How Physics & VR Are Changing Gaming Forever

virtual reality and physics are a match made in heaven let me show you the many ways that this incredible combination is changing the way we play video games forever from how we shoot and handle guns use melee weapons like swords and even just the more basic stuff like interacting with the world and environment so let's get on with it it all starts with your hands because we're holding controllers that track our movements one to one we can reach out and touch stuff take a door for example you can reach out grab the handle give it a Twist and then push or pull the door open you have full control over it so you can open it slightly to Peak and see us through the other side then use your hand or even the pistol that you hold in just land the door open and shoot a gun all over the place foreign games that really Embrace physics have full collisions early VR games will let your hands ghost through objects or enemies but now a lot of more modern VR games stop your hands from going through solid objects this allows more freedom for the player to Simply push objects to one side when Scavenging for ammo grab a draw or cupboard and pull it open to Lou when valve was placed testing Half-Life Alex they found players would spend the significantly longer in areas taking the time and look at all the details over playing something on a regular monitor so they're made sure to add as much detail as possible to the environments and make sure that everything you would expect to be able to pick up you could they also give people a reason to go searching in every nook and cranny by hiding ammo and resin which was used to upgrade the guns in the game another game that really embraced physics and VR was bomb works and the sequel bone lab they made sure that you could pick up pretty much everything in the game this opens up more options and possibilities for the player take this table for example in a non-vr game this would simply be a set dressing to fill up the environment to make the virtual space more believable in bone lab you can use it as a table to put things on flip it on its side and use it as cover pick it up and use it as a mobile Shield or even grab it and hit enemies with it using it as a weapon you could also pick it up and take it somewhere else to then stand on it and use it to get up to higher places you can also use it as the Ultimate Weapon against the AI and just put it in the path to stop them getting to you unfortunately you can't use objects in Half-Life Flex as a weapon as they didn't allow the player to use melee attacks but you can use things like a chair to block flying headcrabs from attacking you or even just catch them mid-air with your hands they do have the signature zombie swipe from other Half-Life games so zombies can literally hit objects in front of them like a barrel and send them flying towards you bone lab introduced a really cool Avatar system this is where you can change into different avatars that not only look different but also have different levels of strength and abilities so for example this little girl is small and weak so will struggle to pick up heavier objects but if you change to the buff dude now you can pick them up with ease or you could even change to the bigger guy who moves slowly but is very strong and can literally pick up enemies and throw them around citizen citizen they've got a character which is very tall making it easier to climb sections of the game it's a great feature that unfortunately wasn't using the campaign enough and you only end up getting into the better stuff towards the end of the game I feel like this sort of system should be used more in VR games because it could be great in some sort of RPG where you have to create a character and upgrade the stats or maybe use some sort of injectables or potions which temporarily allow you to move faster or be stronger for a certain amount of time these avatars also affect things like scale and weapon handling if you choose a really small character then a pistol will look massive but with the tall guy it looks tiny it affects how much recoil a gun has so back to using a little girl and this SMG will recall around a lot but with the buff guy it barely moves around gun handling is something that also benefits massively from VR and physics obviously the way you hold a name weapons in VR feels so much more natural than moving a reticle on a screen valve said that during play testing they were surprised how even novice Gamers were able to aim guns in VR with great accuracy which is why they added little weak spots on enemies like the valve poking out over the shoulder on the tank of some combines which if you shoot will cause the tank to explode there's a weak spot on the arm and headcrabs being under its belly and the ant lions which need to be shot limb to limb before finishing with the main abdomen bone lab has got Dynamic recoil so after each shot of the gun the force of the bullet will come backwards you can actually reduce recoil by 200 in the weapon but also by doing things like resting the gun onto something then using your other hand on top you can't talk about guns in VR without talking about hot dogs Horseshoes and Hand Grenades a game that has over 100 guns with incredible attention to detail you can do things like Rucker slide on a pistol using the environment because each part of the gun is classed as its own physics object the guns also operate like the real-life counterparts so when you rock a slide if you look through the bullet ejection hole you can see that the bullet will travel from the magazine and get loaded into the chamber you can also look down the end of the barrel and see the bullet sat in there each time you pulled back the slide a bullet is ejected and a new bullet will travel from the magazine into the chamber most games fake this so like in contractors when you pull back the slide you see a bullet that teleports into the chamber and after each pull a fake bullet flies out but the same bullet stays in place this is the easiest way to do it and it doesn't really affect the gameplay you just show the attention to detail of H3 VR when it comes to the guns and how they work if you have something with full physics you can also use the guns for other things like in this example I need to hold open a filing cabinet which is on its side because if I let it go it drops back down again I can simply Slide the gun under the drawer to hold it in place while I reach him with my other hand to grab inside you can use guns as melee weapons in some games like bone lab where you can pistol whip an enemy in fact pretty much any object you can pick up in bone Labs can be used as a weapon including your own head so you can grab a head crab and headboard it to death melee is also massively affected by VR and physics we're seeing more and more hack and slash combat VR games use physics to enhance a fighting game weapons don't go through enemies they will hit and bounce off sometimes you do end up in junky situations which I will talk about more towards the end of this video but that's just part of the trade-off with physics stuff what it doesn't allow is for much more freedom to the player to attack enemies in so many different ways and the weapons can be stabbed into them you can chop off limbs you've got games like walking dead Saints and Sinners which has got a really cool melee system where weapons stick in Zombies but depending on the sharpness of the weapon depends on how easy they are to pull out so they end up getting stuck and you really have to pull and tug on them to loosen them off this is really effective at ramping up tension when a horde of zombies are coming for you because you can't just walk around bonking them in the head one after the other before we wrap up this video let's talk about the bad side of physics in VR not every game leans heavily into physics because integrative physics and full collisions into a game in a polished way that doesn't potentially degrade the overall gameplay is extremely difficult and if you look at games that are fully embracing it like blade and sorcery and Bone lab you inevitably end up with things getting funky and Jank sometimes it's just immersion breaking and sometimes it can just get in the way if you're actually playing the game cause frustration I think physics can massively improve a VR game but it has to be done right it's important to get that balance between what enhances and improves the game and what gets in the way Half-Life Alex is the game that has clearly had an incredible amount of time put into it by a very experienced set of developers they've added things like full collisions into the game in a way that you rarely see issues or experience glitches or Jank they didn't personally like how melee felt in VR with physics so they left it out which a lot of people don't like but I do agree that having a VR game with full physics combat seems almost impossible to do in a way that doesn't have issues Health split arena is my current favorite simply because it feels very polished the enemy animations are done in a way that you don't experience as many strange Behavior previous unlike blade and sorcery where the enemies can be very jerky and it's hard to get through a play session without something not happening with gun reloading most VR games of the magazine go up into the gun some use an animation to finish the reload and this is because going full physics like hot dogs Horseshoes and grenades can cause issues but if you don't get the magazine land perfectly you end up having to make multiple attempts to get it in H3 VR also has issues with the gun you hold in and collisions so when the gun presses up against something or other weapons it becomes very jittery and ends up getting very janky I think it's a real shame that valve hasn't made Source 2 open source with all the interactions physics and systems in place that they developed for Half-Life Alex because overall for me I find that Source 2 is the most complete polished and accurate in terms of physics and feel and allowing other developers the opportunity to take all of that work well put in making release their own games with it and obviously valve could charge for the license based on game sales very much like unreal and unity but they haven't so for now we'll continue to see games released with physics and the usual Jank and it would be nice to see more AAA Studios take on this approach so we can see some more fully fleshed out VR games that have the sort of quality Half-Life Alex does and that's the end of the video let me know what you think to VR games that are using physics in interesting ways and what are your personal favorites as always thank you so much to my patrons and YouTube members your support means a lot

Channel: Virtual Insider

Views: 98,713

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Id: OdNrdsig-TY

Length: 9min 51sec (591 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 08 2023