vorpX & Daytona USA 2

[Teknix1]

Hi everyone,

Just discovered this amazing emulator and thought I should join and share some of the things I've been tinkering with.

I've been an Oculus Rift user since the DK1 came out. I bought a vorpX license really early on (I am not endorsed or paid by them), this application is as they coin it is a "VR 3D driver". It hooks onto applications running DX9-10-11 and openGL and constructs a stereo (3D) image pair to send to the VR headset. This allows you to enjoy 3D in games that don't actually support VR headsets. At the very beginning the application showed promise, mostly worked but gave you headaches. Not their fault, games not designed for VR will do things that will make you sick, things as simple as turning in-game using the mouse will give you motion sickness, anyways I'm getting side tracked here. The build of vorpX from last week unfortunately didn't work in 3D with Supermodel, however you could still play in 2D within a VR living room on a giant screen, simply amazing. I would simply get a black screen when turning on the 3D effects. The application just auto updated today and a new 3D mode is available, turn on these setting to experience Daytona USA 2 in full stereoscopic 3D:

Play Style: Full VR Mode
3D Reconstruction: Geometry

Warning, there is a lot of glitching and most huds are not shown correctly but still, this is the first version of this new tech. I don't know if the source of the issues lie within the emulator or vorpX but I truly hope this gets much better. As of now, my preferred way of using Supermodel is in the virtual world, you just can't beat a 10 foot screen right in your face!

Teknix1

[isamu]

WOW thanks for sharing! So basically when you're running this in a non-vr supported game, you'll be looking at the game in full stereoscopic 3D instead of a giant 2D screen? Is this similar to what Carl Kenner/2EyeGuy did with DolphinVR?

Also do you know if works with other emulators such as PPSSPP or Teknoparrot?

[Teknix1]

Yes, that's correct, full stereoscopic, it looks really good except for the glitches which potentially are only a configuration thing. I have to admit I am new to Supermodel and vorpX so I am still fiddling with it, hopefully I can find settings that work well. At certain time it can work for a small segment without glitches and it looks phenomenal. But at his point (with my settings) it is not playable.

I will have to look at DolphinVR, I've never heard of that before. As for other emulators, I have read other users have had success, I haven't tried personally, but it does hook anything that runs DX9-10-11 and openGL with varying success. So in theory it could work. The site has a list of supported games, that means that someone has taken the time of adjusting settings so that it looks good enough. Everything is profile based in vorpX. For supermodel, I simply copied one from another game (Quake in my case) and adjusted the stereo options to my liking.

I tried copying profiles from other games last night but the glitching is always the same. I'm just realising now that I'm using the -new3d flag, I should try without, maybe I'll get better results.

Teknix1

[isamu]

Yes, that's correct, full stereoscopic, it looks really good except for the glitches which potentially are only a configuration thing. I have to admit I am new to Supermodel and vorpX so I am still fiddling with it, hopefully I can find settings that work well. At certain time it can work for a small segment without glitches and it looks phenomenal. But at his point (with my settings) it is not playable.

I will have to look at DolphinVR, I've never heard of that before. As for other emulators, I have read other users have had success, I haven't tried personally, but it does hook anything that runs DX9-10-11 and openGL with varying success. So in theory it could work. The site has a list of supported games, that means that someone has taken the time of adjusting settings so that it looks good enough. Everything is profile based in vorpX. For supermodel, I simply copied one from another game (Quake in my case) and adjusted the stereo options to my liking.

I tried copying profiles from other games last night but the glitching is always the same. I'm just realising now that I'm using the -new3d flag, I should try without, maybe I'll get better results.

Teknix1

Sounds awesome! Please keep us posted on your results!

[Teknix1]

I haven't had any luck with getting the stereoscopic view working properly. I think I will need to catch vorpX's attention to get that resolved. There's just way too much glitching.

On the other hand, I have just discovered the -wide-screen parameter. If you thought triple monitor was amazing, you ain't seen nothing yet. With vorpX you get a single view without seams (that you get between actual monitors). There's a parameter in vorpX to curve the screen around you. The screens I've posted don't do it justice, your view is pretty much completely covered by the virtual screen. I don't normally play like this, somehow my laps are slower. I normally play in 4x3 ratio, the way I have it setup in VR looks like having an 8 foot screen about 8 feet way, it takes pretty much my entire view. But in super wide; it's just overwhelming.

The resolution I've used is 2976x768,this might seem low, but VR is low rez at the moment. I have to say, this looks absolutely beautiful nonetheless. This vertical resolution is double the original hardware, the horizontal is six times. Which equates to having 3 monitors (original arcade) side-by-side. I haven't ventured in higher resolutions, but I could go as insane as I'd like I suppose. There's stretching happening to the sides so there's a point where it just looks worse.

I have played this in front of an HD television (46 inches), right in front of it in hopes to replicate the arcade, but I have to admit; playing in the Rift (I'm sure other VR headsets are just as good) is far more intense. I won't play in front of a regular screen anymore.

The following just don't do justice to VR, you need a helmet to understand what is going on. Notice how you can see to the right of the track (HUD) and to the left of the lap count.

Wide-Screen-1.jpg (141.09 KiB) Viewed 5135 times

Wide-Screen-2.jpg (81.47 KiB) Viewed 5135 times

Wide-Screen-3.jpg (66.22 KiB) Viewed 5135 times

[isamu]

Thanks for the update. Yeah the "Big Screen" 2D effect is something I've played around with using Desktop VR. It works well but I've noticed that the bigger the size of the screen, the slower the sense of speed appears to be. Have you experienced this with VORPX?

Anyway I've been reading the VORPX forums a bit. Seems like the new DirectVr they're using with the latest version makes things a lot more plug and play. I watched this Youtube guide where the guy claims the new version of VORPX should work with practically everything, so long as you follow his guide:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4fYsmbDqeQ&t=1s


...have you tried following his guide to see if you can accomplish running Daytona 2 with better results? Was VORPX able to "Scan" the world in Daytona 2 using the 3D Geometry mode or whatever it's called?

[Teknix1]

Thanks for posting this amazing tutorial, it is very long but demystifies a lot of things. Unfortunately the issues with getting supermodel to work with vorpX are beyond simple configuration. I feel supermodel is simply not structured in a way that vorpX can understand. Although it works very well for a few seconds every now and then, the rest it just doesn't. If we could figure out which single feature or effect it doesn't like in the game, perhaps there would be a way to get it to work. I have to say it look absolutely amazing when it does. Here are a few screens of when the glitches appear, sometimes the entire screen is blue. I picked screens where there were a few elements to look at.

Glitch1.jpg (54.59 KiB) Viewed 4973 times

Glitch2.jpg (99.9 KiB) Viewed 4973 times

Glitch3.jpg (100.67 KiB) Viewed 4973 times

Perhaps one of the developers could shine some light on the issue just by looking at these?

Nic

[Teknix1]

Forgot to respond to your other comment about about the sense of speed.

I can't say I thought it made a difference in my case. But your question makes sense; if you only see a portion of your field of vision, you will think things to by quicker and slower when you see more. At first I had issues getting good laps because I was losing my frame of reference; the front of the screen, it's so wide you don't know what you're looking at. My view is the bumper cam. So I had to get used to it, I played with the hood cam in the hopes that it would help getting my bearings and that worked to a certain point. I played with the widescreen view for a while and ended up getting my best lap and #1 spot on the high scores, go figure... maybe it's not really making it harder. Personally I prefer the regular view like in the arcades, but it is a sight to behold at least once.

I can't imagine your question was really about FPS, but I've been struggling with getting the frame rates to be perfect all the time. A few noticeable (only sometimes) spots are in the advanced track when going by the bats with a lot of cars around and in the last corner of the beginner track. I mostly race with the bumper view so there are less polygons to draw (no hood). I don't understand why that would really make a big difference, I have a 6 core i7 (although from 2012) with a 1080 card, it should handle this very well but doesn't always... I played with the powerpc settings, lowering too much crashes the game, going too high makes the game run slow. I'm in a happy spot now with 75 but I get occasional slowdowns on those spots which aren't too bad. I plan on upgrading my PC at the end of the year when the new generation of threadripper CPUs come out, perhaps this will alleviate the issues.

Another thing is the game runs at 60fps where in the arcade it would be 57.5 (or something like that, I can't remember exactly), so I shouldn't complain; the game runs 4% faster on PC. But It got me thinking about vorpX where it's trying to display 90fps, is there a way to disable vsync in supermodel? Maybe this could help?

There has been new check-ins, I will need to get my hands on build 734 to see if any of these issues have been solved.

[Ian]

try using the legacy renderer with vorpX
it has a more straight forward render pipeline

[Teknix1]

I was under the impression that not using the -new3d flag would run the old engine. But I just read an old post about the default engine being switched to the new one. I would then have to use the -legacy3d flag, correct?