Discussing Unreal

As far as I can remember, a Kunos teammember has reveiled this numbers some time ago in the tripple thread. I was a frequent reader for having tripples (and oculus cv1) but wasn’t able to use untill “true tripple” multivieuw rendering was present. Both tripple as VR users represent a very low number of the total amount of users. Another fact that was revealed is that the casual forum readers here dont represent the majority at all (talking about equipment and ways of use).

 

Polls are meaningless unless the sample that responds is a representative sample of the community overall. But of course they tend not to be. If we run a poll about “is VR important to you or not” here, then it firstly only samples from people registered on the ACC forum (a hardcore subset of the ACC user base)and secondly , it’s self selecting, so the people who choose to respond will be disproportionately interested in VR (typically because they’re VR users already, occasionally because they’re haters).

 

I did start a poll on RD a few months ago (covering all sims) and the results were kind of what I expected.
https://www.racedepartment.com/threads/what-do-you-mainly-play-your-pc-sims-on.174369/


Ok, you could argue that this is a biased poll, but it was the best I could think of at the time.
Also, don't forget not every sim has VR supports.

 

All that kknd off poll are biased, only Kunos can tell us how many players use VR.

 

Sorry but a poll which has less than 250 respondents out of the many thousands who use racing sims can’t possibly be seen as representative of the user base.

 

Damn, its 50 short of your made up number of 250.
Will have to bump my own thread to try and get a few more respondents.

Polls only show a snapshot of what is real.
Whether you have 100 or 100,000 respondents, it should still give a good (rough) idea.
However the more that respond the more accurate it should be.
But this till can depend on what group of people are asked to respond.

If we ran this poll on Steam it would be different, if we ran it on Oculus Home it would be very different, if we ran it on a Call Of Duty forum it would again be different, if we ran it on a F1 Codemasters forum it would be vastly different.
A poll can target the audients it wants, to have the results its looking for.

 

What are you using to play racing games:
https://www.racedepartment.com/threads/what-do-you-mainly-play-your-pc-sims-on.174369/

 

That is a poll made in a hardcore simracing community full of people that are frustrated race car drivers. If you make a poll about sexual orientation in a gay bar the results would make you believe that almost all humanity is gay. Polls don't work that way if you want them to be meaningfull, if you go to steam hardware survey you discover that the VR total users are less than 1% of the total user base https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/. Only kunos knows the real amount of VR users in their sim, but I tend to believe that it's closer to the steam poll than to the racedepartment poll because it is a lot less biased.

 

Of course if you carried out the same poll in Steam you would get a different result.
Steam is full of different games and Sims are only a VERY small fraction of them.
Why would I go into a general gaming site to find out what 'sim racers' mainly race on?
Going in to a sim racing forum is the obvious choice when wanting to know sim racers opinions surely?

So, you believe that the amount of ACC racers using VR is 1%?

 

Pretty sure he didn't mean that 250 is the threshold for a relevent result, but that your poll just had less than 250 responses.

 

Yeah... I would say maybe 1.1% of steam users are sim racers, so that 1% for users with a VR headset is actually a fairly significant number.

As a fun fact more people on steam use VR headsets than Linux.

PS, if Steam has 90 million monthly active users and 1% has a VR headset that’s still 900000 headsets. Not sure how big the sim racing market on PC is user wise but I doubt it’s too much over the million mark

 

Yes it does have less than 250 (its actually on 214 now).
If it had 250 then he could have said it had less than 300.
I may have misread it, but it looked to me as though 250 was a threshold when he wrote 'less than 250 cant be seen as representative'.
I may be wrong though, so willing to stand corrected.

 

250 wasn’t some sort of threshold. I meant that results from such a small sample size are virtually meaningless unless the maximum number of people who could possibly take the survey is also very small. I was tired and couldn’t be bothered to accurately add up the total number of votes! In a recent poll on one of the flight sim sites, the results gave the impression that most flight sim enthusiasts used VR whereas more reliable evidence (an external survey with over 15,000 respondents - an excellent sample size) showed that this was very far from the case - only 11% actually used VR for flight simming. I’d be very surprised if more than 20% of sim racers used VR.

 

Considering SPS has been in the UE engine since before 4.18 and the reason Kunos said UE was good because it has all the assists I would say if there was a ROE they could get it working. If your not going to use the tools they are provided with then yes I’m saying they are holding back a proven VR technology that has worked wonders in other titles it was implemented within. Most likely because of cost.

What makes you think they can’t do it?

 

Seriously? You really think they’d sabotage their own sim for VR users if it was possible to easily make it much better?

Because they haven’t? Kunos is made up of a passionate set of devs and I just can’t believe they’d ignore an easy optimisation.

 

Aaaaaaand back to reality Alex!

 

Yes. I’m saying they could if they wanted to but for whatever reason they decide not to. I’m sure they have their reasons and I’m sure they are valid from a business point of view.
UE4 supports SPS and has done since 4.11. It’s been there all along.

What makes you think they can’t implement it???????????

 

It’s in a different branch of the Unreal engine. For whatever reason Unreal runs the VR branch separately, not sure what’s involved with having an ACC build for that but if nothing else maintaining two different builds would not really be viable, especially for a small studio like Kunos.

Instanced stereo is another thing, pretty sure that would be enabled but that’s a guess

This is what everyone wants for VR:https://developer.nvidia.com/vrwork...i-lens-matched-shading-and-single-pass-stereo

Sadly absolutely no one has built a game with that branch of Unreal for whatever reason

 

Happy New Year Vortex.
Maybe we should look at the bigger picture and think about it objectively.......I don't think Alex is suggesting they're sabotaging their own sim whatsoever, but he makes a very valid point in a very fair way about the current state of the VR side of the game.
If the technology is there to enable them to make the game perform better for VR users, and they're not using it, then they're absolutely holding back a proven technology and as a result the progress of that game.
Why? well that's for Kunos to explain and as Alex has already said, they may indeed have a valid reason for doing so. But surely the game has been out for long enough for them to have at least started to implement some VR optimisations, or at least have given the community an insight on how/why these things might not have been possible so far if they haven't.

It's not really fair to respond in such a way to suggest that Alex, or any other VR user for that matter, is being unreasonable or is asking for the world, when the technology to get there is already available to use to get the game to a workable VR state at a decent quality.

VR is no longer a tiny little minority and as has been mentioned before, as the technology is becoming more and more affordable, available and better quality, more and more are making a move to using it. I think we all agree that the devs at Kunos are some of the most dedicated in the business, and i fully expect them to carry on doing a great job with the game. I've been part of the journey from day one of the beta, and the game has come on leaps and bounds since then. It'd be nice to think that maybe the devs are now focusing a little more on VR now that the Base game has been brought up to the level that it has.

 

I'm slightly surprised VR is so high. Although, when I look up the price of ultrawide monitors they aren't significantly cheaper than a mid range VR head set. Out of the 3 high end display options ultrawide, triples and VR, VR is fairly easy to implement, it's not going to cost desk space like a big monitor would and opens up more gaming options. So VR is probably getting more and more attractive as an option. Especially in comparison to triples. Triples and VR are obviously harder on the PC hardware.