
Public VR Critique #1: Nighttime Terror - jrbedard
https://developer.oculus.com/blog/public-vr-critique-1-nighttime-terror/
======
petercooper
He did some others as well:

Dreadhalls -
[https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1652934931...](https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1652934931607684&id=100006735798590)

Playhead -
[https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1663414923...](https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1663414923893018&id=100006735798590)

Bazaar -
[https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1717273305...](https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1717273305173846&id=100006735798590)

Viral -
[https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1725972060...](https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1725972060970637&id=100006735798590)

------
rocky1138
I feel like the value of this article would be greatly increased by including
a video of gameplay of the game in question. I have no idea what Nighttime
Terror is or what it looks like.

~~~
wyldfire
I misunderstood "Nighttime Terror" to be some kind of description of a
misfeature/bug/side-effect of VR.

~~~
civilian
Same here. It would've been far more interesting if VR was causing night
terrors.

For those of you who haven't experienced them:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_terror](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_terror)
I've had a combination of Sleep paralysis and Night terror and it's not fun.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis)

------
NKCSS
I had a chance to play with the HTC VIVE for a few hours yesterday, and I can
tell you, my mind was blown. I was ready to do away with the whole VR thing as
just another gimmick like 3D TV, but boy, was I wrong.

It's very responsive, fairly high resolution and 90Hz framerate; the two
controllers make the whole experience complete.

A few things to recommend if you can try a HTC VIVE:

    
    
        AudioShield
        Space Pirate Trainer
        Hover Junkers
        Paper Cuts

------
Animats
Carmack's critiques are interesting for what they don't say. There's very
little about how VR interacts with the gameplay. VR doesn't seem to have been
exploited much in these first person shooters. They seem to have standard game
mechanics.

One could have a VR game where you're being followed, and have to keep looking
behind you to try to spot your tails. But when you look back, your tails
notice if you;re too obvious or look too long, and take evasive action or swap
with a different tail. None of the mentioned games seem to tie where you look
with game mechanics like that.

The detailed discussions of aliasing vs stereo vision would apply to any 3D
display. Any artifact that's different for each eye is really annoying. Also,
why did someone release a 30FPS VR anything? There are arguments over minimal
acceptable frame rate in VR, but the numbers are around 100FPS and this is
well known.

Menus in VR suck. No surprise there. It probably would have been better to
ship the thing with a game controller, so the user could use the controls
without looking at them.

Carmack seems to like a dark world. Grey borders good, white clouds bad.
Whether that's his Doom bias or a problem with the Oculus Rift isn't clear. In
GTA V, you can climb a mountain and see the whole game world, clouds and all.
That should look good in VR. If it doesn't, the current headgear has a
problem.

~~~
bigiain
The "framerate" discussion gets kinda complex in the context of head mounted
displays. You're right that high frame rates are essential for head tracking
updates to the viewport - but that's a different number to the rate at which
the elements in the scene in your very-quickly-animated viewport need
updating. You _do_ want t attempt to get 100fps in response to me swinging my
head around, but you don't need (so much) to try to get your player and
explosion animations up quite that fast (although all my adderall-enchanced
fast-twitch fps gaming friends will sneer at you and blame your slow game for
them getting headshot all the time if you don't manage 60 fps...)

I don't know quite enough about how the GearVR (or Oculus) manages the
framebuffer that the head tracker chooses it's viewport out of, but I suspect
there's a way to render a 30 or 60fps scene at two or three thousand pixels
cylindrically, then have the viewport update faster than that up around 100fps
in response to the head tracking sensors.

------
bradhe
These are really hard to understand without some associated images or videos.

~~~
bigiain
I guess it depends on who the intended audience is - I doubt too many people
who follow Oculus' developer blog weren't immediately picturing all of the
flaws he describes while reading that. I'm only a dilettante in 3D VR, but I
didn't need any images/videos to understand exactly what he was describing. I
suspect Carmack was going for information density for people who'd understand
here, rather than "3D VR games dev errors 101 for beginners", and he's pretty
good at writing for his audience.

------
rajacombinator
I have no context on the game but it's awesome for such a prominent figure to
share public feedback like this.

