[BETA RELEASED] Necro Mutex playtesters? Especially Oculus users.

[mkultra333]

So much for the olive branch.

Thanks for the PM mkultra333, but honestly there is really no reason to drag me back into the thread.

My PM didn't ask you to come back to the thread. It was just a quick note saying that despite things going a bit awry, thanks for the input because you know a fair bit about Steam sales.

I never said that. Do not put words in my mouth and make outright lies about what I said.

Chill. It was a joke.
Calling me an liar seems hyperbolic over-reaction, given the context of my reply and what you actually said.

60fps is not a minimum. 24fps is. Only fickle players ~must~ have it at 60fps.
Personally I can hardly see the difference between the two frame rates myself.

A key word in that quote is "hardly". A definition of that word is: "used to emphasize a minimal amount"

So you emphasized that you see a minimal difference between 24fps and 60fps. Hardly makes my casual joke an "outright lie."

Up till this point I felt like things had maybe gone a little hostile, unnecessarily. Still civil though. While I didn't want or need any further input from you, I did want you to know that I had thought about your comments, found value in them, and respected your knowledge of Steam sales, as I said in the PM.

Now that you've called me a liar, I'm over it.

[mkultra333]

lonewolff.

Well you would run at the higher FPS if your screen supported it, and your customers would love you for it.

The difference between 30 and 60 is very noticeable in certain circumstances (take a side-scroller for example).

Each to their own though

I used to play games a 30fps, or less, all the time. But now that I'm used to the smoothness of 60fps, the difference is extremely obvious. It just looks terrible to me. My monitor goes to 144 Hz, but I can't say that above 60 I notice much of anything in terms of increases smoothness.

You can get VR to run at 45fps in some circumstances, instead of the usual 90fps, but it also looks quite rough. Which is odd, because 45fps looks okay with non-vr play.

But since there are people who don't mind 30fps I might use it for minimum spec anyway.

[lonewolff]

I used to play games a 30fps, or less, all the time. But now that I'm used to the smoothness of 60fps, the difference is extremely obvious. It just looks terrible to me. My monitor goes to 144 Hz, but I can't say that above 60 I notice much of anything in terms of increases smoothness.

Agreed.

There is also the matter of input. If there is a lot of 'button mashing', for example, some of the input can be missed as it is pretty easy to hit two different input states in a 33.3ms interval (there by dropping the last key).

[Kojack]

I can help out testing on the oculus side.
I'm on a gtx 1080, threadripper 1950x and oculus cv1.

[lonewolff]

Ha Kojack! How you been?

I see we have both been lazy with our avatars and have been celebrating Christmas the whole year round for the past half decade.

[mkultra333]

Hey Kojack, that'd be excellent, thanks!

lonewolff: lol at the perpetual xmas avatars.

So it's been about two weeks since I started this thread, but I've fallen behind, sorry to those who've offered to help.

I'm about 2/3 of the way into what I needed to get done. As per usual, known bugs and tweaks are taking longer to fix than expected, and new bugs are uncovered... or introduced.

Will give updates as it get's closer to a working beta.

With the Oculus, I was wondering if its steam setup options are the same as for Vive. These are the suggested settings for playing on the Vive that work best on the min spec VR system:



Does the Oculus have the same options?

[Kojack]

I see we have both been lazy with our avatars and have been celebrating Christmas the whole year round for the past half decade.

Yep. I liked the look of it back many years ago, so I made it permanent.
Oddly enough, there's a user on the Oculus forum that has a near identical avatar to me, except the kitten is real instead of anime. But the christmas hat is almost the same and he uses it year round. I've never asked about it. So I use a different one there.
This avatar is also my Gravatar, so it turns up in Source Tree and other places.

Does the Oculus have the same options?

They are there, but as to using them...
I don't know as much about the steamvr side (I know a LOT about the oculus side), since most of my vr games are on the oculus store. But here's what I know (or just read).
The oculus runtime has two forced optimisations: ASW and ATW (these came before SteamVR added theirs)
ATW - Asynchronous Time Warp. To reduce latency, the runtime resamples the tracking data when you submit a frame, works out how much your head has moved between the start of rendering and the end of rendering, then does a rotational reprojection to compensate. This is always on. That's fine in 99% of cases, but it's an issue if you are doing freaky shit like injecting fake head tracking data into someone else's game to compensate for simulator motion rig movement (hint: that's exactly what I'm doing, so for the last 2 weeks I've been finding ways to trick ATW).
ASW - Asynchronous Space Warp. If your game is running less than 90fps, it drops to 45fps and every second frame is generated by positional reprojection between the last frame and the current head data. This means the VR screen and head tracking run at 90Hz, while the game only needs to render at 45Hz. The game can't turn this on/off, but the oculus runtime checks for Control-Numpad1 to disable it. It lets a lower end system do smooth vr, but certain styles of rendering, like the GUI in Elite Dangerous, get graphical glitches by positional reprojection.

SteamVR optimisations (I don't know these as well, so I could be a little wrong here):
Enable Always On Reprojection - This is the same idea as Oculus ATW. When this is off, SteamVR forces you to only render in the last 2-3ms of a frame. The reason is to keep the head tracking data as close to the frame display as possible to reduce head latency. When this is on, it does reprojection.
Allow Interleaved Reprojection - This is the same idea as Oculus ASW. Drop to 45fps and reproject to fill in the gaps.
Allow Asynchronous Reprojection - This is an alternative to Interleaved. It does the same kind of thing, but doesn't limit the game to 45fps. Oculus doesn't have a direct equivalent to this.

So roughly speaking, SteamVR's always on reproj and interleaved reproj are doing the same thing as Oculus' ATW and ASW. The big problem is... for Oculus users SteamVR runs on top of the Oculus sdk. So everything doubles up. You have one VR sdk passing everything through to another vr sdk. This adds overhead. Plus since Oculus doesn't let games (including steamvr) turn off ATW and ASW, you end up with the steam versions running on top of the oculus versions. So there's probably no benefit (but several disadvantages) to having any of those steam options turned on for rift users.

But as I said, I most of my games as on the oculus sdk, I've only spent a few hours total in steamvr.
But I can try them out.

[mkultra333]

Thanks for the info. Might be best for Oculus users to disable all SteamVR performance settings and let the Oculus runtime handle it automatically.

[Zonder]

I'm going to be away for a week in spain if you have anything ready I can test in about a weeks time.

[mkultra333]

Thanks Zonder, hopefully that'll be about when it's ready.

[mkultra333]

Quick update.

Final fixes (mostly on the procedural map generator) are taking a lot longer than expected. At first I went into a bit of a panic and tried to rush it, but that got me nowhere. I eventually figured it would be stupid to rush and mess it up at the last moment after years of work, so now I'm resigned to it taking as long as it takes and I'm making sure everything that needs to be done is done properly.

Working on it all day every day. Every night I go to bed thinking "Tomorrow will the last day," and every day some new bug comes up, or I decide there's some detail that is sub-par and needs improvement.

That said, I'm down to the last 2-3 things I think need fixing. Might get them done by tomorrow, then there's a week of generating the maps, since generating 10,000 maps takes a fair bit of computation. While that happens on another computer, I can fix up a last few details in the game itself, and then finally work out how to set up a beta on Steam (already done a few small test runs so hopefully I have that worked out fairly quickly.)

So no ETA at the moment, I figure at the very least 1 week. Apologies again for the delays.

[Zonder]

No probs keep us updated

[mkultra333]

Another quick update. Everything taking much longer than I'd hoped. Procedural map generator is done and the maps generated. Fixing minor issues in the game, and adding final optimizations. Had hoped to have the beta out by Halloween but that seems unlikely now, though the number of things left to fix is rapidly dwindling.

[Zonder]

Remember you only need to fix show stoppers for a playtest, we don't expect perfection.

[mkultra333]

Yeah, I'm sorry for the delays. Twice now I've been a delusional state where I think I'm all but finished, only to realize some aspect or other needs some serious work. I would have put off asking for playtesters if I'd been more realistic in working out how long things would take.

That programming saying about estimating the time: Work out how long, then double it, then move up to the next unit of time. So 2 days is 4 weeks, 1 month is 2 years. It's a joke that's depressingly true.

I can skip one or two things but this is really a full beta test, I hope to launch a fortnight or so after that, and I'm getting other beta testers as well, so I want it to be very complete first. If I leave any major changes, it could introduce bugs that defeat the point of the beta.

But as I said before, I really am down to the last few things. So it shouldn't be too much longer. Thanks for the patience Zonder, and anyone else still interested.

[Kojack]

I'm still in.

[Zonder]

Same here

[mkultra333]

Okay, so I've finished the beta and I'm currently in the process of trying to set it up on Steam. It's all a bit confusing, but hopefully I'll have it sorted soon.

None stop drama leading up to this. Feel free to skip this boring story, it's just me being constantly traumatized by nothing ever working.

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A week ago I figured I should do a debug run just to check. I don't use debug often because it's mind-bogglingly slow to even just load a level, 15 minutes or so. I wasn't expecting problems, but got a debug crash the second the map loaded.

Traced it to a DXT compression bug in my particular version of Ogre. Non square, non-power-2 DXT make it choke for unknown reasons. I ran into this bug long ago but forgot about it. I'd recently upped the resolution of my main texture from 8192x8192 to 8192x16384, which is fine in release mode but crashes debug.

After a short, failed attempt to find the bug and fix it, I did what I did last time: Changed to a square texture. I turned it to a 16384x16384 texture and filled the empty space with two other smaller textures I used, which fit quite neatly onto it.

Unfortunately this messed up my whole tool chain, which was already on the edge with the 8192x16384 texture. So that all had to be fixed to handle the suddenly doubled memory requirements.

And then the VR renderer seemed worse. Maybe the new texture size hit it, or maybe it was always that slow and I didn't notice. But I ended up writing a new VR renderer too, one that skips any kind of clever RTT or deferred lighting or FX in any form, and just renders nice and simple and direct to the VR textures. Actually turned out pretty good, probably looks better than the lowest quality/fastest version of the old VR renderer.

Nothing is ever easy.

[mkultra333]

Finally got it all working, and beta 1.1 is now available. Zonder and Kojack, I've PMed you your steam keys. Enter the key in the "Add a game" section on the bottom left of the Steam screen and the game should register.

I have a couple more spare keys so if anyone else would like to give it a playtest, let me know.

[Owl53]

Unfortunately I'm not in a position to be able to help test, but congrats on making it to the first stage of release!

[Somtin]

I can give it a go on my machine, though I can't test VR.

[mkultra333]

Thanks Somtin, I've PMed you a key.

[mkultra333]

Just a note that I've been doing some playtesting, and as a result I'm modifying the difficulty a bit, I think it got too difficult too quickly. I'll probably have the tweaks uploaded before anyone plays anyway, and steam should update the files like any normal game. It'll show "beta 1.2" for this new version.

[al2950]

I can test with an oculus on a 980 and on a 780 without oculus if you would like (Slightly limited by steam not being allowed on company networks!)

[mkultra333]

Unfortunately if you can't use steam, doesn't sound like it'll work. The game's fully steam integrated and won't run without it. But thanks for the offer, al2950.