Once again, you continue to highlight limitations in roomscale and advocate for something even more limited. For all the "grounding" in your roomscaleless utopia, you're severely limited in other ways. General movement limitation this, general movement limitation that, but everything isn't about walking huge distances. Lets take this hypothetical situation: You have a gun in each hand. You want to side step an incoming attack while laying down fire on two enemies and then proceed to duck behind cover.
Roomscale solution: Perform the action just like you would in real life.
Artificial locomotion solution: Drop your guns for some other tool, or in the very least stop using them to make gestures to move around. Alternatively use buttons to perform real life actions. Both options are far more limiting than the roomscale one.
Well, no, because there's nothing stopping me from performing the same physical sidestep to dodge the attack while laying down covering fire with both hands. Then I just hold the ratcheting button as I make my return to center, pulling myself behind the cover in the process. Or I could simply dodge the attack initially by ratcheting myself behind cover, which is far more effective than your dodge would be, because I can move my hand a lot faster than you can move your entire body.
But your first instinct is still to shift your entire meatbag. That's fine. So what happens when there's a physical wall in the way of your instinctive dodge? Which is more real to you, the fireball or the wall? Your sense of presence was firmly rooted in whichever environment you picked, and I suspect you didn't pick the virtual environment, as was our goal.
Actually, our goal was to make you forget there was even a decision to be made, and it seems we've failed miserably in that regard. The user who's learned to move with their hands instead of their feet is never presented with such a decision, because they never get closer to the wall. They can easily dodge in any direction at any time. Thusly, their sense of presence in the virtual environment is maintained. Will they eventually teeter their way out of the trackable zone? Of course they will, even if you can track an entire football field, but it will take a hell of a lot longer than would if you sent them trucking straight towards the edge.
And that's the real point here. You keep saying I'm focusing on the limitations of Lighthouse and proposing we replace it with a more limited system, but that's not what I'm doing. Why would we replace Lighthouse at all? It's the most capable tracking system we really have access to.
But having a larger tracking volume only helps you so much. Hitting the tracking limits is bad, so having them further away is better, but that doesn't make hitting them any less bad. If your trackable volume doesnt correspond to your game environment, youre going to have mismatches, and thats a violation of presence every time the user finds one.
Yes, yes, this is all well and good, but what if we needed to
crouch to avoid that attack? Well, if youre still super attached to your meatbag, then go right ahead. If youve abandoned it to a comfy chair or a hammock somewhere like a normal person, then just ratchet your head up and down through the range of available heights. If youve got a rag doll following you, the system just shows it to be standing or stooping or whatever. Or maybe instead of crouching down, Im actually getting really tiny
Hey, look. Now Im Antman, changing my size at will as I hurl myself through keyholes with some well timed ratchet vaults. You can do whatever you like now; its not like your meatbag is going anywhere.
Ratcheting may seem like a ridiculous amount of abstraction, but it's actually far less abstraction than what we've been dealing with for the
last 50 years that's why it doesn't make you sick and figuring out what all you can do here has always been part of video gaming. Git gud, son. Don't you wanna play Celerity Ninja 3 with us?
Assuming your game is more than endless walking, you're going to come across more situations like the above where not being able to perform a complex, yet intuitive action ever is more of a setback than running across certain situations where you hit the chaperone bounds. At least in my opinion.
As I explained above, I dont think these intuitive actions are nearly as complex or difficult to perform as you seem to think. Conversely, I think environments more than three paces long are typically quite common in video games.
It would be a functional part of that "reality" so it wouldn't stop presence at all. If you erected a force field in a given location and that field is anchored in place, it'd react exactly the same way that the room scale bounds do in the virtual world. Sure you'd have to do hand waving and limit yourself to where it makes sense, but all the artificial locomotion methods are much the same. Teleportation, ratcheting, and so on are hardly realistic methods and motions by real world physics standards.
Well, no. As I was telling Zap, teleportation has some complications, but a basic ratcheting implementation is pretty natural and straightforward. Sure, the lack of inertia makes it unnaturally fast, but the range is short, and once everyone in the world moves similarly, it will seem perfectly normal, just as circle-strafing at 20m/s does now in CoD.
Users dont
need real world physics standards, and as Ive said before, I think well have more design options to us if we dont arbitrarily constrain ourselves to them. What they
really dont need are experiences where they need to stop every three paces and wait for their meatbag to catch up. I mean, playing through two or three of those might be interesting from an intellectual curiosity standpoint, but going on WalkAbout for
dozens of games? Just let me get on with it already. And how does that work with multiplayer? The other players walk for three seconds, disappear for five, then reappear and walk for three more? Yeah, that sounds
way more realistic than my suggestion of walking with your hands
=/
Anyway, youre basically just arguing that rather that avoiding the tracking bounds as I suggest, you can incorporate them in to your gameplay. Of course you can, and that was my initial argument; theres only so much you can do with physical locomotion unless youre willing to build a build a comparatively large facility. Why? Because every time the user reaches the tracking bounds, unless it's also the game bounds, they gotta stop and figure something else out before they can progress.
So knowing that will always be an issue, why not just avoid it from the get go and stick with the abstraction? Either youve eliminated the need for abstraction or you havent, and constantly changing your primary form of locomotion is both immersion-breaking and tiresome. You still cant make it out of your room without ratcheting (or whatever), and if you can ratchet, why would you ever walk?? As you argued at the top of the page, you never would. You'd do the sensible thing and ratchet to the corpses, because stopping to futz with the CB is nothing more than an unnecessary complication.
So we have ratcheting, which allows full freedom of player movement, subject only to developer constraints. "No, you can't ratchet yourself straight in to the air. Sure, you can hop around a little bit. No, you can't clip through the walls, but you can scale this one. Hang on tight. You unlocked Spider Ninja; scale whatever you like and don't worry about falling." Best of all, it never ever fails to deliver the expected results, so it never ever breaks presence. (Presumably, any dev constraints will be similarly predictable, at least in context.) So given the presence of this necessary system, what does wandering around your bedroom bring to the party beyond regular reminders that you're really still just stuck in a bedroom? Reminders which typically come in the form of blocked progress followed by a compensatory adjustment phase performed by the user.
When do we get to the part where physical locomotion becomes a huge win? Because so far I'm behind on presence, playability, and couches.
Alas, I'm getting to the point where I'm caring less and less about these things. At least as far as concerning myself with what other people want goes. There are people enjoying what roomscale offers right now. There are devs taking advantage of it. I'll just have fun in that group while having access to everything else to boot. Well I will when my Vive gets here at least. Other people are free to limit themselves for any reason they so chose.
Okay then. I think this stuff is sorta important.
Seeing as you're sidestepping the question I'm guessing that's a no for trying a Vive
Actually, I was just staying on topic.
So I suppose you could say I sidestepped your attempt to sidestep, yes.
As I said earlier, Ive used Virtuality and Gear. Move too, obviously, if that counts for anything. How much ratcheting have you done? How many times have you seen it demonstrated?
The chaperone just becomes additional geometry after awhile, the point stands high presence is still easily achieved even with those borders appearing.
It still exists as a reminder that the virtual environment is nothing more than that, which is precisely the opposite of the effect were trying to achieve here. We have a myriad of systems working together to make your brain say, Yes, this is
really happening, and a single system designed to apply the brakes and say, Nah, you're still in your room. It exists solely to ground you in reality, and it does precisely that.
Standing at the edge of a cliff is our classic example for presence, yes? Your brain should be telling the rest of your body, Holy shit! Watch the fuck out! One gust of wind and we fall to our deaths!! The chaperones job is to say, Nah, youre alright, but you're
about to stumble backwards in to your coffee table, so if anything, chose the safety of the cliff.
Cliff or coffee table? Fireball or wall? Those are decisions the user should never be making. Thats not presence.
Seriously! Hopefully silversurfer can try a Vive before wearing his keyboard down to a nub.
Anyone in the midwest wanna let me come try theirs? lol
Texas is a bit of a trek, Krej, but it might be worth it if you knock up something I can ratchet around in
It wasn't long ago, we were getting similar articles from serversurfer about why using IR for tracking was the wrong choice for Oculus and why they should have used the same solution as Sony and the move controllers.
Thats still the case, and while I would say Touch is the better controller overall thanks to its additional inputs and ability to get a true yaw lock, the impressive girth of its tracking ring is a direct result of the comparatively poor visibility of IR markers.
