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Would RTS genre e.g. Starcraft work in VR?

Arowx
Explorer
Has anyone tried an RTS style game in VR yet, the camera tends to float above the action, giving the player a godlike overview of the situation.

As I could easily add VR to my Teroids game...

Youtube - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osMbUByGE9U
Kongregate - http://www.kongregate.com/games/Arowx/teroids


What do you think, currently I don't have a Rift to play test it on though?
12 REPLIES 12

KuraIthys
Honored Guest
For traditionally coded RTS games, I suspect the answer would be... No.

Well, I mean, if you really wanted to force the issue you probably could get it to work to some degree, it just doesn't seem like a good idea.

Aside from the field of view, and depth perception, the major point is head tracking.
But that primarily means head rotation, which is a kind of camera movement I pretty much don't see being of much use for a traditional RTS.

The camera motions in an RTS are almost all in relation to the ground. Which clashes horribly with what a human being will try to do with their head if they expect their head movements to have any effect on what they can see.

Basically, short of ignoring all tracking data and just treating the headset as a 3d display, most of the conventional camera movements associated with 'gods eye view' games (such as RTS and other strategy games in general) as well as 3rd person games don't seem like a good match for a VR display system.

I'm sure with some creative thought you could come up with schemes that might work reasonably well, but you'd have to drastically rethink how an RTS tends to get presented.

Nogard
Honored Guest
I must respectfully disagree with the Right-Honorable KuraIthys, I think head tracking will enhance this experience although you don't need to look around a lot, being able to glance around at the battle field and watch as the tiny units mash each other would be fun to see. Speaking of tiny, thanks to stereo 3D the units will look like cute little plastic soldiers!

There is also that sense of being an all powerful god that makes this really interesting so much so I would love to see Black and White 3 with hydra support and Oculus support!(unfortunately Peter Molyneux is insane now 😞 and i think EA owns it)

That is my, how you say? two cents.

Arowx
Explorer
Well you could take the God like aspect to a new level, with virtual tabletop battle you can walk around as opposed to being immersed in the game the game is shown as a 3D map within the virtual world.

E.g. The commander controls a holographic map table.

or The gods view from mount olympus via magical pool.

usb420
Honored Guest
read the Michael Abrash article from GDC. He says that games where you're focused on an object like a chess board tend to not work well in VR.

Nogard
Honored Guest
"usb420" wrote:
read the Michael Abrash article from GDC. He says that games where you're focused on an object like a chess board tend to not work well in VR.


Alas the Abrash has spoken, shame i would have thought it to be a good idea.

Arowx
Explorer
Could you point out the specific section where he mentions that viewing items relatively close is an issue, as he mentions a lot of issue to do with head tracking and smearing and things moving too fast and were talking about viewing an RTS/Stratergy type game.

Also he is working on a FPS game so his views and experience may differ from someone working on an RTS style game.

He also says this.

I’ve just spent 25 minutes telling you how hard VR is – and that’s certainly true. But realtime 3D was equally hard – just check out Chapter 64 in my Black Book about the lengths John went to in order to solve the potentially visible set problem, or think about how crude the early 3D accelerators were – and over time all that has worked out amazingly well.

This is the kind of opportunity that everyone in the gaming industry should dream of; if you want to do challenging work that has the potential to affect almost every game written in five or ten years, VR is a great place to be right now.

mire
Explorer
From what I've seen in TF2, games like this where you have a lot of UI on the edges of the screen may not be practical. Text is extremely blurry and hard to focus on if it's not directly centered in your vision. Some of this may be down to the low resolution of the display, but I suspect it may be a deeper issue. Time will tell, I suppose, but right now it seems like it could be an issue when porting existing games. I've heard the current build of Hawken they're showing doesn't have any UI at all (can anyone who was at GDC confirm or deny?), which would be another point in the "uh oh this might be really hard to solve" column.

But in plain terms of the camera model - I think it could work, and the head tracking could add a nice bit of flexibility to the interface (being able to glance around your base to make sure nobody's trying to cannon rush you without having to move the view entirely off the probe you sent out to build a pylon could be really nice, for instance, although it would be a significant change to the way the game is played). The biggest issues aside from the aforementioned UI stuff would probably be motion sickness - unnatural and rapid movement are the worst offenders in terms of nausea, in my experience so far, and sliding your view quickly to the side or jumping around with the minimap could be very disorienting.

usb420
Honored Guest
"Arowx" wrote:
Could you point out the specific section where he mentions that viewing items relatively close is an issue, as he mentions a lot of issue to do with head tracking and smearing and things moving too fast and were talking about viewing an RTS/Stratergy type game.


you may be right. I don't think I can dig up exactly where he said that.

My impression was that it's difficult to fixate on stationary objects because of the lack of translational tracking. Not 100% sure about that though.
Maybe someone with a rift can test it for us.

CSHokie
Protege
"Arowx" wrote:
Well you could take the God like aspect to a new level, with virtual tabletop battle you can walk around as opposed to being immersed in the game the game is shown as a 3D map within the virtual world.

E.g. The commander controls a holographic map table.

or The gods view from mount olympus via magical pool.


Powermonger!!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Monger