this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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VR biplane combat sim, with heavy emphasis on your plane as a location and an object. A massive but oddly fragile thing you can walk around, on the grass, for a real sense of scale. The prop-shaft is eye-level and there's another four feet of plane above that. It's this massive ungainly thing you have to climb onto, and then into, before convincing it to leave the ground. All so you can push it to the edges of its capabilities versus other google-wearing maniacs doing much the same.
The interwar period is just about ideal for the physicality of air combat. Speeds are comprehensibly low, while still blasting past anyone stuck on the dirt. The machine has a manageable number of controls, all bracingly direct, and you can watch the wings flex from whatever you ask of them. If you need to see ahead while taking off, you lean over the side.
All of this is suitable for a sitting-and-standing VR experience. You probably don't have access to enough room for a proper walkaround. But you should readily develop enough of a feel to do proper barnstorming.
It'd actually be hilarious to have this set in the era when the pilot's handheld weaponry or even just throwing a goddamn brick at the other plane were viable tactics
It'd absolutely be an option. If nothing else, if you glance aside when you pass someone going the opposite direction, you are going to see the whites of their eyes and maybe a rude gesture. There's every reason to let you twist in your chair and pop off with an old-timey revolver.
But if you fire it through the props, you will be landing ahead of schedule.
A biplane vr sim would be fun, there's plenty of interactions to dive into, like adjusting the engines and clearing gun jams.
I've long wanted a single person tank/artillery simulator and guess I'll just have to build it. Something about choosing a target and ammo type, grabbing shells from stowage, opening the breech, slamming it home, driving a tank and standing in a cupula just have vr interaction fun written all over.
Tank sims seem constrained and tactile for VR. You can poke your head out by standing up... whether or not the hatch is open. You'd just go through. Fabric-based aircraft are open enough that most movin' around is a valid option, in real life, and the controls are simple and loose enough that a virtual stick will just about do.
? you've got interactions with the radio, map, gun comp, throttle, steering, all the parts of running the main gun.... I see tons of opportunity and that's before you add fuzzy dice and fancy keyrings and custom painting the beast lol
I've created a solution for this already. Well, two:
one is, while standing up to look out the hatch is fun, it's probably better a seated game. I put a collision box near the underside that triggers the hatch to open. it's still janky (not interpolating smoothly) but that's just details.
the better way, imho, instead of standing from a seated position while wearing vr shit, which even with a quest is still janky in my experience, is just having a button to elevate the chair so they're seated at the cupula rim. a quick fade in and fade out coming and going might help.
but tell you what, if I can make this happen, you make your sopwith sim and we'll jam'em together so I can light up your lovely canvas with the commander's ma-deuce! :D would love to have that in both games, swooping bomb runs and minitanks lol
Constrained in the sense that physical mechanisms would stop you, but a handheld controller cannot. Operating a tank is extremely tactile. There's a literal ton of moving parts in a very tight space. It is a gun you are inside of.
Steel Battalion's infamously enormous Xbox controller was halfway to a child's toy dashboard because the only way to convey all those fiddly dials and levers was to actually provide them. Complexity within the game is not the same experience. It has to be present in-person. Quitting is not a menu option; it's an ejection key you grip with white knuckles until the last second.
The HOTAS experience for some Red Baron shit is a Wiimote duct-taped to a broomstick. Force feedback would be massively better, but the stick not corresponding to the plane is a realistic possibility when things go fully pear-shaped. This goal and available technology align especially well.
I'd argue the ideal home tank game is a smartphone app you slot in front of the itty-bitty window of a glorified Rubbermaid container before climbing inside. Map all the thumbsticks and triggers of a generic controller onto widgets and switches on the lid. Disguise the main cannon's foam round having nowhere to go by curling it down and back into the magazine when you shove it forward. Convey recoil within that tube by projecting a ring of light that slides back and forth.
... now I'm wondering how cheaply you could do a low-friction bowl so the whole thing can rock unpredictably with your center-of-gravity. Maybe just make the bottom round, and extend little legs when the treads are still.
yeah no pass on that hard pass kthx
I am imagining the horrible graphics of Red Baron 3d (1998) played at a ludicrously crisp frame rate through VR goggles. The game had fast forward and play buttons because it took so long to fly over to the trenches or to ascend to a decent altitude. Solid idea though, it would be hectic with numerous biplanes dog fighting over France.
Edit: there are youtube videos of players using VR headsets and flying biplanes on IL-2 Sturmovik: Flying Circus (2019).