"VR"

[Holy_Diver]

Here (http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/bbs2/index.php?topic=284.msg2530#msg2530) is a link with a how-to set up PlayStation VR for SOM, with all necessary programs in a ZIP formatted download.

Just FYI I've been messing around with Sony's headset for a few days. It works wonderfully out of the box in its theater mode. It costs $200 or less. You could play King's Field on an emulator with it. I think it would be great, except that the digital controls might prove nauseating. Supersampling it would probably eliminate visual artifacts (I've seen it played on emulators in HD.)

www.swordofmoonlight.net has excellent analog controls (probably 5x better than any commercial product) and an excellent (possibly unknown/undiscovered) aliasing free visual. It also has a mode that happens to eliminate what are probably inconsistencies in the PlayStation VR's OLED pixels, that create the appearance of a moving rainbow fog. I'm not sure which extension makes the difference, either dithering or stippling, I think anything that creates more of a dot-matrix appearance eliminates the effect. And the pixels on the Sony headset are very fuzzy, so you cannot even see a difference between the stipple extension being on or off.

At any rate, I can report that the experience is excellent, and well worth the price. I'm just experiencing one artifact that I don't know if is a feature or a defect. I will include an attachment, but I didn't notice it until I started looking at modeling/art software withe headset. But it's by far the most unforgivable artifact in the budget headset. I'm trying to confirm that others see it.

For Sony's headset you need this (https://github.com/gusmanb/PSVRFramework/releases) and you also need DriverPackages.zip two headings down (very easy to miss.) I'm going to be working on full integration for SOM off-and-on. I feel like it's not so urgent since the Cinema mode works very well, and even does a lot of great things for "free." And is probably best for desktop development; switching between editors and playtests. Yesterday I did some work to enlarge the tools so that their text is not blurry on the 1080HD headset. I will publish it before long. The hardest part to enlarge is the little pie graphs SOM_PRM has. I have to work on them yet. Possibly later today. (edited: enlargement has the side effect of adding tiles to SOM_MAP's two work areas. It has random imperfections compared to the planned layouts. But I like that the button textures are stretched. That gives them a polished marble appearance that I think suits the tools well, that normally only unusually large buttons enjoy. The text remains 1px thick. It looks better in "VR" than bold text. I guess having the letter's lines not crunched close together makes the big difference.)


P.S. I imagine it's hard to see images like this on your PS4. If you have a web browser you can navigate to it... or just try your PSVR with Windows! It has almost everything, except the Cinema mode doesn't have the pupil setting, since no one has discovered it. Maybe I will be the one to. Because I really value the cinema mode. The effect is the same with blues, but not green. Red on a green background looks fine, if not perfect. Same for black backgrounds (obviously you cannot see the black defect on black background.) What's worse, is when the picture is magnified (I think through the lenses, but  I don't have thorough knowledge of the PSVR hardware--yet) the black pixels turn into large horns that shift around when the image moves. Please help me confirm this effect if you can. And know that the PlayStation VR isn't perfect, but it's novel to have a colossal theater at the tip of your nose nonetheless

EDITED: I should also point out that the effect/defect pictured only happens on the top and left sides of the pixels between the two colors. I've not neglected the other side in other words. This is what it looks like. It's pretty disturbing to say the least.

[Holy_Diver]

EDITED: For the record, I'm not getting smooth sailing any longer. I've never seen my workstation do that before, so maybe something did change. But in Windows there's always so much **** running in the background that cannot be controlled that it's hard to say anything definitively. Especially when with graphics it's either 60FPS or if one straw breaks the proverbial camel's back... down to 30FPS hell or ping pong between them purgatory.

SOM is suddenly experiencing a great improvement in terms of performance/steadiness. This picture is dissolving two frames with full VR color correction, running at 60fps at full 1920x1080. It just all of a sudden got a lot better. I think because after I put everything on a buffer-based pathway to do stereo rendering (everything is doubled/binocular) the driver no longer has to think about buffering, and it's suddenly behaving like a normal application. This is running on a computer that fits in the palm of my hand/integrated Intel Iris chipset.

[jwhyrock]

I've been following the updates on SwordofMoonlight.net, but am unable to register on the site to post comments.

I'm very interested in your work with PSVR. Are we too early to early at this point to use it with existing fan made games? I'd be ecstatic to use it with games like Shadow Tower Abyss which I haven't played yet or any of the original KF games as well.

[Holy_Diver]

I've been following the updates on SwordofMoonlight.net, but am unable to register on the site to post comments.

I'm very interested in your work with PSVR. Are we too early to early at this point to use it with existing fan made games? I'd be ecstatic to use it with games like Shadow Tower Abyss which I haven't played yet or any of the original KF games as well.

I don't know of any "existing" fan games that use swordofmoonlight.net's software. None of their creators took the 15 minutes or so necessary to add it to their work. So one can only conclude that they were not thinking highly of their work or considering their audience for that matter.

I've put more detailed information in the forums there. Such as most recently the free-look feature is working (it's not been uploaded/added to the code or downloads) however it seems to me that it's going to require a camera setup to make it enjoyable. You have to have a camera because the SIXAXIS (gyroscope/accelerometer) units "drift" so that it's necessary to notice that you're drifting away, and then you have to manually recenter. Adding a camera (not the PlayStation one) is a lot bigger project than I wanted to do right now, and I might do it very soon if I was very impressed, but to be honest, even though it's been a whirlwind to work with, it's not a very good experience to use. I purchased it mainly because I wanted to add VR since more than two years ago, but the opportunity never presented itself until now.

I think SOM is ready for VR but VR is not ready for people yet. But the good news is as soon as it is, SOM will be all set to go. Sony's home-theater mode drifts too. It's less annoying than when the world itself drifts away. You can just kind of adjust in home-theater mode and recentering is less obnoxious. To recenter SOM you have to pause/unpause. I could add a dedicated key binding, but it's not really worth it, and the pausing solution is actually a pretty good one.

I'm surprised work on it has moved so quickly. I'd rather be working on something that would help me finish King's Field 2. But having a VR mode for it is something I'd like also. The PlayStation VR is like part GameBoy. My greatest misgiving about it is its color, which is really crap. Even with extensive color correction. And GameBoy green is not a good color for a goggles that make you feel like you're going to puke. I think if Sony can't make a better product than this, that comfortable VR is realistically probably a decade or two away.

As far as your other wishes go, you can always try the home-theater mode with some PlayStation emulators... if the PS4 doesn't work with PSN Classic games (I don't have a PS4 and am surprised to learn there is talk of PS5 coming sooner than later.) I watched a video of Eternal Ring's ending yesterday... I found it pretty ridiculous. I've never played that one, out of a store demo. I cannot remember if Abyss had analog or not. I think playing these games without analog controls might be the biggest hurdle to enjoying them with the PSVR.

I've been following the updates on SwordofMoonlight.net, but am unable to register on the site to post comments.

You can PM me the username/password you want. I want to register it myself to see if the form really doesn't work or what. I'm told often that it doesn't work, but it has always worked for me. The spam defenses are very high, and I can't afford to lower them. People have a lot of ways to contact me, but no one generally does.

EDITED: I think it does have promise as a tool for developers. It really helps to see your world in lifelike proportions, and you notice many things that just don't appear on the screen, because they get squashed, or don't stick out without depth, or just the super low DPI of the headset helps you see tiny pixel sized faults. I'm just unconvinced it's going to be a comfortable way to play games for very long. Or I'm willing to let it simmer for a long time. I can't keep giving it undivided attention.

[Holy_Diver]

P.S. The best news to come of PlayStation VR is it forced me to look for ways to find quick performance gains that have led to some really good finds. I can play Moratheia in VR at 1920x1080HD at a steady 60fps on a very modest computer, now. That's a much better deal than VR for SOM. Even if I get around to changing its render pathway in more fundamental ways, I don't think that would ever have solved these steadiness issues. The new performance gains come mainly from ensuring the game has priorities over other processes, and it uses 3 back buffers now and a new "presentation" model that's supposed to be as good as a dedicated fullscreen game but works in a Window also. Windows 7 is required to get all of these benefits.

I tried many ways to do these things without success before, but couldn't get them to work, because of little technical things, like I thought 2 back-buffers would be enough, but 3 seems to be required (normally "double" buffering is 1 front and 1 back buffer, but maybe "triple" is really 3 back buffers... I don't know) and the "presentation" thing didn't work because it was incompatible with another feature, and this was not in its documentation (but is in the incompatible feature's documentation.) And the priority thing just used a newer multimedia API I'd never heard of instead of the obvious "thread" priority APIs which may or may not work, but not as well if so.

EDITED: Another factor, is I had to switch Direct3D over to buffered APIs which I believe helped a lot by taking buffer management away from the driver, which could have been highly conservative. But this may just be an Intel drivers thing, since theoretically a driver might be very good at managing its own buffers. This was necessary to do the split-screen picture.

[Holy_Diver]

For what it's worth, I'm forging ahead on the camera business...

I thought I'd decided to program tracking from scratch, since nothing off the shelf looked sensible. But first I got a lead from from here ( http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-make-a-Virtual-Reality-3D-Tracking-headset-/ ) that looks promising, and potentially helpful if necessary.

https://sourceforge.net/p/facetracknoir/discussion/1150910/thread/0cf1726d/

http://facetracknoir.sourceforge.net/home/default.htm looks like a good way to begin, and possibly all that will be needed to get things set up. It also gave me an idea (I've read about this before) to look at face tracking for SOM, so that monitor play can appear less flat, by adjusting the image to how you move your head. I think I'm interested to find out how the overall experience differs from seeing a flat picture as opposed to looking through a pretend window.

One odd turn of events, is the PlayStation Eye (PS3) camera is recommended for this, just because it's cheap. But they probably won't be available for long yet. I've ordered two to experiment with. If my workstation can run both, I will experiment with hand tracking (for seeing your hands mainly) and tracking from more than one vantage, to see if it improves the experience. That said, my only goal is to solve the drift problem, somehow, but it could be pretty straightforward to add other things.

(SO! Even though I hadn't any intention to use the PS4's bundled camera, we are still talking about PlayStation peripherals, funnily enough.)

[jwhyrock]

Sweet! Very excited to hear your progress. Setting all this up might be outside my abilities even if you get it working, but at the very least it's freaking awesome to see what you're accomplishing. I have PSVR with Move controllers and both PS3 and PS4 cameras.

[Holy_Diver]

Sweet! Very excited to hear your progress. Setting all this up might be outside my abilities even if you get it working, but at the very least it's freaking awesome to see what you're accomplishing. I have PSVR with Move controllers and both PS3 and PS4 cameras.

There's no set up involved. It sounds like you have everything you need. I also got an idea from the cameras having built-in microphones to adopt voice-command into King's Field, for "equipping" and using magic. I think that this will work very well and free up buttons, and not seem ridiculous at all (as voice features very often do.)

If you have a new model PSVR with built-in headphones you can help to figure out if it needs anything to be changed.

One odd turn of events, is the PlayStation Eye (PS3) camera is recommended for this, just because it's cheap.

I should probably add that it can go up to 120fps and is designed to be low resolution, which are good qualities for tracking (it's made for tracking) that garden variety cameras might not share.


P.S. For the record, I'm not doing anything with Move controllers. They are too expensive anyway. I might play with basic hand tracking (e.g. tracking flesh tones) to make grasping for a keyboard or mouse easier (mainly for developers.) If things like "leap motion" become practical/ubiquitous I would program a hand model for it. I don't see a great use for using your hands in the game, but it's a definite inconvenience to be cutoff from them vis-a-vis the external world. (edited: Oops, repeating myself... seems I already said something about hand tracking before.)

[Holy_Diver]

EDITED: If you read the link you'll see that Windows drivers for PlayStation Eye cameras are unofficial, and these (https://codelaboratories.com/downloads/) are recommended. I don't know if they support the microphone function or not.

It will take me a while to prepare a new release, but you can get everything working in the meantime. Yesterday I finished some work I was doing on a COLLADA-DOM feature (https://sourceforge.net/p/collada-dom/discussion/531263/thread/d31b81a2/#8d18) and am just now returning to SOM.

[Holy_Diver]

Here (http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/bbs2/index.php?topic=284.msg2530#msg2530) is a link with a how-to set up PlayStation VR for SOM, with all necessary programs in a ZIP formatted download.