[Just to preface this I didn’t put this in the suggestions category because I don’t really expect full VR support for every game world to happen (at least not any time soon) and I wanted to make this post more as sharing my thoughts on “what if this happened” rather than “the devs should make this happen”]
Something that I’ve always wondered about regarding VR support is how game worlds could control. Sadly the current plan is just making VR support for the plaza and condos but i still wanted to throw my ideas out here anyway, because I’d really love to see proper vr support added for them eventually (being able to explore the maps in vr would be a nice compromise, though)
Minigolf
I’ve thought about a couple ways the camera and putting could be controlled.
For putting, in both methods you would stand on the course like real golf and putt with a club, also like real golf. You would also control where the ball goes by walking around it (either irl or with joystick/teleport) and putting it in the desired direction.
- In the first method, you would simply swing the golf ball, and the further away and harder you swing, the larger the power is. I’m not sure how the power meter could possibly predict how hard you swing, though, which may be a problem
- For the second one, you would move the club closer or further from the ball to control the power. After getting the right amount of power you want, you would click the trigger to lock in the power. You could also press another button to cancel as well. Putting at any strength will hit with the same amount of power. This could be more consistent and more similar to desktop minigolf, but also removes a bit of realism in the process
For the camera, you would be able to walk around the course in a radius around the golf ball. You could raise and lower yourself as well, to get a good view above hills and walls. I had a couple ideas for how it could work while the ball is moving:
- for the first idea, you wouldn’t move with the golf ball at all. Instead, you’d see a large outline of where it is after putting it, and you would have to walk/teleport around the course to walk back to the putting radius. If it takes you too long to do this, the game would automatically teleport you back after fading to black to avoid disorienting you.
- for the second idea, it’d just work identically to desktop minigolf. This has an obvious disadvantage of probably causing extreme motion sickness, though.
Game Worlds w/ 3rd person (Ball Race, Virus, LC)
This is possibly too simple of a solution to this problem but, for game worlds with a mix of first person and third person elements, you would have 3d arms and everything for 1st person (knights, survivors), and then in 3rd person (infected, dragon) you would basically just be the camera and play the game as you would using a controller (the camera would behave differently, though).
One issue 3rd person would likely have in VR is that it’d be very disorienting if it worked exactly the same as desktop. But, I have a couple ideas for how it could be made a bit better for VR.
- You would just move the camera horizontally, and not vertically.
- You could use snap turning with the 3rd person camera. You would still control your character with full 360 degree movement since movement and camera rotation would be handled with separate thumbsticks, but being able to use snap turning rather than smooth turning would probably help a lot for avoiding motion sickness in 3rd person
- Additionally, an accessibility option in many VR games could be implemented to combat motion sickness when turning (or just doing any quick movements at all). Basically how it works is your field of view is lowered a bit (depending on how strong you set the setting) whenever you move fast at all, which makes fast movements like turning quickly less disorienting
For Ball Race you would just always have 3rd person controls since it’s always 3rd person.
Zombie Massacre
To be honest I only have one okay-ish idea for how this could work in VR and even then it’s kind of lazy and wouldn’t be that great. Basically, you’d be rotated so your standing position is parallel to the floor of the level, which would retain the top down view without needing to strain your neck by looking straight down for 20 minutes, instead you’d basically just have to look at a wall, kinda. You would just control your survivor using similar controls to controllers.
Alternatively you could be in first person but I think that would be such a drastic change in how you play the game that it’d work much better as a mutator or something.
Accelerate
This is pretty straightforward mostly. Accelerate could maybe have 3rd person support with the motion sickness accessibility feature i mentioned above? idk. For first person mode, though, you’d be able to actually steer the kart by spinning the steering wheel (workshop karts might need a floating wheel to show up in vr since they cant have modeled and animated steering wheels). When you pick up a consumable item, you’d just have to press a button to use it. To drift, you would make a sharp wheel rotation in the direction you wanna drift in. For throwable weapons, you’d physically throw them forward or back depending on how you’re feeling at the moment.
That’s all of the ideas i had, sorry if these suck or are confusing im writing this at 2am and i took some melatonin earlier