oculus rift version!!!! please!

I love this game.
But on the weekend I got to try out an oculus rift and my first thought was how awesome would this be if I could play PA like this.

I was thinking a potential view was where you can view the planet you are current on as if you are right in the middle of it. Sort of a negative world map view. Since it's 3d you could have fairly transparent ground layer so you could still see everything.

Please make this. It would be AMAZING!!!

H-how would it work visually? O.O

He's saying the camera should be fixed in the centre of the planet and you just look around to see different parts of the surface.

I wouldn't say it's worth the effort.

You could repost this in the mod section might possible get an interest to get it sooner.

but I could see getting used if anyone has one

It would probably work really well with the regular view. Super Stardust HD on PS3 which also had the same "centered on planet" view was one of the few games that actually looked good in stereoscopic 3D.

This would be a great experience for the dozen people who own an oculus rift.

Ooh, while we are at it, stereogram mode as in Magic Carpet! Sadly, I couldn't find a video of it, but here is an animated shark using the same principle. In spoiler tags because it also hurts brains.

Spoiler

Ow my brain.

Says the guy with a rotating four dimensional hypercube as a avatar.

Stuff that works well with 3d on monitors (anaglyph or one of the various 3d tv techs) does not always translate to working well in VR. In fact most of them do not. While something like PA in VR sounds awesome there's a ton of technical limitations and squishy meat bag (us humans) limitations that make just taking what works on a monitor and sticking it in VR a literal vomit inducing experience.

Some basic issues:
Oculus mostly just supports DirectX right now, and PA is OpenGL.
For the Dk2 we'd need to keep a locked frame rate of 75 fps. Dropping below that is bad on many levels. With the unbounded nature of PA there's no way to guarantee that as no matter what we do for LOD someone can always make more units.
Camera motion, or more specifically accelleration, is really bad in VR. That describes about 90% of player interaction in PA.

Lastly, and this is one that'll likely eventually be solved, the resolution of the DK2 is too low be able to see much in the game. If you look at videos for most VR games or demos you'll notice the text is almost comically large. The reason is because using the DK2 anything smaller is unreadable.

I'm developping on DK2 in OGL. Not a problem.

Not true in the case of PA. As long as you have the feeling that it's the world that is moving and not you, it is all right. This can be done by having a fixed reference point (ie. an embedded UI or the background).


Or if you rethink the whole interface to be more useful : ie. by displaying all the planets around the player (so you can switch to different planets just by rotating your head. You would solve the issue that PA is most of the time an unreadable mess

That won't be a problem for the comsumer version of the oculus. Also, you can zoom in a planet by leaning towards it.

The only concern would be the frame rate. But they are solutions for that. What need to be at 75 fps is the camera tracking. The game can update at 25 fps or less with no problems.

Yep good don't even waste your time considering it...PA is not the kind of game VR would be good for.

Though the design hurdles are huge, I actually disagree. Full VR with good interfacing could really give you that 'enders game' feeling that PA already excels at. Grab a blob of units, wave then at the enemy, queue up build orders. The UI would have to be rebuilt from the group up, something I definitely don't see happening. But someday VR could revolutionize the RTS experience.

Currently OpenGL is supported when using Direct Mode by rendering the OpenGL into a DirectX window. This isn't free, and we're already doing copies from DirectX to OpenGL (the UI) so there's a good chance this would be really bad for the PA engine.

Fixed reference points help, but don't solve 100%. If we just made the game's skybox static this would probably not be an issue most of the time, but it's still not a comfortable experience.

Having to lean in and out (like you do for Elite right now) is a non-solution in my opinion. That's just a work around.

Separated view update and render update is already something that can be done using the Time Warp. This is very effective as long as there's nothing relatively close to the view ... like UI elements ...

Ah yes. As extended mode is the new preferred way of doing things, I'm not even trying to make direct mode working

Extended mode will likely be phased out eventually. It's a bad user experience where direct mode "just works" most of the time. The only reason why extended mode even exists still is because it was the fastest way to get something working early on as it took a while for them to figure out how to get direct mode working. Once stuff like Unity gets proper direct mode support in editor I suspect even enabling extended mode will become more difficult.

Just to add from personal experience, I tested a friend's demo in the DK2 that used a highly displaced shaded sphere.
With the sphere in front of your face, the experience is quite impressive. It really appears there's an object about 3 meters across hovering just in front of your face.
Having said that, the detail of the surface is blurry/pixelated when you focus onto a small area (without moving closer).
My guess is that as a future tech it's going to be awesome, but the DK2 and probably the consumer version won't have the pixel density required to display the detail PA needs.

I can still dream about how awesome it will be ten years from now.. if you haven't tried dk2 or gear vr.. recommend you give it a whirl.. the future of everything imho