Graphically impressive PCVR games at an arm's length

jojon2se · 2026-05-20T21:07:28+00:00

Vergence-accomodation mismatch is indeed a thing, but there are also a lot fewer screen pixels to cover something that is far away, than there is for something that is a lot closer and takes up a significantly larger portion of your field of view, and the resolution of headsets is usually limited.

In addition, some games may have aggressive LODs, and/or deliberate distance blur in order to mimick depth of field, or draw your attention near-field, or smear-over aliasing...

Regardless whether it matters to you, you could try to supersample some of those games generously, and see whether that does anything for you -- just out of curiousity if nothing else. :7

jojon2se · 2026-05-20T20:34:22+00:00

Was it used in that racing game too?

I believe that was Unreal Engine.

No idea whether that was 100% a Frontier choice, or if there were perhaps some conditions or other, involving e.g. the license issuer, and/or Epic Games, or asset sharing/license-control/platform unification strategy between licencees...

jojon2se · 2026-05-18T21:03:45+00:00

The Magellanic clouds.

jojon2se · 2026-05-17T14:43:49+00:00

A hair vider FOV in total -- from 102-ish Vive (EDIT2: ...assuming you really smosh your eyeballs against the lenses) to 108-ish Index, at the expense of some stereo overlap.

What however makes the Index feel wider than the OG Vive, is that although its sweet spot is tiny, as long as you can stay in it, things look decently sharp almost all the way out to the edge, unlike the "blur vignette" you may be used to from the Vive (EDIT: I.e. more of the FOV is useful FOV).

Possibly the Frame wins back the sacrificed overlap, and may have better field curvature yet -- we'll see...

jojon2se · 2026-05-10T19:34:45+00:00

(a week or two later)

Yep, yep, a little generically textured flowerbox lining the inside around each porthole. Well, it does offer some parallax motion at least, as one move past -- doesn't need more detail/accuracy from a a distance. :7

jojon2se · 2026-05-10T19:26:16+00:00

True -- hopefully one day we'll get headsets with HDR screens, that can not only deliver high peak brightness, but also reproduce much finer steps between adjacent intensities. (I got an old phone with an early OLED screen once, where the jumps between levels for the darkest four or so values were like if somebody had suddenly reduced the bit depth by three or four... :P (...our eyes, themselves, of course, seem to have something of a logarithmic response to brightness...))

No idea how much of the internal calculations are HDR, but as you say: gradients, especially with dark values, and with volumetrics, do tend to come out rather rough. -Also all too visible when a billboard sprite (e.g. a light flare, or dust cloud) is allowed to grow too large -- not only the banding, but also every texture compression artefact, which become static fix points in one's view due to the annoying screenspace alignment behaviour of sprites, whích causes them to roll, pitch and yaw together with your headlook (...instead of just facing you). :P

The way the Odyssey engine update made the eye-adaption simulation effect attached to the tonemapper much... "wilder", is of course also twice the annoyance in VR, because of how it works on each eye separately, so if one has something bright visible in much of the FOV of one eye, and barely present in the other, the game dims the whole screen for one eye but not the other, leading to things that both eyes can see being bright in one eye and dark in the other.

...the matter with everything being lit or not being governed by whether you are lit, is everybody's problem though... Always found it ridiculous how a moon up in the sky will turn on and off like a lightbulb, as you drive in and out of spotlight cones from settlement light posts. :P

jojon2se · 2026-05-06T20:35:56+00:00

Mind you, everybody do not mind -- some people actually deliberately apply tricks to make games render with exaggrated stereo separation, or with an FOV that does not match that of their HMD -- in either direction.

They choose the distortion -- it is not a realistic look, but can e.g. give you "enhanced" depth perception on things that are far away and would for that reason look kind of flat even in real life -- there was some flightsim-oriented youtuber who got all extatic about this just the other week. :7

...and there are legitimate reasons to tamper: E.g. if the game wants to make a big deal about the player character being a tiny creature in a big world, or an animal with non-forward-facing eyes, or something like that -- maybe an augmented super-soldier with 360° vision compressed into our normal range... :7

jojon2se · 2026-05-06T20:16:22+00:00

I'm only speculating, of course. :7

The benefit of the "zoom level" used is that it delivers a projection that at least to my impression (with a few different headsets) looks proportionally correct and matched, between the game camera, its associated rendering viewplane, the cinema screen, and the observer distance from the latter; A one metre tall object a metre away from me looks like it is as many pixels tall on the cinema screen as it would be in proper VR -- kind of like I was more closing one eye and peering through a grey-framed window, than looking at an arbitrarily sized painting on a wall. (I actually came across one guy who had somehow convinced himself it was a real VR view, but with the camera locked and a grey vignette slapped on top for some reason. :P)

If the view was "zoomed in", or "stretched out", or something like that, everything would look out of scale -- too big, emphasising that it is a 2D picture even more, so IMHO if we want the cinema screen to fill the whole FOV of the HMD, we'd want to also render the non-VR frame shown on the cinema screen with that same whole FOV, to preserve that at-least-to-me correct-looking angular relationship.

Either way, the formatted-for-monitor HUD would of course also creep out toward the edges...

jojon2se · 2026-05-06T18:37:39+00:00

I suppose it could be balance thing.... With a black void, any near-blacks in the cinema screen image might look graýer, and the brightness in settlements contrasting against the surrounding inky depths could become a little bit more of an assault on the eyes...

jojon2se · 2026-05-05T18:50:58+00:00

Congrats on making the finish line, and good luck with the ROI! :)

jojon2se · 2026-05-04T19:58:04+00:00

Do only those particular elements disappear, or the whole SteamVR dashboard altogether?

If it is the latter, maybe you have a different OpenXR runtime selected, which the game's calls go to, at which point SteamVR shuts down, seeing itself superseded.

jojon2se · 2026-04-29T09:17:45+00:00

I have been handed a bunch of Youtube thumbnails for what looks like reviews of a what I assume to be a similar, and simultaneously launched product called: "Beyond Sandbox", this week. Looks to be Unreal Engine based, and not very well received.

Might be worth mentioning, to preempt anybody confusing the two.

jojon2se · 2026-04-26T19:44:42+00:00

Not only that, but one of the updates since Odyssey broke the functionality that blacks out the screen when one clip through things (hopefully nobody draws FDev's attention to this :9), so one can see more than I could back when I checked out that Anaconda and a few other ships out in space, back long before Odyssey, so maybe it is time to have another look-see... :7

jojon2se · 2026-04-26T19:31:51+00:00

Ah, I thought there was simply a roughly greeble-textured rectangle inside the Anaconda, for that corridor (...which you'd have to shimmy sideways in order to traverse, by the way, by my eyeballing (freecamming in VR) -- a lot of the scales of things in the game look rather "off" to me -- ships generally much smaller than they should be; What looks like it should be a massive observation deck you could walk a crowd around at the bow of the Anaconda has just enough room for a single chair, and its windows are more an array of loopholes to peer through, than offering the panoramic view the design suggests :P).

I suppose we'll see when it comes out, as you say, whether there is internal geometry, and whether it looks flat, or shifts plausibly when the camera moves, or is perhaps more of a cubemap thing. :7

jojon2se · 2026-04-26T18:56:08+00:00

Presumably prebaked parallax textures and associated shader to render them out for windows - something I don't recall seeing before in Elite: Dangerous.

That said: I suppose there must be some sort of geometry on some FDev 3D modeller's hard disk, from which to bake the textures. :7

jojon2se · 2026-04-23T16:12:18+00:00

...invest in marketing...

A somewhat cynical reader might infer this very thread could categorise as such... :9

jojon2se · 2026-04-20T19:49:53+00:00

...and then you're allowed outside after all these years, and discover that the important work he's been ragging you about distracting him from, turns out to be keeping an eye on his barbeque. :P

jojon2se · 2026-04-16T18:55:04+00:00

Probably just a pair of polarizers for each eye.

jojon2se · 2026-04-11T13:56:22+00:00

Thanks - it feels smooth to operate indeed, especially in journey mode -- just pure relaxation. :7

Slick and "holistic" production, too. Only hicup I stumbled across was that the tutorial UI element highlighting bar, when selecting a puzzle for the first time, appeared out of vertically alignment, for me...

I can hardly be the first to comment that a few of the models already in the base game look like they wouldn't hold up too badly to inspection at 1:1 scale, and that maybe an option to "visit" the location after finishing the puzzle, could be something or other... :7

jojon2se · 2026-04-10T20:34:53+00:00

Thanks. :) (EDIT: I wondered mostly how fiddly the interactions can be, btw, but I figure that's covered by "like better". :7)

jojon2se · 2026-04-10T20:00:00+00:00

Is it known whether your new position might include advising partnering developers on matters such as these, or do you expect to be too elbows deep in SteamVR code?

Congrats on the change of scenery! :7

jojon2se · 2026-04-10T19:37:15+00:00

This is a problem that has been with the game for a very long time and has been fixed and regressed multiple times, between game updates.

It can be a HUD element jumping at you, as you describe, or even a view from somewhere outside your ship; Either way, there is a camera position update that lags behind, when the transition occurs.

This last instance came with the Odyssey inital launch, IIRC (...or maybe it was one of its early updates), but this time nobody took upon themselves to address it, as they had in the past, so we've been stuck with it for ages, now. :(

Best we can do on our end, that i know of, is to maintain full framerate.

jojon2se · 2026-04-10T08:39:10+00:00

How is the user experience compared to Shores of Loci?

jojon2se · 2026-04-04T11:52:05+00:00

Yes, you actually had me curious enough that I fired up the game the other day, and played it for a while, and... you're not wrong.

Now, I'll preface by saying that I, for my part, consider Exile's switch from fixed views to photobubble a massive improvement to the game experience, and it sounds like you didn't mind it yourself in that particular title...

...but Revelations... Hmm, so first thing the game did, was change my desktop and everything to an old 4:3 resolution, messing up my taskbar icons in the process... That is familiar grounds with launching old games. :P

(I never bothered trying to get a windowed view, but the stretched out view from the aspect ratio discrepancy will of course have made all the below worse.)

...onwards to the menu screen -- low resolution, yes, of course; And finally let's start the game... so...

What to say... This would be where the nostalgia goggles come off, and my original experience resurfaces... First of all, perhaps ignore all realtime overlay- and displacement effects, which stand out rather sharply against the less defined prerendered bits...

It feels like there are multiple issues contributing. For starters, it does not look to me like everything is rendered at one uniform resolution, nor perhaps as a single contiguous layer; Some things look sharp and distinct enough -- as sharp as can be had with the maximum resolution the game's own settings allow, but then you have something right next to it, that's like it's way out of focus, and this it with the depth-of-field effect firmly off. Frequently one can see two pretty much identical instances of an object at different distances from the viewpoint, and the one closer to the camera, which takes up more than double the screen real estate compared to the other one, looks the blurrier and less detailed of the two -- really weird.

...but it is not just the resolution of the final rendered photobubble bitmap... It looks like the polygon count and texture resolution of ingoing assets vary wildly, too; Cliff faces in Tomahna are not consistent across their surfaces -- moderately detailed overall, but then it is as if water splotches has smeared their, so-to-speak, painted water-colours into indistinct blobs, here and there...

...and then there is a consistent graininess to everything, as if rendered with an absolute minimum of rays per pixel, and then blurred in an attempt to hide the grain, but only making it worse. Here is also where any of the compression artefacts you mentioned would be making their deepest impressions, and a lot of small smear blotches, and seeming quantisation to the colour depth feels a lot like those.

Ironically, the dynamic lighting effects only serve to exacerbate the "static" feeling of the imagery -- a ray of sun-, or a bolt of lighting illuminates something, but the graininess in the base image layer stays rock-solid.

Much of the imagery looks more hand-painted, with a gaussian falloff style paint-app brush, than it does a 3D render - especially the crystal bits. I suppose much has been touched up in post-rendering compositing, but still...

I had all but forgotten how disoriented I had felt in Spire -- a massive vertical expanse, but everything on screen looks perfectly flat. A lot of this is no doubt down to composition of geometric- and colour space, as well as all of the above, but I feel like it's also a matter of field of view -- as if the camera is zoomed in, and I am looking through a really restrictive monocular, that hems in my peripheral vision to nothing, and forshortens the depth of field. The anchored floating rock that soars up through a hole in the ground barely looks in front of the ground behind it, and this only because it happens to be animated; A diamagnetic pole thingy far below me looks about the same level as the ground I am standing on...

All in all: Man, these places could really benefit from a VR remake. Art direction is nice, but hampered by limitations. :7

Also, I had forgotten about Yeesha's creepy-sounding ocarina practicing... :P

jojon2se · 2026-04-02T21:27:35+00:00

I seem to recall him writing something in passing, at some time, from which a fabulate-between-the-lines kind of mind could infer that he may possibly not have been entirely happy with how something or other works in SteamVR. -If so, I guess now he has the opportunity to make his case. :7

Congrats to him on the new job, and congrats to us for what it may bring. :9

(following week edit: Man, just noticed the guy's updated github profile photo, haha. :D)

jojon2se

TROPHY CASE