Originally Posted by stenyak Originally Posted by

We are assuming that Oculus decided to put effort specifically to break Revive, but that is not necessarily the case (no one knows for sure, all we know is Revive didn't continue working in the last update, that's it).

But they may have decided to try to break ALL other headsets (not specifically Vive), maybe because they saw the incoming influx of low-end VR headsets that may be coming this year and the next, with who knows what kind of persistency issues or unstable head tracking, and Revive has reminded them that similar software may pop up in the future allowing people to get discomfort with these cheap headsets, and then automatically associating it with the Oculus brand.





Now, regarding to what we actually know, which is that Revive broke:



Not all games work with Revive. As an example, the aforementioned The Climb game is not working currently. Revive is a damn fine piece of software, but it cannot have the same level of refinement as a natively developed game. I'm not talking about "hey, it works for me, in the computer in my basement!" kind of refinement. I'm talking about "after exhaustive testing plans, it is shown to work for 99.999% of people, with these known corner cases being problematic".



For example, what happens when Revive has a bug that affects 1% of users? Maybe lower performance due to some weird interaction when using who knows what specific driver/hardware/software combination? (if whoever is reading this is a developer, then you know what I mean). And what if the users are not even able to realize that the problem exists purely because of the headset conversion (due to lack of experience/knowledge), and assumes the problem is the game they bought on Oculus Home? Do you think game developers will go out of their way and test their software with this Revive thingie everyone talks about in some VR forums on the internet, to make sure no such problems exist? Nope, Revive is almost certainly not included in any testing plan.





And let's not talk about ATW, which last time I took a look, is not working when using Revive (again, please correct me if I'm wrong). ATW is not some minor detail. It's a technology developed by Oculus, available in Oculus runtime, whose only purpose is to prevent nausea.



Nobody gives a damn about rendering 89fps instead of 90fps in your desktop screen. But your brain and stomach can complain about it in a VR headset. Note that I always keep in mind the 10% of people that are likely to get discomfort; I know some people who could play on their DK2 with pre v1.3 runtimes (without ATW) at 30FPS for hours and not feel any discomfort. But the problem here is the people that do.



Valve decided to go a different way, and haven't put any effort towards solving this nausea problem (or, to be correct, have not shown any result; I don't have any insider information on that front).

Sure, they developed this adaptive graphics quality stuff, but that does not help in case of sudden framerate drops. It's a nice system, but it serves a completely different purpose than ATW, no matter what some people think or claim; Valve system cannot cope with many problems unless they go async and inject frames when running late for the next frame. Running late is not necessarily the game's fault, it can be a problem in the OS scheduler when prioritizing processes, and reducing graphics quality won't influence what Windows is doing. ATW is currently the only way to really solve the nausea problem, as far as I know.



If you were Oculus, and you cared that much about the physical comfort, and have gone to these great lengths to implement a working, solid solution, then IMHO it is understandable when Oculus does not want people to associate their name with discomfort, no matter how unlikely it is to happen (remember, it's the 10% of people that counts).



Still, since I'm a VR junkie and I know my stuff, from my personal point of view I would prefer that I can try these experiments, because I know I would not happily jump the trigger and accuse Oculus for any nausea I get. But the target in this generation is not VR junkies, but rather tech enthusiasts and general population, who may not be into VR as much as some of us.