The adventures of Bart and the CV1

[isamu]

Hi Bart. Will you be getting an Oculus Rift CV1? What are your thoughts on virtual reality in general? Do you anticipate Supermodel ever supporting the CV1 or maybe perhaps the Vive? How easy/feasible will this be to incorporate? My dream is to one day play Daytona 2 and Scud in virtual reality.

[Bart]

I haven't actually had a chance yet to try out Occulus or Vive. I've only tried Google Cardboard and Samsung Gear VR. There is obviously a lot of excitement about VR right now. VR content is an area of focus for the new Andreessen-Horowitz fund, for example. But personally, I am more excited about augmented reality (AR). I'm thinking about picking up a HoloLens and playing around with that (should be eligible within the next month or two). Being a mere programmer, though, it's difficult for me to produce 3D content but I digress...

As cool as it would be to play our favorite 90's racers in VR, it's not possible through emulation. There is nothing behind the camera -- everything is culled out. We would need the game source code to do that.

How about you? Have you picked up either of these headsets or have any plans to? Which retro games do you think would work best in VR?

[Toshiko]

Why, Virtua Racing, of course!

[isamu]

I haven't actually had a chance yet to try out Occulus or Vive. I've only tried Google Cardboard and Samsung Gear VR. There is obviously a lot of excitement about VR right now. VR content is an area of focus for the new Andreessen-Horowitz fund, for example. But personally, I am more excited about augmented reality (AR). I'm thinking about picking up a HoloLens and playing around with that (should be eligible within the next month or two). Being a mere programmer, though, it's difficult for me to produce 3D content but I digress...

As cool as it would be to play our favorite 90's racers in VR, it's not possible through emulation. There is nothing behind the camera -- everything is culled out. We would need the game source code to do that.

How about you? Have you picked up either of these headsets or have any plans to? Which retro games do you think would work best in VR?

Great post and thanks for the reply. No, I haven't had a chance to experience VR yet but given all the wonderful and incredible impressions I've read about the Rift and Vive, I will most certainly be buying one either this summer of early fall.

Regarding your statement about VR not being possible through emulation.....I have to disagree. Here are two examples proving otherwise:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2hQFURY7Jw

This is F-Zero GX running in Dolphin and developed by a gentlemen named Carl Kenner, aka 2EyeGuy.

He just updated the VR version of Dolphin with fantastic results. You can read more about it in the Dolphin VR thread:

https://forums.oculus.com/community/dis ... ity#latest

Second example is the PSP emulator PPSSPP. A special VR version of it is also being worked on by 2EyeGuy and although fairly preliminary, quite a few game are already working quite well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvPnn-TC-B0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BW6gdvk47jk


Thread here:

https://forums.oculus.com/community/dis ... e-emulator


So yes, VR in emulation is indeed quite possible. I know this isn't on your immediate list of features to incorporate into SM, but I'm hoping the above examples will encourage you to explore the development of either Oculus Rift or Vive for SuperModel some day, if not perhaps someone else like Ian could explore the possibility.

Either way, virtual reality is the future and it's only going to get better as time goes on. To deny it and brush it off is to deny the advancement of technology.

Keep up the good work man we all appreciate you

[Bart]

Dolphin VR is made possible through a feature someone added long before called 'free look'. Not exactly sure how it works but my guess is that it is just applying an additional transformation matrix to move the camera. If that's the case, then it will only be able to view what the game sends to the GPU. YouTube videos seem to corroborate this -- notice the missing geometry. I think free look works as well as it does on GameCube/Wii because modern games expend less effort on culling geometry themselves and simply let the GPU handle it. This is in stark contrast to 90's 3D games, which were careful to avoid wasting CPU (and GPU, if it existed) time uploading and rendering geometry that would end up being rejected for falling outside the view frustum.

Nik actually implemented a feature exactly like free look in his Supermodel graphical debugger that allowed you to position the camera however you want. It actually works reasonably well and you can see quite a bit of geometry. In the racing games, you could easily 180 degree field of view but wouldn't be able to see much behind or above you. The bigger problem is that AI vehicles often disappear as soon as they leave the frustum. You can test this yourself by forcing a very wide FOV using wide screen. Try setting a resolution of 1920x200 in wide screen and play some of the racing games, especially Sega Rally 2 where vehicles are more detailed and therefore more expensive to render.



So yes, technically it's doable, but it would be a hack and would be pretty unconvincing I think.

Ian: if you're implementing culling, hopefully it will be generic enough to support not only wide screen but a "free look" mode. We could try adding one at some point. I think it would just be an extra matrix on top of the existing stack.

[isamu]

Ahh that explains it then. Very information lesson. Well, you know a lot more about this avenue than I do, so I stand corrected. In any case, yes it's disappointing to hear that it can't be done quite as well as games for Dolphin, etc, but even still, it's good to know that *SOME* sort of vr, even it's rudimentary(aka free look or whatever) is possible. Either way, please keep us posted on any progress you may make should you and Ian go down this route.

[Ian]

In theory oculus should be relatively straight forward to implement for supermodel. The free look thing isn't really a big issue as most of the games render geometry in all directions. Some assets such as dynamic models might be culled out of view.

The bigger issue is, to do off axis stereo you need to set a proper projection plane, and that is normally relative to the near plane. But this is hard to do without knowing the exact scale or knowing where the near plane should actually be. What this means in simple terms is, if the projection plane is too close you won't get any stereo effect at all. It will just be parallel stereo.

[sonic32]

Hello,can anyone advise how to run the debugger?

I tried "supermodel scud.zip -res = 640,480 -SUPERMODEL_DEBUGGER"

And it does not work.

Supermodel.ini - insert "SUPERMODEL_DEBUGGER = 1"

And it does not work...

[Bart]

You can't run the debugger in that screenshot. This was from a test build that Nik had made. The source code is not available, unfortunately. Supermodel's existing debugger is text-based (very powerful but probably not of interest to anyone who is not actively working on Supermodel) and is enabled by compiling with SUPERMODEL_DEBUGGER defined and then using the -enter-debugger command line option (or Alt+B).

[sonic32]

Thanks Bart,
Debugger fact only serves Developers supermodel,
Too bad that no NIK disclose 3D debugger that would let you help a developers.

(VR reality in Model 3, would be interesing to examine Jurassic Park - In gen House, swim in the Ocean Hunter etc..)