steampowered.com/app/427240/) or anything similar, and to make it fast, use radial build order when holding trigger, or in line. Selecting units would be also easy, touch ground, hold trigger, do radial select, then point, and order. Teleporting around would probably be the way to move in game, and there could be some shortcuts to make waypoints to get back to (Touchpad can be used as couple buttons at once, depending on what you want to do or you hold right now).

Current performance would probably not be good for VR, especially for AMD because of opengl. Vulkan would be probably way to go, because both companies support it very well, and it would work even better with goal of thousands of units at once.

Etc. and so on. It would not be easy at first, but it would be the most innovative and best RTS for VR and probably PC all together. (I'm biased, I already think PA is the best RTS there is ). And the best part is, there is not a single RTS like this in VR, and there probably won't be in a long time. It's a free market, ready to be taken, there aren't many RTS, and the only one (Cosmic Trip) is very arcady, and still in development.

What you all think? And cmon Uber, make it a reality. I would throw so much money at you.

necro!!!!!1111!!!!! .... ....!!!!1111!!!!

so since i actualy was able to checkout both the vive and occulous at this years gamescom in cologne, germany i gotta say i am not entirely sure the VRview would be that/as beneficial to rts as to many simulation/ first person games than your standart monitorview ... and with more complex RTS's you still would require a keyboard were i think the immersion simply wouldn't as great ... i think VR would be most beneficial and/or give a woweffect on more simplier games such as dungeonkeeper for example

so to me PAvr would be rather "neat to have" than "truely innovative"

I assume you've seen this video, where uber made a VR demo using PA.
https://www.vrfocus.com/2015/08/first-clip-of-planetary-annihilation-titans-on-htc-vive-revealed/

yea .... and? looks more like playing battlezone .... in that case you could do battlezone vr and that would be alright but with the scale of PA:T spawning over multiple battlefields and planes it is insuficient by a magnitude ...
what i imagine PA vr to be is having an interface similar to what envelop uses for its windows/OS desktop VR but you still would have the same issues were a person can oversee only so much of the overall battlescenario at a time and i don't think having a godseyeview is all that immersive VRwise ... not to forget how taxing this will be on the hardware using multiple screens/windows ...

I'm not saying a VR RTS is a good idea. Just that Uber have experimented with it already.

I played lately nice RTS-like game Cosmic Trip that uses RTS elements, and is still growing. I think it is a great example that RTS can be made, even if it's in first person. But there is nothing stopping devs to make "steps" from first person to whole planet. I think it could work, if it is well made. I don't mean direct tranformation of PA into VR, but creating PA 2 with VR in mind.

And yes, VR right now is neat to have if you got money. Next gen will be much better.

so when you say PA with vr in mind how do You inagine it?

I have to be honest I really don't see the point of VR for non-first person games. Doubly so in top-down games where everything of interest is in front of you at all times. Triply so in strategy games where GUI information being readable is extra important. Quadruply so for games where the scale is such you wouldn't really get any sense of 3D from how far away everything is. Unless you want everything to look like miniatures.

You could probably not find a worse candidate for VR if you tried.

I agree completely.

I have no idea why people are so desperate for VR for an RTS. It's like asking for Bugs Bunny cartoons to be made for 3D TVs.

Have you guys TRIED RTS in VR? Or anything that looks from third person to the board or anything RTS-like? Because it looks awesome and is very intuitive. You have really try it to "get it". Plenty people will tell you that about VR.

I think I already described it, third person, changing how high you are, from ground up to system view. You can click for build menu or controls, you can select units by touching ground and expanding the select circle by swiping it futher (or point it to the ground, if you are higher), you can point and select action for units etc. Simple and intuitive, UI with usage of real life motion. It might sound stupid, but in VR it would feel awesome.

yea we really need PA VR, especially considering how starved for deep content a lot of Vive users are right now!

I'd love to see them incorporate this scaling mechanic ..



Has anyone looked into modding this?

it's definitely not mod-able but it's cool

i don´t think we NEED it ... and what do you want with lots of games if the broader audience don´t have realy access to it with the devices costing 700 to 900 dollars ... the cheapest vrset you would be able to get would be 400$ for the playstation and that has nowhere the hardware to run neither properly control the game ...

while the above video is neat i´m still sceptical about the usefullness of that kind of zooming with bodymotionfunction for a game with multiple layers and multiple battlefields .. i´m still of the opinion this would rather work for smaller rts´s such as company of heroes (which also is more suited for the immersion one would want ... or again battlezone or planetside 2)
than for such a largescale game like PA

What's with all that VR stuff here on the forums? VR for RTS is already weird, and VR for RTS with planets and **** is just useless (and probably impossible).

Nobody will bother to add VR support to PA, it's extremely complicated and expensive, and will give little to no profit.

no ... just not as immersive as people would think

It can't be healthy to play rts in VR. Actually most fps games would hardly fit, aiming is the biggest problem. You know normal human beings would use only one eye to aim and shoot.

me playing pirate trainer with the HTC VIVE i didn´t have any real problems with aiming realy ... could be a different story with modern military shooters and aim-down-sights but then again we are speaking about technology that is still new ...
to me similar with PA played differently from other RTS´s games using VR for FPS or MMFPS is rather a matter of getting used to .. and i´m rather positive that the tech will be advanced enough for certain games to make that getting used to easier ..

Slight necro, but I just saw this video on Reddit of a remake of Red Alert 2 for VR, which shows off how a RTS could work with VR. Kind of neat. Obviously not spherical.

Not only not spherical, but not even translation of the viewport, let alone any form of zooming or alike.

When we talk VR and RTS, if anything, the original advertisment for Ruse comes to my mind:


You can overcome the problem of motion sickness and alike by using a proxy surface projected onto a real table or alike, whereby all the problematic translations are then performed with the proxy camera.

It's the same principle as with the "virtual cinema" applications, where you also have a virtual room containing a virtual screen, on which the actual movie plays. Which works flawless with video material which originally wasn't suited for VR, as the reference point is the virtual room, not the actual videos content.

Which then - thinking about it for a while - is surprisingly easy to implement. The original game "only" needs to have multi-touch enabled controls. The actual game can even be rendered as flat 2D without any real issues. I'm not even sure if 3D would be a good idea at all, considering the resulting need to project the controls.

Especially for PA it would most likely be a bad idea, given the multiple layers of movement, which can't be all in focus when rendering in 3D. The focal plane should be the same as where the controls are in.

When I say touch controls, I mean simple gestures such as selection by free drawn shape, directional (target less) movement controls via swipe gestures and alike. All of which is pretty much intuitive once you got a physical 2D plane (the table) to constraint your movement.

There were view port changes in the RA2 video using that blue pointy thing that teleports you to different locations on the map. That seems to be the way to move around in VR games in general, I think.

That Ruse video does look cool. But like you say, what would the added value of VR be if you are going to look at a 2D surface anyway. Actually, no, that's not true, Battle Chess would look awesome.
I feel the added value of VR for RTS would be standing in the middle of the action with the battles going on all around you. Though that probably makes it a lot harder to keep an overview. Especially in PA, where overview is already somewhat problematic.

But yeah, I'm unsure if VR would go well with PA. Though with the teleporting business, I suppose you could teleport to system view and see all the planets down below and teleport down to the surface of a planet to manage your units.

I should also say that I do not have a VR headset and only used it in the library once, so I probably don't really know what I'm talking about. I just thought the RA2 video was cool.