Just wondering ... has there been any talk about a VR mod for PA or PA:titans? PA is it's own engine, right? So using Unity's tools is probably off the table. Has anyone from Uber talked about this, or any modders looked into it?
This gets brought up frequently. Truth is there's a reason why most vr games look like PS1 graphics. Rendering two different hi res screens at 90hz is hard work - PA is so epic. having 1000 units crawling around bogs in my monster gaming build eventually on one screen! If you drop frames in vr it can get painful. And then someone crashes a planet into you? We're a couple 3-4 years away from that vr experience but it would be great. Uber is now making like enterprise productivity software for vr I think (facepalm) You could use virtual desktop with enough options turned down and play PA in VR?
Except you don't actually need to. "Asynchronous Spacewarp" which Oculus just published in cooperation with AMD provides decent intermediate frame extrapolation and low response times to head movement. So even if the game itself can't do 90fps do to the complexity of the scene, the motion sickness problem - springing from a mismatch between head and camera position - can be avoided. There is an entirely different problem with PA though, which makes it rather unsuited for VR: The strategic zoom. Simple rule about VR, be careful with camera movement. Zooming from surface level to space and back in on another planet is pretty much the opposite. Quick movement over the planets surface on a curved path is just as problematic. We even got players which can't stand this zooming and the planets curvature on a classic 2D monitor without getting sick, so this isn't going to be any better in VR.
There might be some tricks that could be used to make the user feel like they are looking forward, at a miniature planet/globe. Essentially, make them feel like they are not moving, but they are moving some objects around in 3d space.
