(Speculative) Mount & Blade II: VRlord Thread

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Scarf Ace

Sergeant Knight at Arms
DISCLAIMER: NOTHING REGARDING VR IN BANNERLORD HAS BEEN CONFIRMED OR EVEN HINTED AT IN ANY WAY. THIS POST IS PURE WISHFUL THINKING.

As pretty much everyone should know by now, Valve and Oculus have both announced consumer versions of their headsets as well as powerful motion controllers with superior precision and latency compared to anything that has been released before.

This could be unbelievably awesome for the whole "cutting things with swords and stuff" genre. It could potentially be a great thing for TW to pursue some time after the Bannerlord release. VR itself is pretty hype, and combined with quality motion controllers it sounds like a no-brainer that you'd probably want to chop at some heads with it. It all sounds so simple! You attack and turn with your body and run around with the stick/weird-valve-touch-thing.

So basically, swinging a sword around with super-detailed tracking sounds perfect, but I think some things needed to be taken into account. What happens if your sword hits an obstacle, gets parried, blocked, etc? You can't have your sword just go through everything after all. Or what if you flail around your controllers like Starwarskid in a way that would be impossible if you were carrying something that actually had some weight to it?
The answer is to let the avatar's motions "desync" whenever the laws of physics start complaining. However, seeing your body do stuff ingame that you real body isn't doing is apparently confusing and awful in VR. What you'd need to fix this is some sort of "ghost" representing your exact, real life movements to appear whenever your character's movements are "desynced".
The obvious tricky bit is that in order to make such a system requires a sort of physics and inverse-kinematics based system to detect when things have gotten strange. You'd also need to somehow create a way to make your character try to resync with your RL movements on its own. 

There's also the issue of compatibility. It probably wouldn't work well in conjunction with the regular KB+M system as it would allow for far more control. So you'd need a wholly different system for the AI as well, and as for MP, you probably can't have the VR folks playing with the KB+M folks. I think therefore the VR version would have to be a separate module or so.
Another problem is two handed weapons. The controllers we've seen so far are simply too small to be held in two hands. As for polearms? Lolno. I'm pretty sure though that Valve at least has an open enough tracking system that in theory some company could make a "staff controller", but who the hell would buy that?


Oh, and playing on horseback would be fabulous. The best way would probably be to grab a stool or something. Then you'd slaughter the filthy horseless peasants by manually aiming your lance and leaning to the side as you hack away at them with your sword.
Archery would be pretty odd I guess. Either you'd have to just point and shoot with a controller or draw the two controllers like in a bow in crappy wii game. Crossbows could be used in conjunction with a gun-shaped controller if you have one, or you just point and shoot with your controller (which is boring).


tl;dr:
VR could potentially be awesome in a game like Mount & Blade but it would probably be expensive and risky to implement. Also, you'd probably look very silly while playing M&B:VR

 
Have tried out the DK2 with elite at a friends house and also was able to try the crescent bay demo at PAX East by waiting in line for 4 hours (totally worth it). Mounted combat with m&kb + oculus would be a dream that must be achieved, or else!
 
I wonder if people would get travel sick from riding on horses though....not to mention falling off! It looks great in first person when you have ragdolls active; you go head over heels usually. I imagine one might feel dizzy doing it in virtual reality.
 
DanAngleland said:
I wonder if people would get travel sick from riding on horses though....not to mention falling off! It looks great in first person when you have ragdolls active; you go head over heels usually. I imagine one might feel dizzy doing it in virtual reality.
People play and enjoy racing games in VR, so cav should be fine as long as you don't bounce around too much.
As for falling... Don't get hit!  :twisted:
Or just do a fade to black, which is apparently a common solution to falling and getting killed in VR games.
 
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