Elite Dangerous, the interstellar space trading, fighting, and exploration simulator, has been teasing support for co-piloted ships for some time. Today the Commanders 2.3 update launches with the Multi-Crew feature, allowing up to four friends to fly together in VR.
Update (4/11/17, 9:51AM):Following a series of beta releases, Elite Dangerous: The Commanders (2.3) launches today on PC, bringing the Multi-Crew co-pilot feature along with other major improvements. A trailer showing off the new update heads this article.
Photo courtesy Frontier Developments
According to developer Frontier Developments, the Elite Dangerous servers will be unavailable from around 9.30am BST until the new updates are live (expected around 6PM BST). The studio highlights some of the major new features:
Multi-Crew has been added with three new roles: Gunner, Fighter, or Helm. Matchmaking has been added for different session types and there are also separate stats included.
Commander Creator: with the new in-game Holo-Me feature lets you create your own commander using a variety of customisation options!
Welcome the new passenger ship called the Dolphin.
With the all-new Camera Suite you can view your commander and ship from a variety of interior and exterior angles, using a range of new camera controls. Perfect for all the videomakers out there… can’t wait to see what you make with the new tools!
Aside from bug and stability fixes, we’ve also added a host of new mysterious things, asteroid bases, 100 new tourist beacons, and more!
And a few VR fixes:
Made the schematics render in stereo
Added dithering support to tackle banding in VR
Fixes to some of the cockpit VR cameras
Fixed some incorrect scale assumptions when fitting the left eye image to the monitor window. The view should feel a little less stretched. In addition there will be a significant memory saving moving from 2160×1200 to 1280×768
Original Article (1/28/17): Elite Dangerous is not a VR-only title, but with support for both the Vive and Rift, and its focus on simulator-like mechanics, it does an impressive job of making you feel like a lone pilot somewhere out in a vast and lonely galaxy.
But that feeling of lonely awe isn’t quite as fun when you look around your single-pilot ship and have only glowing instruments and flight controls to share it with.
Thankfully, the Elite Dangerous: The Commanders (2.3) update, due to launch in beta by February 26th, will bring what’s being called the Multi-crew feature, allowing multiple players (in or out of VR) to cooperatively pilot ships across different roles. Everyone with access to the Horizon Beta will be able to access the 2.3 beta.
Zac Antonaci, the game’s Head of Community, said in an update on the official forums, that the studio would be sharing more details about how the feature will work, including the new ‘Commander Creator’, which promises to allow players to customize their avatar.
• Players will work together to control the different functions of a ship. One player could fly the ship whilst others would handle the sub-systems and weapons. Or a Multicrew ship landing on a planet’s surface could have one player stay with the main vessel, another patrol in a ship-launched fighter, and another explore in their SRV.
• Multicrew uses the Wing system and has four roles:
• Helm (piloting) • Fire control (turrets/weapons + limpet control) • Tactical (sensors, shields, countermeasures) • Engineer (power distribution, repairs)
• Roles are balanced so that a fully-crewed ship is on par with four commanders in a Wing.
• The crew limit of four may be increased in a future Season. We don’t know how high we would go. Current instancing issues likely make more than 4 unfeasible for the immediate future.
• Enormous range of faces and features available using the Commander Creation “slider tool”. This option will be selected via the game’s interface. In combination with Multicrew players will at last be able to see each other, in game. Although dev-demo shows baldness, hair is confirmed.
– – — – –
While it’s very exciting that players will soon be able to co-pilot ships together with friends, we’ve yet to see if there will be any issues with nausea if you’re using a VR headset while inside a ship flown by another player. Presently, the cockpit-nature of Elite Dangerous is an effective way of mitigating nausea in VR despite lots of movement, but when the movement of the vehicle isn’t under your direct control, it may not provide the same protection. We’ll have to wait and see once the Commanders 2.3 update launches.
Deus Ex fans with VR hardware can rejoice as developer Eidos Montreal have launched a new, free VR experience based on their latest title in the series, Mankind Divided, and it’s quite the looker.
Deus Ex has had its problems as a franchise over years. From its incredible, trailblazing debut in 2000, through a questionable sequel in 2003 the first person action RPG has more recently seen a return to form in the hands of developers Eidos Montreal and publishers Square Enix. The latest instalment, Mankind Divided, continues where its predecessor left off – with the human race at war with itself, a rift opening up between those choosing mechanical and electronic augmentations for bodies and those not.
However effective you feel Deus Ex‘s latest episodes have been as games, there’s little argument that Eidos have managed to instil their take on a dystopian future with a unique and at times beautiful production art style. And it’s into these visually sumptuous, oppressive and brooding environments Eidos’ new free virtual reality experience thrusts you to impressive effect.
The VR experience does not require you to own any prior Deus Ex title and can be grabbed from Steam for free right here. I stepped into the experience for a brief look around and found that, having already played through Mankind Divided, the ability to move around a selection of digital sets from the title inside VR an eye opener. This has been written before of course (not least of all by us), but the differences between witnessing digital creations like these separated by a screen and being encompassed within it is a starkly different experience.
The experience allows you to walk through a selection of scenes from the full game, with exit points taking you to the next scene highlighted with white markers. It’s a sort of digital tourist experience if you like, and I really like the format. As you wander through each scene, you’ll use full locomotion to navigate. That is, there’s no teleportation in this experience whether you play with motion controllers or not. Instead, comfort options are provided via yaw snap turns actioned via controller buttons (triggers on the Xbox gamepad for example). I enjoyed the default focus on a more fluid, natural form of movement through the VR world, but some may find things uncomfortable with the default settings.
Speaking of settings, Eidos have spent some time giving those who like to tweak their experience the ability to ramp up visual settings as their hardware allows, from Anisotropic filtering through optional FXAA and a selection of visual quality levels. It’s worth ramping everything up if you can, and in my case, running with a NVIDIA GTX 1080, things ran very well on the Oculus Rift. Eidos has thoughtfully included notes for both VR platforms to improve performance too with helpful warnings on comfort before you begin the experience. All in all, the whole thing feels remarkably polished and Eidos should be praised for not just throwing this out the door as a quick, cheap and cynical marketing exercise.
In summary, the Deus Ex: Mankind Divided VR Experience feels like an opportunity to witness the attention to detail lavished upon a world by its talented artists. I lost count of the “Oh wow, I’d not seen that!” moments I had whilst wandering through scenes that, prior to thi, I believed I was extremely familiar with. And on that front, the experience works on different levels for those having played the game and those coming to the world cold. It’s a great example of a VR accompaniment done right and Eidos Montreal should be congratulated for both only bothering with the project but taking the time to do it properly. What’s more, I’d heartily encourage other developers wanting to show off the artistry present in their games look at this digital tourist format as I think they are eminently worthwhile.
RaceRoom Racing Experience has received a major update that introduces Vive and Rift support through SteamVR. The update also includes a number of improvements and adds new content to this often underappreciated racing sim.
Developer Sector3 has been largely silent about potential VR support for RaceRoom, despite the title offering an excellent, experimental VR mode for the Rift DK2 dev kit back in 2014. Today’s update has, along with some major feature and content additions, enabled a ‘first pass’ of VR support, much to the delight of the community.
RaceRoom can be considered an established racing sim at this point, despite being technically still a ‘beta’. It has a colourful history, having been originally developed by the SimBin, famous for classic racing sims such as GT Legends (2005) and GTR (2005). RaceRoom’s approach was different, both in terms of being a free-to-play title with paid additional content in the form of cars and tracks, as well as aiming to have accessible physics. This lead to the sim being dismissed by large sections of the community, and ultimately, the demise of SimBin.
Now that Sector3 is at the helm—which operates effectively as a restructured SimBin— RaceRoom is back on track, having seen massive physics and force feedback improvements, making the sim far more appealing to the enthusiast. The return of VR support is another indication that RaceRoom is heading in the right direction.
The update, detailed here, also adds leaderboard divisions, a revamped multiplayer browser, manual pit stops, AI changes, DTM physics improvements and the Silverstone and Stowe circuits.
Here are the steps to enable VR mode, according to the developer post on the Sector3 forums:
• In your Steam client library, right click RaceRoom and select “Properties”. • In the Properties pop-up window, under the “General” section, click the “Set Launch Options…” button. • In the dialog box that opened, just type in “-vr” (without the quotation marks) and it will use the default value for render target multiplier, which we currently have set to 1.5. • To experiment with different render target multipliers, you can simply add the desired value after the argument, for example: “-vr 2.0” will start the game with the multiplier at 2.0. This multiplier can go as low as 0.5 and as high as 4.0 which is very high, so we recommend small steps here.
Plevr is a third-party application in development which brings the popular personal media streaming platform Plex to VR. The app is due for an initial release by the end of the month, and a new devlog video shows a major update including 3D video support.
Plevr developer Alex Keybl posted a new video showing the latest beta build of the app. There’s been a major UI overhaul, including the important addition of a seatside clock (to keep you from losing track of time in VR, of course).
The new interface greatly expands the ability to browse your Plex catalogue which offers up content that streams from your personal media library. As before, you can physically reach out to grab the movie and video posters to see a description on the back, and now you’ll see a little trailer included on the back as well. You can also now access the media libraries of your Plex friends as well.
The novel ‘throwing’ interactions are still there: if you want to hide something in your library, just toss it off into the surrounding abyss. If you want to watch it, just throw it at the screen and it will start playing.
Plevr now supports 3D video, which is great because VR headsets of course offer native stereoscopy with no cross-talk (which means sharp, comfortable 3D video). Although it isn’t shown in the latest devlog video, Keybl confirmed to Road to VR that 360 video support is in the works and will be coming in V2 of the Plevr app. “I really want to nail the 360 experience,” he says.
Keybl plans to make an initial release of Plevr on the HTC Vive in January. You can sign up for a chance at early access to the private beta via the official Plevr site.
Kevin Mack is a digital fine artist and prolific visual effects designer known for his work across films such as Fight Club (1999), A Beautiful Mind (2001), The Fifth Element (1997), and What Dreams May Come (1998) for which he won an Oscar. Outside of supervising VFX for big budget Hollywood films, Mack creates abstract surrealist art, realizing them as 3D printed sculptures, 2D renderings, and now through his newly founded VR production house Shape Space VR, immersive virtual reality experiences that let you explore his strange and beautiful globular creations up close and personal. Enter Blortasia.
Blortasia is his second public VR art piece, arriving a few months after the pre-rendered 3D 360 video Zen Parade for Gear VR. Created for HTC Vive and Oculus Touch, Blortasia is a real-time VR experience that lets you fly in and around the abstract sculpture using either system’s hand controllers, and letting you freely explore the universe’s undulating, cavernous structure in the sky. According to Mack, Blortasia is an exploration of virtual reality as an aesthetic medium, one that is necessarily unconstrained by the limits of ordinary reality.
Accompanied by a calming soundtrack, I can’t help but feel a deep relaxation as my brain goes on autopilot while I watch the living, breathing lava lamp before me. Like watching clouds, I see faces, hands, objects—a neurological illusion thanks to a phenomenon called Pareidolia. I exit Blortasia a little more refreshed than I went in, a little more aware of my physical world outside virtual reality.
Even the platform below your feet shifts in color and shape
To learn more about the nuts and bolts of the experience, I spoke with Kevin Mack about how it was made.
Mack tells me that among custom-made animated shaders for Unity and other techniques created by himself, Blortasia was built using tools and rule-based procedural systems in Houdini, a procedural content creation software from SideFX.
The results, Mack says, are a type of “directed randomness that are hybridized and seeded with manually created elements.” So while Blortasia’s textures aren’t entirely random, but are rather derived from images painted by Mack in Photoshop, Blortasia obeys what he calls “a natural system where the rules of nature are aesthetically defined.”
This means that the starting structure of Blortasia is fundamentally always the same, but it undulates over time and is painted with different colors that are recalculated when you start the experience, something that makes the sky-bound creation appear different each time you visit.
But what about the name, Blortasia?
Mack told me it wasnamed after the self-coined word ‘Blort’, an acronym deriving from the process that he used to create the otherworldly sculpture. Blort stands for “blobs that have been rotated, translated, and scaled.” Whether the neologism catches on or not, one thing is for sure: Blortasia is exactly what virtual reality was intended for—bringing to life something vibrant and alive that would otherwise be impossible in our daily physical reality.
Trebuchet, or not to trebuchet? There really is no question when it comes to Siegecraft Commander, a tabletop strategy game that combines traditional real-time strategy (RTS) elements with a unique base-building mechanic that’s designed to significantly change the way you create structures and attack enemies. By making you physically fling—as in, put in a slingshot and shoot out—everything from explosive barrels to defensive buildings like outposts and armories, Siegecraft successfullygameifies the most banal part of traditional RTSs and summarily smothers what might otherwise be a dynamic and interesting game.
Developer: Blowfish Studios Available On:SteamVR (HTC Vive, Oculus Rift) Reviewed on: HTC Vive, Oculus Touch Release Date: January 17, 2017
Gameplay
In Siegecraft, your base is composed of essentially two main types of buildings that help create a sort of fractal defensive web:
Primary Structures
From the heart of your base, called ‘the keep’, you launch outposts, which are essentially self-replicating nodes that allow you to grow your base larger and closer to the enemy. Primary structures are useful for manually destroying the enemy’s keep or any pesky foot soldiers that slip by—accomplished by launching explosive barrels. But more on that later.
Primary structures let you create secondary structures like armories and garrisons, and also some limited defensive structures like land-to-air ballistas. If the enemy knocks out an important node in your primary structure chain though, it destroys everything linked to it from that node forward, effectively undoing a lot of your work.
Selecting secondary structures in ‘Siegecraft Commander’
Secondary Structures
After placing a primary structure, you can then have to option to select a number of secondary structures. Placing an armory for example opens up a new branch of the tree, letting you create infantry barracks, and gads of defense structures—all of which are basically dead ends when it comes to growing your base though. Because secondary structures can’t build primary structures, you need to think tactically about how to get past tight terrain, and advance through the map without filling a crucial bottle neck with a library or a mortar when you actually need an outpost to help push forward.
After a successful match, it almost feels like Siegecraft has me creating a sort of primitive intelligence, like a brainless slime mold that eventually takes over a Petri dish bit by bit. And while I really want to like Siegecraft solely based on this self-imagined premise, the activity of physical launching structures is consistently unnerving and just comes too close to ‘unnecessary gimmick’ territory for comfort.
Sure, launching an explosive barrel at an enemy outpost should rightfully require a keen eye and a good understanding of how the launch mechanic works, but hampering forward progress in the heat of a match because you launched an outpost too close to a rock, or too close to a river, or too close to your own building, or the wall that trails behind it is too close to anything—you begin to ask the most important question of all: Am I having fun yet? Because I’m honestly not sure. I should be worrying about the enemy marching at my gates, and not aiming, pulling back and whiffing my second outpost on a row.
Admittedly, the game is available in two flavors, turn-based and real-time, so you can dial down the chaos if you so choose. While I played the real-time single-player campaign, online multiplayer is also available in both flavors, but I wouldn’t risk being matched with anyone using the PC or Xbox/PS4 simply because of the disadvantage of playing in VR. Moving your POV to get a good look at the game board, fiddling with unit selections and physically reaching back to fire every 20 seconds takes both time and patience in VR, something RTS players know is in short supply. Simply put, I found game’s VR mode too encumbered for the all-out chaos of real-time strategy play.
Immersion
The beauty of motion controls in virtual reality reveals itself almost immediately when you try it in a made-for-VR game. Picking up items and interacting with them as if they were actually there is something magical, something that we’ve never been able to do as a species before in the digital realm. Since Siegecraft is more of a VR-mode than a bespoke VR game, both general object interaction and haptics are an absolute afterthought, and there’s certainly no magic to be had using either Vive controller or Oculus Touch (which still renders as the Vive controller in-game).
While you do have a beautiful controller skin and a ever-present book glued to your hand so you can read some of the game’s useless story banter, I can’t help but feel that the game would benefit more from gamepad support—not a damning verdict by any means—and a complete removal of the book in favor of voice overs for campaign mode.
Immersion-wise, finding a comfortable angle to see the gameboard takes time to suss out, because too far away and you can’t accurately select units, and too close… well, you get this:
Instead of sacrificing some of the inherent coolness of a unified color pattern and architecture for the VR mode, the game insists on using labels so I don’t feel lost. The problem is, I feel more lost with the labels on the otherwise beautifully rendered gameboard, truly underlining this as a PC-first, VR-second game.
Comfort
Since Siegecraft Commander doesn’t require room-scale locomotion, and can be played entirely from the seated position if you so wish, users may suffer slightly from manipulating the gameboard too much, as you can grow in size and rotate the board to see better. This sort of world-shifting is known to cause nausea if exaggerated, but Siegecraft offers enough opportunity to rest in between so that little to no discomfort was felt personally.
You may also be tempted to look down at the board to get a good bird’s eye view most of the time, but keeping your neck pointed downwards with a VR headset can be a big pain in the neck after a while if you’re not careful.
We partnered with AVA Direct to create the Exemplar 2 Ultimate, our high-end VR hardware reference point against which we perform our tests and reviews. Exemplar 2 is designed to push virtual reality experiences above and beyond what’s possible with systems built to lesser recommended VR specifications.
