Jun 24, 2017

VR Motion - VR Chat

VR Motion extended entry

After loading into a zone, the player is sometime dropped into the avatar's height. 80% of the time when loading into a new zone, there was Room Motion as though the game didn't realize it put me at a different height than they had originally measured me for.

View height is Room Motion adjusted based on nearby stairs. By putting your RL head position over an staircase, ramp or box, the VR position can be shifted up or down to where your avatar's height would be in that position.

System menu gives a glitchy motion view. When paused, the view traveled about 2 to 5 meters in distance in a repeated path in the course of less than a second, repeating as quickly as it could.

Other players are able to cause your avatar's view height to move. I watched a player move a held marker under another player, and their viewpoint was forced up as though they were walking on the marker. The marker player then pulled the marker above her head, and the other player rose up higher up until the marker was no longer under them, at which point they snaped back to the ground.

Normal movement is a modified teleport system, in which you tell your avatar where you want to go, and you watch from your existing position as your avatar moves to the new position. Really nifty way to include travel time without pushing the player's viewpoint.

Jun 14, 2017

Star Trek: Bridge Crew, UPlay

The following is my experience in attempting to launch Star Trek: Bridge Crew.

Upon launch, the game asks what controllers the player wants to use. Controllers are not visible in Vive at this point. These should be visible until the player tells the game that a non-vive controller is going to be used for controls, or the controls are being visually replaced by the avatar's hands.

UPlay. Steam is DRM. A second DRM is unnecessary.

UPlay labels itself as a game launcher. I'm not even interested in Origin, and they have greatly improved since they started.

After installing UPlay and logging into my account, the in game connection error message to UPlay is not cleared nor is there an option to retry connection once UPlay has been installed. The only option is to quit the game. This is also rude.

Upon second launch, the game failed to launch, and put me back in SteamVR Home. My monitor tells me that UPlay threw an error message. The game should have stayed open and notified the player to look at the monitor.

After allowing the game to be bound to my account, UPlay "helpfully" launched the game itself. Since I wasn't prepared to play yet, my headset was still in afk mode, which means it isn't tracking, which makes Star Trek: Bridge Crew throw an error message of hardware error. Restarting the game is the only option to continue.

During this second launch, Source2 gives a warning that only one instance of the game can be running at one time. Since I was already kicked out of the game from the UPlay thrown error message, this suggest that UPlay launched the game twice. Good job.

After connecting to UPlay correctly, I'm greeted with a screen of health information warning that permits me enough time to read most of the first sentence, which I think was along the lines of "Read all" before it cut that screen away. It's not a CYOA if you aren't allowing people to read the shit you ask them to. I imagine I would have to relaunch the game 3 times to read that text.

The main menu gives me motion sickness. A moving background while attempting to read text does this to me. If the menu pod was stationary relative to the stars, this wouldn't be an issue. This has been included in my post about games that give me motion sickness.