> Conrad was ... the author of several technical books, including the classic "Land of Lisp".
That book has very interesting art. I hope he brings that style to the game. I hope he does something strange like implement the game in Lisp and use some sort of self-modifying game engine.
> Walking Dream, on the other hand, is built on a brand new combat engine with a rich weapons crafting system. This system is shared by both the player as well as the many enemies, and turns each battle into a completely novel experience, requiring completely novel strategies at every encounter!
I immediately recognised the Land of Lisp art style - looking forward to trying this. On a side note, this is one of the few things where I would like to be able to sign up for a newsletter.
> On a side note, this is one of the few things where I would like to be able to sign up for a newsletter.
How does one solve the "tell me about this in a few weeks/months when you launch" without email notification?
There's no reliable way to notify someone via Twitter or Facebook. Timelines are too noisy and there's no mass private messaging APIs.
I love my email but I've noticed that projects and products are beginning to appear that shun email communication totally.
I nagged a few projects into starting a simple list via Google Forms because I knew I wouldn't notice when they launched any other way. But "Me nagging" doesn't seem very scalable.
The closest the game has to "self modifying code" is that you can "see" the "brains" of the opponents that shows the actions they will perform, and then attack with "hacking" weapons directly against their brain, to alter their behavior.
The most interesting thing here for me is the use of redirected walking (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redirected_walking). I saw the video accompanying the paper but this would be the first game I've seen try to use it.
I will be very curious what the minimum area requirement for the game is. I can't imagine redirected walking being very convincing in the Quest's minimum 6.5 x 6.5 ft square.
I've played around in Tea For God (https://sidequestvr.com/app/65/tea-for-god-under-development) which does this on the quest, and it works really well, and I didn't even use the full 6.5'x6.5' (in my case ~6'x4') possible. Within a minute I lost all sense of where I was in the real world.
Tea For God does not use redirected walking. It procedurally adopts game space to available room space, and uses clever mechanisms like non-euclidian geometry and various elevators to allow for huge worlds. Still, movement is 1:1 mapped between room and game.
Redirected walking means distorting the mapping when moving or rotating, to fit any game world into limited playing space. In research it's always applied in larger spaces, x5 times bigger than living rooms. If you distort moving or turning too much, users lose balance or become nauseous.
I agree that 6.5ft^2 is probably too small for a good RDW experience based on the gain numbers I'm familiar with. The tracked volumes of the experiments I was a part of were all on the scale of ~15-20 ft square. (I'm not a researcher, really, but I was a developer at a lab that did some RDW research -- for instance, https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/2931002.2931018). There are some tricks that the literature suggests could help (forcing the user to turn >360 degrees in place, exploiting change blindness to get people to accept non-euclidean spaces, etc) but I believe it's not controversial to assert that the user is going to realize they're not walking straight if someone tries to get them to walk a circle with radius ~3ft with traditional RDW cues!
I'm the lead dev on Walking Dream: No doubt the player will "notice" they are being redirected in a small space, the question is if it's bad enough to induce nausea. Our goal is to be able to tell the player "you can just walk wherever you want in the game, but you'll notice some weird rotational shifting, however you won't get nausea". It's a lower bar that can still lead to fun gameplay.
Hi, I'm the lead dev on walking dream. It's hard to say right now what the "minimum area requirement" is, because there's an inverse correlation between area size and nausea (since more "redirecting" is needed in smaller spaces) However, I think it works pretty well in 9x9ft so far (but we need to see how it works for other testers)
I'm really curious to try this. It's interesting how we tend to veer off course when trying to walk straight, and cool to see an idea of how to exploit it.
I used to do gymnastics and as part of that I trained doing long series of cartwheels along a marked line. I managed to get good at doing it without deviating from that line. I looked straight ahead and it went fast enough that everything was a blur. However, I still couldn't do it with my eyes closed.
I look forward to trying this. Improving locomotion in VR would be great.
But I feel we may be overthinking it. I believe simply tracking leg movement and having the player jog on the spot is the solution.
Having simulated this myself by holding forward on the controller while jogging on the spot, I believe it's the way forward. If you have a headset, give it a try. I admit walking doesn't feel very natural, but jogging works well.
Of course, games don't have this option with most popular current hardware (but foot trackers and whole body trackers do exist).
It would be tricky to blend/differentiate movement and jogging, but I think it's doable.
I predict that future headsets will do inside-out tracking of your entire body, including the legs (they made need a flip out camera to be far enough out from the body to do this). They've already put out a software update for the Quest that does surprisingly good controller-free hand tracking.
There was also a comment on HN a few weeks ago (I'll try to find it) where someone implemented this system and said it worked well.
> Of course, games don't have this option with most popular current hardware
There's a great low tech solution - pair your mobile phone and leave it in your pocket. The accelerometer data is more than good enough to detect jogging.
There was an app for Steam VR that did this and I recall it worked quite well.
treadmill solutions seems to be the way the industry is going. The Kat Walk C is a kickstarter project that actually works pretty well, and relatively small:
Hi, I'm the lead on walking dream. There have been a couple of other games I've seen that have implemented version of this, though using very different approaches. However, most were closer to tech demos, without a full game experience.
Would love to see a newsletter signup form. Sounds great but I'm not sure I'll remember it. And I can't trust The Great Algorithms to plop this at the top of any feed..
Not directly related, but I just finished "Half Life: Alyx" yesterday. It is exceptional. I can't believe it is running on the same Rift hardware I bought years ago. They have just figured out how to do so many things correctly in that game. Sorry about the tangent, just can't recommend it enough.
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[ 12.1 ms ] story [ 109 ms ] threadThat book has very interesting art. I hope he brings that style to the game. I hope he does something strange like implement the game in Lisp and use some sort of self-modifying game engine.
> Walking Dream, on the other hand, is built on a brand new combat engine with a rich weapons crafting system. This system is shared by both the player as well as the many enemies, and turns each battle into a completely novel experience, requiring completely novel strategies at every encounter!
How does one solve the "tell me about this in a few weeks/months when you launch" without email notification?
There's no reliable way to notify someone via Twitter or Facebook. Timelines are too noisy and there's no mass private messaging APIs.
I love my email but I've noticed that projects and products are beginning to appear that shun email communication totally.
I nagged a few projects into starting a simple list via Google Forms because I knew I wouldn't notice when they launched any other way. But "Me nagging" doesn't seem very scalable.
Redirected walking means distorting the mapping when moving or rotating, to fit any game world into limited playing space. In research it's always applied in larger spaces, x5 times bigger than living rooms. If you distort moving or turning too much, users lose balance or become nauseous.
Here's a decent intro paper. 15 Years of Research on Redirected Walking in Immersive Virtual Environments https://illusioneering.cs.umn.edu/papers/nilsson-cga2018.pdf
I used to do gymnastics and as part of that I trained doing long series of cartwheels along a marked line. I managed to get good at doing it without deviating from that line. I looked straight ahead and it went fast enough that everything was a blur. However, I still couldn't do it with my eyes closed.
But I feel we may be overthinking it. I believe simply tracking leg movement and having the player jog on the spot is the solution.
Having simulated this myself by holding forward on the controller while jogging on the spot, I believe it's the way forward. If you have a headset, give it a try. I admit walking doesn't feel very natural, but jogging works well.
Of course, games don't have this option with most popular current hardware (but foot trackers and whole body trackers do exist).
It would be tricky to blend/differentiate movement and jogging, but I think it's doable.
I predict that future headsets will do inside-out tracking of your entire body, including the legs (they made need a flip out camera to be far enough out from the body to do this). They've already put out a software update for the Quest that does surprisingly good controller-free hand tracking.
There was also a comment on HN a few weeks ago (I'll try to find it) where someone implemented this system and said it worked well.
There's a great low tech solution - pair your mobile phone and leave it in your pocket. The accelerometer data is more than good enough to detect jogging.
There was an app for Steam VR that did this and I recall it worked quite well.
EDIT: here: http://pocketstrafe.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqchs9xMLCw
I tried tea for god on the quest and I was sold on it. It’s the future of VR IMO.
https://pay.reddit.com/r/OculusQuest/comments/hlyp0o/walking...
The Quest is my favorite toy/leisure activity device. Can’t wait!