VR development appears to be slowing

[tempestornado23]

Is it me or does it appear as if the VR development focus is slowing down? When I look at the bug list and wish list it feels like the estimated timelines keep moving out and.or more of them now say “not started”. Here’s the latest snapshots. [BLOG] April 8th, 2021 Development Update

I get the fact that VR is the smaller user base for sure but it’s still disappointing to see this when they appear to spending most resources on world updates and not making as much progress on bugs in 2D, let alone VR performance smoothness, and optimization. I suppose that’s what sells more software in more markets to a largely 2D user base (plus VR is more demanding on the hardware so it may always be lower priority from a software side view) so this is a business decision on what maximizes revenue.

Perhaps the developers will comment on this or get asked about it at the Live Q and A that is next week.

[Adystealth]

I’m surprised it’s not given a higher priority in MSFS2020 incredibly MSFS2020 was released without even working with VR , everyone I know that uses a PC for games/sim are just using VR or about to get a headset & tend to give titles that work best with VR priority

[CptLucky8]

@tempestornado23

it’s still disappointing to see this when they appear to spending most resources on world updates and not making as much progress on bugs in 2D, let alone VR performance smoothness, and optimization. I suppose that’s what sells more software in more markets to a largely 2D user base

I’ve written some comments lately about the first part of your remark, where I’m trying to help assessing the technical implications of some of the VR items. It would be presumptuous qualifying these as “very small coding work tasks” because it depends on the overall code context, nevertheless, from a technical standpoint, and in isolation, there is not much more to do with these items than what I’ve listed IMHO:

@CptLucky8

In addition, I’d like to pass these comments because some of the bugs and wishes are technically less complex and most likely easier to solve and implement more rapidly than what the snapshot is indicating:

Bug	Comment
1. Increase Distance Threshold to See Aircraft Lights	This was increased for 3D mode previously, it might just be the threshold value have not been propagated back in the VR pixel shaders and/or VR code. I understand 2021-22 is conservative but this doesn’t look like a very complex fix either?!
7. Propellers and Reprojection	There are mods already for most aircraft and the solution to this is to make sure the alpha value in the texture doesn’t go above a certain threshold. It seems 25% alpha is working but this should be easy to try out with a set of textures with varying alpha, and establish which threshold is working with WMR, with SteamVR and with Oculus.

Wishes	Comment
2. Cockpit Size and World Scale in VR	It is basically setting up a translation matrix based on a UI slider, and then do a matrix mul per eye… nothing more.
6. Can you please add a “Sun Glasses” mode	It is basically reducing exposure in the existing Tone Mapper by 1 or 2 stops… nothing more either. (no need for displaying a pair of glasses in 3D in front of the eyes for example)
13. Render Sun with Fading Disk when Bloom is Disabled	In lieu of a reduced version of the Bloom shader which would be working only on the sun pixels (hard to separate this from the rest because the bloom is a whole screen shader), a simple Sun with blooming light texture overlay would probably give enough visually pleasing results.

As for the 2nd part of your remark, I’ve just commented about a different point of view. You might want to read the rest of it!

@CptLucky8

Re: “Xbox Q&A makes no sense”

I’m sorry to disagree but to me, there are other ways to look at this.

On one hand, Windows and Xbox are converging entirely in the Microsoft Gaming strategy. However most 3rd party devs are used to PC dev, not Xbox dev, and this is why there might be some specific questions regarding this new ecosystem which we’d want to ask.

But on the other hand, because dev tools and technologies are entirely converging and are making no distinction between PC and Xbox from a game and technology perspective, I believe there shouldn’t much questions coming from 3rd party devs otherwise this would defeat the very principle of convergence.

But you could look at all this in an entirely different way than before: the game main target audience is…

[CodeLoran69]

@tempestornado23

let alone VR performance smoothness, and optimization

Just adding: The CPU spikes we experience are the same in 2D and in VR, and have obviously more impact on a immersed VR user, so IMHO optimizing the core engine for smoothness and optimization will benefit for monitor and VR session. In other worlds, this is linked, and not a VR specific work.

[MarcG888]

They had an entire team working on the (belated) implementation, wishes are STILL “TBD” and Bugs have barely any acknowledgement after 3+ months…it doesn’t make good reading.

As if it wasn’t bad enough that they didn’t include VR from the start we now get a half baked implementation with no signs of solid improvement. Sure the last big patch had a few VR areas in it, but they also broke the in flight Windows with no signs of them getting fixed and there was no movement to improve anything, let alone add solid features.

Seems to me they just wanted to get it out there and forget about it, frankly this disappoints me greatly.

[Darkgaming029]

I said this from the start that a Flight Sim released in 2020 without neither native VR support nor a single helicopter is absolutely shocking. What were they thinking? Or perhaps they weren’t.

[Betze59]

It’s fascinating. In the MS/Asobo Q&A yesterday >1h and only 5 seconds spent on VR (Jörg mentioning controller support is in the works). Some people seem to work on VR but this clearly isn’t a priority. Since the beta we had 2 updates (public release, and last sim update). 2 updates in 5 months…
At this point we can just hope that the XBOX improvements carry over nicely to VR but VR in itself seems so be a side-product although Jörg and Martial mentioning that they only use VR at this point…

[tempestornado23]

I agree with you on the carryover benefits of better memory optimization, etc. But once Xbox launches then VR users will be a very small percentage of the total and it stands to reason that most development resources will go to Xbox (a large new revenue source), then PC and VR will be way at the back of the line. That’s a realistic view given that VR is also the most resource demanding on hardware and will never have a user base as large as Xbox or PC. Hopefully the optimization for 2D carries over in general FPS and smoothness improvements all around.

[CodeLoran69]

@Betze7210

Jörg and Martial mentioning that they only use VR at this point

This give me tons of hope, and they seems to be honest here. So let’s be positive!

[Blacknet]

Microsoft lost me on the XBox. First VR should come for XBox, then again not, then after all … a back and forth. Then I decided to invest in a new PC and Steam in order to use VR. If the Playstation 5 gets a good VR headset next year, I’ll buy the Playstation 5. Sony has many very good games for VR, all of which I haven’t played yet due to lack of PS5. From that point on, I only use my new PC for gaming purposes for X-Plane and MSFS.