Author Topic: [QUESTION] CoH / Paragon Chat Oculus Support?  (Read 4061 times)

tamborjam

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[QUESTION] CoH / Paragon Chat Oculus Support?
« on: April 15, 2016, 09:15:41 PM »
How difficult would it be to tweak the CoH files enough to get stereoscopic graphics / VR to work?

slickriptide

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Re: [QUESTION] CoH / Paragon Chat Oculus Support?
« Reply #1 on: April 22, 2016, 05:11:31 PM »
Since you're not getting any other answer here, I'll contribute what I'll warn in advance is a somewhat unsatisfactory one.

The short version is that you can't* do it. It's something that needed to be designed into the graphics engine from the ground up to be really feasible.

I looked into this very thing several years ago when the game was still alive and kicking and I was playing a lot with things like iZ3D (which you can still download and use for anaglyphic 3D if your game supports DirectX; it has the Slickriptide seal of approval).

City of Heroes isn't based on DirectX. It's OpenGL-based. There are good and bad consequences of this, but the "bad" for 3D is that there are no really functional OpenGL 3D drivers. (At least, last time I did any active searching for such.)

There's this scene in the movie _Beetlejuice_, the social worker tells the dead main-characters couple, "That's how he dies. That's how *he* (pointing at another person) dies. That's how she dies. It's all very personal." 3D in OpenGL is a lot like that. The various frame buffers and what-not (that's a technical graphics programmer term, :-p ) all have to deal with creating stereo input at a low enough level that they're effectively coupled to the game engine.

I tried several OpenGL libraries that supposedly attempted to act as general-purpose 3D "filters" and none of them worked. The only OpenGL games that supported 3D in any fashion that worked properly were games that had a 3D option built into the game as a feature.

In short - It's never going to happen because nobody is ever going to have the incentive or the source code to hack on the Cryptic Engine or whatever else in CoH it is that drives the graphics rendering functions. What you really want is something like Nvidia's 3D libraires or like iZ3D that hooks into the graphics subsystem of the computer itself. As far as I have ever been able to tell, there's no equivalent OpenGL driver that hooks into the graphics drivers on the computer. At least, none that work.

--

*as with many things in the world of computer programming, the word "can't" doesn't so much equate into the concept of "impossible under any circumstances" as into the concept "so wildly impractical that nobody is likely to ever attempt it".

Felderburg

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Re: [QUESTION] CoH / Paragon Chat Oculus Support?
« Reply #2 on: May 19, 2016, 04:40:47 PM »
Is there no way to trick people's eyes into seeing 3d from a single video? Like those gifs that are two pictures taken slightly apart, and then switch between them real fast to make the image look 3d.
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Tahquitz

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Re: [QUESTION] CoH / Paragon Chat Oculus Support?
« Reply #3 on: May 20, 2016, 01:54:02 AM »
Is there no way to trick people's eyes into seeing 3d from a single video? Like those gifs that are two pictures taken slightly apart, and then switch between them real fast to make the image look 3d.

Well, maybe if there was an app was made that did that for any OpenGL game.  But I see at least two problems with that approach:

1) It defeats any "motion sickness" tech in the Oculus because the native gameplay in Oculus compatible apps doesn't rely on that trick in the first place.
2) At best, it would be like watching "The Lion King" in 3D in theaters.  If it wasn't made for it from the start, the best possible outcome would resemble parallax scrolling on the Super Nintendo.
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TimtheEnchanter

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Re: [QUESTION] CoH / Paragon Chat Oculus Support?
« Reply #4 on: May 21, 2016, 08:56:34 PM »
The engine can do Depth of Field but it can't do 3D? Something seems off about that.

Tahquitz

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Re: [QUESTION] CoH / Paragon Chat Oculus Support?
« Reply #5 on: May 21, 2016, 11:05:34 PM »
I'm not saying depth of field is the only consideration (For example, it does full blown 3D, but zones like the Shadow Shard look like they have as much depth as a backrow seat of a movie theater.  Distant objects look like a close fog instead of seeming far away.)  City of Heroes did have "pop up" issues, even on Ultra Mode.

But if the result is undesirable, odds are there's only so much a middle-man app could do to tweak the graphics.  But it's still conjecture, because right now one doesn't exist.
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