Elite VR Report:
Rarg, finally had a proper go at
optimising the settings, and this can get a bit special at times
Main highlight was scudding past the city-surfaces of coriolis station in a tutorial Sidey, and realising I just had to go and have a traditional FA-off fly inside
Pix still can't get across what's cool about being in the middle of all this stuff, but here's
another album anyway just in case
I guess pragmatically I can discuss how my current settings pan out. Dumping a load of Supersampling and glitter (bloom, blur, ambient occlusion, high end shadows) and making do with lowly FXAA etc allows me to boost the 'HMD' setting to 1.5 (basically downsampling, as I understand it). Gives much better distance views and general fine detail render. Decent balance of smooth & pretty. Getting the reco 90fps in space & stations and a solid 'asyncronous 45fps' (IE 90 fps with half the frames filled in) on surfaces, and all looking pretty clean. (Turns out I was dropping sub '45' previously, which is why it was a melty hell).
This pic probably gives an idea of some of the payoffs:
Text is all big and bold on station menus, but you can see some aliasing shimmer in the bigger cockpit of the 'Conda. (Aliasing / shimmer is probably one thing I'd still like to tweak - most of it's fine, but station meshes do crawl a fair bit on some approaches). The slight barrenness of the cockpit is barely apparent when you're in motion. (Keeping reflections high seems to help in some of the shinier cockpits too - the Courier's interior looks pretty fantastic as the starlight shifts over it
)
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TLDR: The game's still stupid (got sent on a '10 minutes away' assassination,
agaaiiin). But now I've got it stable in VR, it is also pretty fantastic again. Flies and feels like a wonderful sci fi beast
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EDIT: Additional:
Combat:
After doing some prolonged CZ combat, I can say that it is a bit like viewing everything through a sieve. Even though you essentially rely on the larger HUD info, you still spend a lot of time tracking small dots at range, be they the sub-system boxes, or the orientation hints of the target in flight.
Not playing to any of the tech's strengths really. But with the bonuses of the headlooking for target tracking and general whizz bang when shots got close and **** got intense, still happily spent an hour doing it
. (Really wish the Arena mode was active - would love to use this set up with that 'visual make and break' rule set)
Alien Ambience
Visited a fully sprouting alien zone...
Again impossible to put it across, but here's a
mini-album trying to show the 'waarg' element that VR adds to being 'in' this classic sci-fi style environment
Canny Valley
Seeing your own Av in 3D is odd
. Impressive, but most strange...