AMS1 working in VR

yes, i forgot to mention that. Num-pad 5 recentres the view

 

I am a little sick so can't try AMS 1 in VR but hope is a couple of days.
If it works as well as the VR implementation for GTR2 by the same guys it is great!
look forward to trying out the great open wheelers and some mods.

 

Very interesting, I guess I have no more excuse not to buy AMS.
I am already enjoying AMS2.

 

While this is great news, I could not get it to work with my Oculus Rift.
Can somebody point me to a place where I can offer my information to the devs (and do any kind of tests they may need)?

TIA!

 

Excited to try it later this afternoon!
Just reinstalling AMS1 the first time since 2017....so many good memories.

 

Did you start steam vr first?

 

quick heads-up, if you find that the ">" button to advance to the track isn't reachable with the mouse pointer in VR, you'll need to run the config application again and lower the resolution (note that this only affects the layout and scaling of the menu screens, not the in-car VR image)

 

I had some (just a little) time to test it now and overall it works. But it still feels quite unfinished in some places. Maybe some of the issues are Oculus Rift S (don't have any other VR headset to test) related?

What didn't work well for me:
- Something about the head tracking and/or field of view feels off. When i turn my head it feels like the image distorts a lot on the outside. I get a similar effect in the Madness Engine in screenshot mode when i zoom out a few degrees in VR.
- The positional head tracking is not 1:1. When for example i lean forward about 15 or 20 cm it feels like the ingame camera moves 30 or 40 cm or even more. This, in combination with the distortions from the fov issue mentioned above, feels very nauseating (which is the reason i had to stop testing more)
- Another thing i've noticed is that the images for the left and right eye are not perfectly synced. Sometimes it feels like one eye sees something a single frame earlier than the other eye.
- It seems like i can't disable the lock to horizon feature, the car always moves around my head position.
- The menus work, but for some reason the font is too large and the aspect ratio is a bit weird (1:1 instead of 16:9). I'll post a screenshot to show what i mean:



On the positive side:
- All the buttons in the menus work.
- Image quality is good as well. Everything looks very crisp and the anti aliasing does what it should do. I really miss MSAA in a lot of modern game engines. Works so much better than all the post processing effects like FXAA, SMAA, TAA etc.
- Performance ist great too on my system, no stutter or frame drops at all so far.

Overall quite nice for a first beta release. Just needs a few bugs fixed and to be polished a bit here and there.

 

that's very very different to the experience I get on the Valve Index. I see no distortion at all and head tracking is absolutely perfect so something odd is going on there. I'm installing the game onto my old PC which has a HTC Vive, so i'll be able to test with an older headset (but not a Rift).

[edit]

I see a similar issue with the menu font and sizing, but to be clear, once on track it looks exactly like a native VR implementation for me

 

Can confirm that distortion thingy with Rift, will do more testing tomorrow

 

there must be something in the maths that we've missed, where things line up for the Index but not the Rift. It's puzzling and surprising

 

Erm - no, I started the Oculus software. Will start Steam VR and test again. Thanks for that. Maybe that should be in the readme

 

there's no mention of SteamVR in the readme, I forgot about it

I've just tested this on my HTC Vive and it works correctly - the tracking is exactly right and the stereo convergence is also perfect, so if there's something wrong in our maths it's specific to Rift users. We're looking into it so there'll be an update soon but we'll be unable to confirm if it improves things without some testing help

 

OMG !! This is great news ... As far as i'm concerned Reiza should have never stopped support for AMS 1. The Simulation is simply awesome and now that it's working in VR it only gets better. I can't for the life of me understand why they would polish their creation to an almost a perfect level and then drop it like yesterdays news. It's got fantastic FFB , great racing , a polished overall feel and the gold standard in AI.
VR support and the implementation of an AI defensive driving line was all that was needed to really put things over the top. The racing community likes mods and modding and with AMS 2 being virtually unmoddable , it's shelf life is going to be very limited. Releasing more cars and tracks ever other month only goes so far when the end user has completely random grids from race to race with no ability to adjust AI talents in order form a proper grid.
If generating revenue was the driving force behind AMS 2 then why not release quality paid DLC content for AMS 1 , perfect the Artificial Intellegence and add native VR support ? I would gladly support Reiza with that .
For now I look and AMS 1 as unfinished work that had so much promise and potential until it was unceremoniously dropped

 

Stereo convergence seems fine in the Rift S (although it would be a nice feature to change it manually for people with a very high or very low ipd). It's just that weird zoomed out distortion effect. Maybe the mod uses the same fov for all headsets? I think Vive and Index have a larger fov than Rift CV1 and Rift S. So that might be what's causing that distortion effect.

 

The mod uses the data reported by steam vr so it already takes headset config and everything into account. We'll review the maths, there might be an incorrect transform somewhere which doesnt show up on the Vive and Index. I did make a small tweak to one of the transforms and updated the zip file, try re-downloading and replace the CrewChiefVR.dll with the newer one. It's unlikely to be the fix but it's worth a look.

If anyone has a Vive or Index I'd like to hear your experience with this.

 

wanted to record my issues, but recording is relatively ok ratio/format is strange tho, considering that i was recording 16:9 window. How does your menu looks like @mr_belowski? mine is distorted aswell, perfectly usable tho

(latest tweak)

 

That's interesting. Your eye position appears to be at the back of your head, not the front.

We'll sort this out, while it's great on Vive and index, it's clearly not working as intended on rift / rift s. I'll keep you posted

 

I just reinstalled AMS this morning and jumped into it with my Odyssey +. I chose the FV10 and Speilberg historic. After a few laps , jumped into a race from the back of the grid and had a fantastic race with the AI. I had forgotten how good the AI was and the FB. Graphically it is great, frametimes on my rtx 2060 are in the 5 ms range no stutters, but the fps does range between 90 fps and the high 70's. For a first go at this in vr it is very promising. I had more fun than in AMS2 actually. Until I can upgrade my graphic card to 3080 or 6800xt this looks like my go to as 90 fps at high quality in AMS 2 is unreachable on the 2060. Thanks for your hard work, can't wait to see how it progresses.

 

Holy crap. I just started testing Automobilista today finally after testing out all the other sims. I put it off because it has no VR. Then I just hoped that there was some VR support now. This is awesome.