TresCom Forums

Just a heads up that I’ve changed my sites address to https://trespasservr.wordpress.com/

The project is now officially called Trespasser VR and is VR only.

I’ll be going over the site more in the coming days / weeks giving it a much needed overhaul.

Life’s a bit less chaotic these days, so I’m able to dedicate more time to it, so expect more regular updates.

Just out of curiosity, how many people have a VR headset?

So I read through the blog and from what I can gather you've completely restarted the project again, this time on Unity? What happened to all of your old work? It was looking absolutely beautiful last you shared and my hopes were high to at least get an explorable island at some point, even if that's all it was. I hate to see all of that work go to waste, especially after you'd converted all of those excellent assets. I also personally don't like the way Unity looks as an engine in general, especially the 3D grass, so it's a shame to hear about the switch. What made you change your mind so drastically about the direction of the project?


Very disappointing for us non-VR users. Guess now it's another one I'll have to watch videos of instead...

_________________
Current Project: Cloning Facility | My Release Thread

Glad you are picking this back up, even if it is for VR. I personally have no interest in VR but I am aware a lot of people over at the Discord are interested in it, so there is at least a demand of a VR remake of the game.

Not to lose your old work, is there any way you could release it, or at least privately? As you know, it sucks when Trespasser history disappears

Good luck on the project, it will be interesting to see what you come up with. Hopefully this VR projects goes further than the previous ones.

_________________
Active project: Trespasser: Isla Sorna - Working on PH2-IT (and experimental BE-IT).

"...there used to be more benches, but InGen's workers removed them during the evacuation in the name of framerate."

I’m a little confused as to why you guys think anything is lost or abandoned. When I move house, I take all the contents with me, same goes for all my projects art.

As far as lost progress goes, I’ve made more progress in just the last 2 weeks than I have in the entire time I’ve worked on this project. I’m not sure if you visited the site, but I posted 3 pics that show how it looks and a lot of text explaining whats been done.

In response to some points made, Unity’s rendering is precisely why I chose it. The VR Unity demo posted by James_uk impressed me because A, it was trespasser in VR and B, the rendering was sharp and solid. Rendering in VR can often be very soft or have issues with excessive aliasing. Unity is tack sharp and handles aliasing wonderfully. No need to run temporal AA and post sharpening here. Maybe wait until you have VR and can see how it looks in VR before passing judgement.

Also, how grass looks in Unity is on the artist. Unity has nothing to do with how it looks, shit grass looks shit regardless of the engine.

Unity has 3 different renderers. I’ve chosen the lowest level renderer in the hope it will allow me to build this at the scale and detail level I require. I don’t want to split this into individual levels, I want the whole island in VR.

I didn’t want to say this in my blog post at the risk of sounding like a wanker, but I’m constantly laughing in amazement at how good its looking. I keep asking myself what the catch is, what I’ve forgotten to do, because I dont understand how it’s looking so good at this scale and be running so fast. What kind of extra rendering could be going on in HL Alyx that makes it run so poorly in a room that’s only 5 square metres? I’m in no way comparing my work to HL Alyx, I just can’t for the life of me see where the computational power is being used. If sacrificing volumetric fog, HDR and reflections in exchange for scale and detail, I’ve got no problem with that.

I can only assume the disappointed tone of your comments is because you don’t have VR. I’ve waited almost 10 years to be in my current position to be able to finally make this in VR, and now that I can I’m making huge progress and I’m loving it again. Imagine being me back when I got the first Oculus Rift Dev Kit but not having any real engine support for it and to then get horribly sick due to its lack of positional tracking and have to sell it.

In 10 years I didn’t have a single serious offer of help from a programmer to work on this. Not even someone spending all of 5 minutes to make a change to the default character controller to change movement speed or jump height, let alone implementing a functioning arm or dinosaurs etc.

In one day using Unity and the VR Interaction Framework asset, with just a few clicks I had both arms working, a visible body with I.K, guns with removable magazines, reloading, chambering rounds, holsters, backpacks, physics, climbing. A few more assets later and a few more clicks I’ve got beautiful looking trees with LODs and with a couple more clicks you can now climb every tree in the game. There’s now animated dinosaurs running on Emerald A.I, functioning day night cycles with dynamic weather, an ocean system with tessellated waves and underwater caustics, a suite of terrain assets that make the map look better than any version I’ve ever worked on.

It sucks you guys don’t have VR, but you should look into it. If you get sick and can’t stomach it, that’s understandable, but there’s ways you can overcome this and in fact there’s methods I’ve used to completely cure my motion sickness. Like I said, my Oculus Rift DK1 made me so sick I had to sell it. Now I can’t remember the last time I felt even a little bit strange unless Im doing something really intense.

I will at some point release a version that has just a regular player controller, but you won’t be able to climb or interact with any items or objects. I have neither the time or skill to make any of the interaction stuff work, otherwise I would have done it years ago in cryengine.

Yes, I read all of your posts in-depth, just to clarify.


We're referring to the work you did up until the most recent posts on CryEngine. That map you shared images of was absolutely beautiful, yet it seems you've completely scrapped it in favour of the Unity project?

I can understand the ease-of-access when it comes to switching to Unity, especially with lack of programmers. But I just don't think Unity looks half as good as most other engines...it has a very distinct look to it that tends to be hard to avoid when it comes to its 3D renderer. I'm glad you're making such rapid progress on this engine, however I still must disagree that this version looks better than the previous ones you shared - those maps were absolutely beautiful, the new one does have that specific indescribable "Unity" look to it. Specifically the most recent screenshots you showed with the renovated Trespasser assets, which really read "Trespasser Remake". For example, I feel that this:

(Click on thumbnail for full size)

Looks far better than this, in almost every way - models, lighting, shading, terrain detail, etc:

(Click on thumbnail for full size)

To be brutally honest, the newest ones look more like "generic Unity dinosaur game" at the moment. I know there are Unity games which feel as if they're on a completely different engine so it's certainly possible to escape that Unity look, it's just that the current screenshots don't really do that for me.


Again, it's more a lack of interest in general in VR. I have no problems getting immersed in regular PC games, so putting a screen on my face and pretending I'm there makes little difference. A lot of VR games also seem to substitute playability and quality for this so-called "immersiveness", which is something that strongly irks me about modern game design philosophy. I'd argue that there are games which completely lack graphics which are more immersive than the most realistic VR world simulation. This is purely opinion stuff, of course.


That's nice to hear, for sure. Despite what I've said, don't let a non-VR version take away from the main project.

_________________
Current Project: Cloning Facility | My Release Thread

I had the chance to try a VR game called Boneworks on the HTC Vive this weekend and it is amazing! Manualy cocking, aiming, shooting, and reloading your gun in VR is so satisfying. It made me think of Trespasser the whole time; Trespasser is a VR game before VR was really a thing and needs to be ported over to VR. I'm looking forward to this project, hopefully VR headsets will be more affordable by then.

I've got a valve index, I got it mostly to do a Trespasser remake in VR, I've been spending the last few weeks getting set up in Unity learning the controls etc,

I hadn't wanted to post anything until I was confident I could produce the whole game but it looks like you've beaten me to it

Let me know if I can help out, even if it's to test on another headset, I have a computer science degree and C# knowledge

Stu from Tassie

Oh I am not negative against this project at all. I just have little interest in VR overall myself, but I am interested to see the progress of this!

_________________
Active project: Trespasser: Isla Sorna - Working on PH2-IT (and experimental BE-IT).

"...there used to be more benches, but InGen's workers removed them during the evacuation in the name of framerate."

https://youtu.be/DDsRfbfnC_A

That video settles the debate over Unity’s rendering capabilities.

I’ve got access to all the assets in that clip too, so at some point I’ll go through them and pick and choose what I want. At this early stage I need to be very conservative and continue prioritising performance then do a sweep through later and upgrade assets where performance allows.

If you’re not aware how VR works, you’re rendering your game twice, so if you PC runs a game at 50 FPS, in VR it’s probably going to be about 30 or less, which isn’t good. My headset runs at 90hz and you need to get close to hitting those targets because frame drops in VR are way more noticeable than on a normal display.

The images you’re comparing are only different due to the assets. Yes, there’s differences in shadow darkness and direction and there’s fake depth of field, but that same scene could be replicated in unity no problem and regardless of what opinion you’re forming based on 3 low res pics, the terrain system I’m using is infinitely better. Again, those assets aren’t lost, I don’t know how many times I have to say that. I’m simply not using them right now.

Your judging low res pics of a VR game and as anyone who actually plays VR knows, games look very different to their screenshots. Normal maps for example look almost tessellated in VR and detail overall looks increased. I’d almost go as far as saying what might be considered medium level detail in a regular game, looks like high detail in VR. The added depth from the 3D makes up for any reduction in density or detail. Less is more and even more so in VR.

Hi Stu from Tassie, I’m Larry from Victoria. Where abouts in tassie are you from? I’ve been to tassie once and absolutely loved it, looking forward to going back when my sons a bit older. I’ll never forget a mountain bike tour we did down Mt Wellington, it was legit terrifying at times, because there were some really inexperienced riders who got borderline tank-slapping handlebar shakes while doing about 40kph, it was insane!

I’m still very new to unity and scripting, so I’m sure some help will be much needed at times. I’m trying to figure out as much as I can for myself as i find there’s a lot of value in learning from my mistakes, as I tend to lock it in and remember it as opposed to if I just read a tutorial.

I just updated the blog about some dinosaur stuff I got working yesterday, it’s bloody fantastic and I’ll have to post a video clip of it in action when I get a chance.

Guess I'll just have to take your word that it looks better in VR. For someone like me who isn't going to be opting in on VR any time soon, however, I can only go by what I see on your blog, and I simply do not personally believe that it looks half as good as the old stuff. Obviously there have to be compromises made for VR (part of why I don't believe the technology is really "there" yet - I'd rather play a standard game with amazing graphics than VR with mediocre graphics...isn't the whole point of VR to look and feel real, anyway?), and those compromises appear to be making a negative impact on what I'm seeing in the screenshots. That's my opinion and I know obviously your work is subject to change. And I'd absolutely like to have my opinion changed in the future.


Yes, Unity is capable of games that look incredible, which is why I said:

What I was saying is that in my opinion from the screenshots you've shared, Tres VR specifically does not escape from that stock Unity look. It feels like I could jump into Unity right now, drop in a few shader and model assets, and get a similar look to what I am seeing here, as opposed to what is shown in the video you shared.


You didn't, at least not in your previous posts here...in fact I got the impression that you were using entirely new assets from what you've been saying. There was no mention of those assets being lost or not, but the complete lack of them in your recent screenshots implied heavily that they were no longer going to be used.


I feel the same way. I'm letting you know about the things I don't enjoy about this project as I would like to see it succeed; the old version was more appealing visually in my opinion and since visuals are all we really have to go off of at the moment, that is what I am offering criticism of.

I think it might be useful to know what others think of the visuals of Trespasser VR vs Trespasser Petrolia?

_________________
Current Project: Cloning Facility | My Release Thread

Im sorry if come across like a squealing fan girl, but im so glad that this project is still in the works. VR or not, and s13n1's old posts about his 1st occulus almost made me jump the gun back then and get it, but never had enough free time to actually make the purchase worth my while... and it was so f$%ckadidly-do expensive, too! Glad i skipped it, but there might be a new incentive for such a thingamajig soon, im guessing. probably will need to get a padded room too, and ban my kid from entering it, dont wanna knockout the little lassie while smacking down compies with a baseball bat.

I've been doing a fair bit of research into the VR market recently, especially since I wanted to do a trespasser remake. The market should open up soon and headsets and prices should come down. Varjo appears to be making a new consumer level device, Vive appears to be doing something, Steam looks to be making a wireless headset etc

The new wireless standard is apparently going to be able to handle the bandwidth for high quality graphics too.

i believe that in my country we have highest MSRP prices on it hardware and electronic appliances, tax of import is enormous. So if you try to buy something that has lower price from germany like caseking.de, that means that you cant pay in rates or installments and having a cheaper price means you need to pay whole sum at once and that is frankly out of my league, paying almost one monthly paycheck for a gpu for example is not a valid option.

GPU prices are ridiculously high everywhere right now. Mainly due to the pandemic, the chip shortage, and the rise of crypto-mining.

Prices are pretty high in Aus too, I am lucky that I have a fairly well paying job and my kids are getting to an age that I can be left alone to play games again. This is the first computer I've bought in 10 years and I've gotten a good enough one to do 3D modelling and game desgin.