Is VR dead?

[Kenny Paton]

Don't know if this is old news to you guys but thought it might be of interest

ByteDance’s Pico is making moves

TikTok’s corporate parent, ByteDance, is getting ready to enter the U.S. market with another product: The company has started to assemble a team of Pico employees on the West Coast, with a major focus on content licensing as well as marketing its hardware to U.S. consumers.ByteDance has also...

www.protocol.com

 

[BrightCandle]

Don't know if this is old news to you guys but thought it might be of interest

ByteDance’s Pico is making moves

TikTok’s corporate parent, ByteDance, is getting ready to enter the U.S. market with another product: The company has started to assemble a team of Pico employees on the West Coast, with a major focus on content licensing as well as marketing its hardware to U.S. consumers.ByteDance has also...

www.protocol.com

I assume once the EU beta of the Neo 3 Link is done that will widen the sales of the device. They are also talking about a more capable Cambria competitor for early next year too.
I have a Pico Neo 3 Link, it isn't ready yet there are a few serious bugs and some minor problems but they are working on it, hopefully it works as intended soon.

 

[RCHeliguy]

I race with quite a few others at RD who also use VR, but they just don't get drawn into arguments about it around here.

There may be a silent majority. I've gotten messenged by many people who have been members of this forum for years, but only have a very small number of comments.

Not everyone is comfortable or enjoys posting as much as some of us do.

 

[Rebel_488]

U should see the vr section on acc forum. It’s brutal, thought rightly so in some cases!

 

[RCHeliguy]

U should see the vr section on acc forum. It’s brutal, thought rightly so in some cases!

Yeah, not a very efficient graphics engine for VR.

UE5 "should" be better and offer much better sliding scale to handle different levels of systems. I just read that after taking the plunge on UE4 that the ACC developers are abandoning ship and are set on building one from scratch? Maybe being burnt by UE4 caused them to cut and run, but there would be some irony if UE5 proved much better. Of course I'm sure they've had early versions to play with and maybe they found out it wasn't going to help them much.

 

[Deleted member 197115]

Call be skeptical, but how long will it take for a small team (minus Stefano) to build from the scratch graphics engine comparable to modern games image quality standards.

 

[RCHeliguy]

Call be skeptical, but how long will it take for a small team (minus Stefano) to build from the scratch graphics engine comparable to modern games image quality standards.

We are 100% in agreement on this. Going to a standard engine was a painful change to make. The real pay off is the long term prospect of upgrading and inheriting the improvements over time. Making that change and then cutting bait before amortizing the cost over newer versions seems very short sighted.

 

[Rebel_488]

I'll be honest, ac2 will have to be freaking amazing for me to buy it. Being burnt twice on console ports was tough, then I built a pc for acc and vr only to find they didn't care about vr users, the devs are cheeky or ignore people. I can't c me buying ac2 tbh. Stefano (gone as u know) is knowledgeable and easy to talk to and polite. Aris seems more interesting in yt and bonding with his fan boys. Georgio is so ignorant on the forum that he alone would put u off kunos as a company. There's one other guy I can't remember his name but he is very helpful also on the forum for tech support but now I have a proper dd wheel, rf2 is amazing, just wish I'd known they don't recommend using a fanatec wheel before I bought the csldd, but the sc2 runs amazing in it and I am completely satisfied with rf2 now, bugs and all lol, I can even enjoy vr although I find the g9 is also great and due to the much better image I tend to use it much more and use vr for open wheelers as monitor feels weird! I wish I had never wasted so much time trying to get acc working in vr, although thanks Andrew for all your help at the time, I rarely even race gt3s now they are quite boring compared to other classes.

 

[Deleted member 197115]

Have you tried going back to ACC with G9 and SC2. Unless GT3 bore you to death, this is perhaps the best sim racing experience you can have today in physics, FFB, and visuals.

 

[BrightCandle]

I am pretty skeptical about AC2 as well. Obviously I was also burnt on VR support in ACC, Kunos really doesn't seem to care its unacceptable and that leaves me pretty bitter on them as a business. But I am also unhappy with the FFB in ACC compared to AC and Aris doesn't seem to get there is an issue with the change in style of FFB made. I just don't have any confidence in Kunos now, VR is becoming more important and they are treating those customers with disdain and all the while ignoring criticism of their new FFB approach. They also drastically changed the type of game they made with ACC and while its not been as popular, its 1/4 of the players, I just can't see them coming around to understanding the players again for AC2, the people that made AC what is was just aren't in the company anymore.

 

[Fat-Alfie]

Off-topic, I know, but AC was a 'racing simulator' that covered a multitude of cars and classes from the 1950s to the 2010s. ACC is a GT3/4 simulator.

I don't know why you are so surprised that ACC has a 1/4 of the players when it is a niche within a niche

 

[Majuh]

That VR chart is interesting. I didn't realise you could break it down that way. I compared the numbers from that site to the steam totals for AC

View attachment 572976
Comes out a little over 60% on average if the numbers are right. Unfortunately the two sites provide the data a little differently, so I had to use the mean of the daily peaks. I might go a see where they get the raw data from and do an apples to apples comparison

Google sheet for the above here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AXgI0I8VCK7uXaNzwJLQz0nVoPc0f_LNQmGDmNct75I/edit?usp=sharing


Yeah, that pattern repeats at the start of each year, so I suspect it's just people with new toys. I guess it gives a little insight to how quickly the novelty wears off though

How exactly did you come up with the numbers of AC players using VR? I can't see that anywhere on the https://vrlfg.net/Charts site.

 

[GeekyDeaks]

How exactly did you come up with the numbers of AC players using VR? I can't see that anywhere on the https://vrlfg.net/Charts site.

Click on 'Game Charts' in the top left

Then filter on the game and date ranges as required. To get the values off the page, I 'debugged' the HTTP request that pulls down the data. IIRC it was simply a JSON array

 

[Majuh]

Click on 'Game Charts' in the top left
View attachment 574800
Then filter on the game and date ranges as required. To get the values off the page, I 'debugged' the HTTP request that pulls down the data. IIRC it was simply a JSON array

Honestly, I think you misunderstood the purpose of that page. It's not listing the number of VR users playing these games, it's simply listing the total number of users playing these games. I think it's impossible to differentiate between normal and VR users in the Steam API.

You can see that by comparing these charts with the Steamcharts page. VRLFG is polling the numbers more often than Steamcharts, but still the peaks are pretty much the same. Your data in the VR column is basically equivalent to the average player numbers per month on Steamcharts.

Assetto Corsa - Steam Charts

An ongoing analysis of Steam's player numbers, seeing what's been played the most.

steamcharts.com

VRLFG makes sense for games which are VR only, because there you can be sure that everyone playing the game is using VR. That's why the chart "Overall Steam VR usage" is being calculated by using the "Monthly averages of the sum of the peak-player counts for every Steam VR game where the majority player base is VR-Only".

 

[GeekyDeaks]

Yup, it's possible. Like I said in the original post 'if the numbers are right'. I don't really know how VRLFG are doing the analysis and I also could not get the exact same daily counts from both platforms. It was just a bit of an aside really

 

[dwightyone]

I think many guys are missing out on great VR by not jumping ship (or going back) to the likes of GTR2. I've tried all the sims and GTR2 is the most fluid of them all in VR and if you have a good graphics card it looks twice as clear as anything else and doesn't need a super computer to run it either. The later HQ patches and Crew Chief's VR support for GTR2 has transformed GTR2 and also (you won't get them here on RD so much) there is literally a 1000+ mods available for it. Don't get me wrong the mods for it aren't of ACC quality (but HQ stuff is not far off ACC) and lots of them are older 2006-2014 stuff (but there is also even newer stuff) but even so much of it looks really good, and you can also bump up the Steam VR SS so much they look even better and your computer won't fry. So no, VR is not dead - just other peeps have clued on that VR is not just about the likes of ACC and AMS2 anymore.

 

[ltnordb]

And for AC the combination of OpenComposite and the latest vr tweaks in csp lets me run at 100% resolution for the Reverb G2, whereas with steamvr I was at 50% res. It's like getting a free computer upgrade.

And it makes ACC look even worse by comparison.

 

[Rebel_488]

Acc needs reshade to look anyway decent. The temporal blur is just too much to take beyond the cockpit. Andrew yeah I have been back with the sc2 and it’s def more alive but I can never find a fov setting I’m happy with in it for some reason. This weekend I intend to move the wheel up and the monitor just behind the rim if the gt1 evo integrated mount will allow it to be placed there so hopefully that will help with that issue. I used Dan Suzukas sc2 profile for it. But tbh after rf2 acc just feels kinda dead even on a simucube. It’s better than the csldd but still not as good as rf2. Many will be disgusted but I thought my g29 did a great job on acc lol, rattles and all but I was pretty satisfied with it and my old rift s a long time ago, then I joined the kunos forum and starting following your adjustments lol and that rabbit hole was a never ending pit of kunos loathing darkness as u know hahahaha

 

[Deleted member 197115]

Acc needs reshade to look anyway decent. The temporal blur is just too much to take beyond the cockpit. Andrew yeah I have been back with the sc2 and it’s def more alive but I can never find a fov setting I’m happy with in it for some reason. This weekend I intend to move the wheel up and the monitor just behind the rim if the gt1 evo integrated mount will allow it to be placed there so hopefully that will help with that issue. I used Dan Suzukas sc2 profile for it. But tbh after rf2 acc just feels kinda dead even on a simucube. It’s better than the csldd but still not as good as rf2. Many will be disgusted but I thought my g29 did a great job on acc lol, rattles and all but I was pretty satisfied with it and my old rift s a long time ago, then I joined the kunos forum and starting following your adjustments lol and that rabbit hole was a never ending pit of kunos loathing darkness as u know hahahaha

I will send you my blur free screen settings along with sc2's.

 

[Rebel_488]

I think many guys are missing out on great VR by not jumping ship (or going back) to the likes of GTR2. I've tried all the sims and GTR2 is the most fluid of them all in VR and if you have a good graphics card it looks twice as clear as anything else and doesn't need a super computer to run it either. The later HQ patches and Crew Chief's VR support for GTR2 has transformed GTR2 and also (you won't get them here on RD so much) there is literally a 1000+ mods available for it. Don't get me wrong the mods for it aren't of ACC quality (but HQ stuff is not far off ACC) and lots of them are older 2006-2014 stuff (but there is also even newer stuff) but even so much of it looks really good, and you can also bump up the Steam VR SS so much they look even better and your computer won't fry. So no, VR is not dead - just other peeps have clued on that VR is not just about the likes of ACC and AMS2 anymore.

£25 for full version on steam. How is the physics? I thought that was a drifting game or something for some reason. I would like an alternative title for vr