VR - experimental support

[dave_th]

I am not sure if this a VR thing or not, but in case it is... After a long break i came back to the game. Game runs fine but I can not get back to the LaunchPad without leaving/reloading the game. Nothing in the menu lets me change profiles. Is there a quick key that allows me to do this or do they expect me to reload the game each time I want to change profiles?

[Appusle]

So, After making an account I can offer my thoughts. However, first off I want to clarify something.
I'm by no means a trucking fanatic, nor do I have an underlying interest in trucking as a whole, ETS2 to me is a simulator I do for fun and to relax so needles to say I have a lot of the "Realism" features turned off. So on the game mechanics itself I won't say much. But I will say (and rant a little bit, admittedly) about the technical state of the game, which... is abysmal. I won't sugar coat this.

I see a lot of defense about it from the community, and I get it.. It's a game you love and not many games are like ETS2, there are a lot of good aspects about the game hence why I love it, especially in VR.
But, someone with a rig such as mine should not have performance issues in a game that is barely modded (10K feul, free feul, Navigation hun and Realistic traffic density) Neither of these mods arte the culprit, I ran the game without in my testing.

So, first off I will list my system specifications, and be warned.. I'm rather invested in technology as a hobby, but also work in IT.
However I will only list the parts that matter to the gaming experience.

CPU: Ryzen 7 3700X, No OC, Stock
RAM: Corsay Vengeanse @3600mhz CL18
GPU: EVGA RTX 3080 FTW Ultra, No OC, Undervolted to 0.818mhz at a max clock of 1830 mhz. ~3ish% in gaming performance loss.(Not ultra gaming, just ultra, and yes, I too was very confused)
SSD: Samsung 860: Windows 11, Samsung 870 QVO: ETS2 installation drive.
Monitor: MSI Optix MAG274QRF-QD - 1440P - 165hz limited to 120hz, due to it being a perfect interger for 24 and 30hz/fps.
HMD: Oculus Rift S - Prioritize Quality.
Oculus Tray Tool settings: Low Curvature, 300mbit/sec bandwidth limit for the USB connection.

I have followed a guide to inject Anti-aliasing to the game, however this doesnt work in VR at all so I removed the AA portion of the Guide, but I did implement the rest.
Topic: https://roextended.ro/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1000

Now onto my issue... and a bit of a rant.

In VR have accepted that I won't be able to get AA working, for some reason the game does not like to have AA on aspectratios other than the more standardized variants, I presume anytong other than 16:9 and 16:10. It flat-out refuses to apply AA. I followed the guide multiple times and it only works when I use my monitor. It seems that the more Square-ish nature of Resolution-per-eye is cause that issue. I removed that portion of the guide and kept the rest.
To test if my performance was atleast up to par I decided to enable the PerformanceHUD in Oculus Tray Tool, this showed me an interesting problem whiel I was testing stuff to see if I could mitigate the relentless shimmering caused by the lack of anti-aliasling. Why this is an issue is simple, it makes the game unclear and distant text especially hard to read, it also messes with your sight with prolonged use (about 10 minutes for me but after 30... I really notice it) It can also lead to headaches as your brain probably tries to make sense of it. This is a MAJOR issue in VR, adressing this could make the game go from barely playable to being a joy.

A work around for the shimmering is rather easy, but likely hard to implement correctly, it's called TAA, while I do have my gripes with TAA i can't deny its effectiveness at removing jaggies, but it makes thins blurry when moving. The higher the resolution the less blurry it gets. A sharpening filter can also help with this a lot. - As a quick fix/work-around this is a very viable option, but so would MSAA be al be it more performance heavy. I recommend adding both of them.

So what I'm attempting to do is seeing if I can mitigate the shimmering using the scaling options, and see where my sweetspot lies. So far I should be able to play at 400% just fine, as I have done in the past out side of VR, But given Vr can be more taxing I should atleast be able to use 300 - 350%(Achievable by manual adjusting the scaling values in Config.cfg, Uset R_Scale X, Y Is the line if iirc) But in testing this using the PerformanceHUD of Oculus I found a rather intriquing issue.


In VR, Regardless of setting, I have random drops to 40FPS, otherwise I hover between 77 to 80FPS. What is weird about this is that it never dips below 40FPS. You drive around normally, even on a country side road, I noticed this when I was picking op freight at a building site, probably a quarry? Its at a building site in a massive hole. Perhaps someone knows was too busy trying to find this issue and resolve it, Yep, I work in IT alright, I see a technical issue and I want to fix it!
Driving around this pretty much desolate area I encountered this drops. and, it seems, but I could be wrong, it has something to do with the way the enviroment loads in. So far what I could tell is that it happens everytime a piece of the world loads in.

What I did to test it; I drove around in the loaded cells, this seemed to be fine-ish altho I think it happend there too but less frequent, When I drove further it happened more frequently as the world was loading in, and I have a keen eye for this, not hard to tell if a part of the world loads into view(I have 600+ hours in Skyrim, most of which is modding the game)

I also went back to see how my GPU utilisation did in that run, and... that was abysmally low. it ranged from 38% up to 70ish% (The 70% might be due to my Lock to 80FPS using RTSS, and so it isn't using my GPU because it doesnt need to.)
But the 38% baffeled me, it might aslo be a mix of menu being entered BUT, given the spiky nature it happened to fequent and I didn't always enter menu's. I tried to resolve this by setting the GPU back to "Prefer Maximum Performance" but this did nothing. Runnign the game at its lowest setting with a 50% renderscale also did nothing. It seems tied to the absymal way of how the engine uses your CPU, or rather.. not at all really.

I have not fact checked this, but I have no other explaination, as it seems to be the world loading that causes this it is tied to the CPU, The game world, the content in said game world(Cars, Ai etc) are calculated by the CPU, the GPU only does the pretty things(usually) To me it seems that the game only uses 1 core and if that core happens to be busy then well, it has to wait, lowering the FPS as a result. It happesn for maybe 1 to 2 seconds. I am going to see if I can confirm the game only using 1 core, but other threads seems to agree but I like to check this. If that is the case than this game is in a laugable state, technically speaking, spreading your game load over 2 to 4 cores is the norm and is actually scaling up to more, even where the game engine determines how much cores it will use. There is genuinely no excuse for this. I will mention again that AA also needs to be applied in VR, this does not happen, even the ingame SMAA does not work properly, or so it would seem.

And if anyone dares to say "It's a small studio... you can't just do that.." Right.. then my resoponse is "Warhorse studio, Kingdom Come deliverance." they currently have 172 employees, a staggering 2 employees more than SCSSoft at 170.
If that isn't enough, they need to hire more it's that simple. They are a company, not a charity and that is how they should be treated. I won't stand for the size of a company as defense. Thats coming up with excuses. KCD, when it launched, was released with their own form of Raytracing, YES, they had raytracing in the game before Nvidia popularised it with their RTX-technology. So, no the scale is NOT an excuse. I also don't want to give of the impression I think game development is easy. It isn't It can be very grueling.

Again, I like this Simulator, which is why this frustrates me and Why I even bother to post this here. I dont do this out of slander either I'm here merely to point out what I have noticed so it can, hopefully, be looked into.

Thanks for the read and have a fantastic day!

[Madkine]

And if anyone dares to say "It's a small studio... you can't just do that.." Right.. then my resoponse is "Warhorse studio, Kingdom Come deliverance." they currently have 172 employees, a staggering 2 employees more than SCSSoft at 170.
If that isn't enough, they need to hire more it's that simple. They are a company, not a charity and that is how they should be treated. I won't stand for the size of a company as defense. Thats coming up with excuses. KCD, when it launched, was released with their own form of Raytracing, YES, they had raytracing in the game before Nvidia popularised it with their RTX-technology. So, no the scale is NOT an excuse. I also don't want to give of the impression I think game development is easy. It isn't It can be very grueling.

You've rather missed an important point. The VR beta is maintained by a single SCS employee as a side job, so yes scale is a legitimate excuse as the VR beta has less than one person working on it.

[AfxTwn]

@Appusle I feel your pain and I'm sure many of the VR beta branch users here wish it ran much smoother and looked a lot better than it does but it seems to me that there is just no active development on VR and it's not something that SCS are pursuing. As Madkine said, VR access was provided by a single employee of SCS in their spare time as a bonus if you will but I have never seen any official mention of it by SCS and so I just assumed it wasn't something that was a main part of the game or development team's workload and so I treated it as a mod put out by a third-party gamer similar to a lot of the other mods out there.

A lot of the issues with the VR branch are also inherent in the normal desktop version and unless they're resolved there, then they won't be in VR either. Primarily the main issue is a lack of multi-core CPU support but I don't know if this is something they can add to the current game engine or would require completely rebuilding the game which I don't see happening any time soon after they have so much time and money invested in getting the game to where it is today. (I may be talking complete rubbish here as I don't know much about game development so apologies, just surmising what the issue may be).

The VR beta is what it is and without any active development on it or change in how the game handles multi-core CPU usage, I can't see it improving for a long time if at all. You just have to accept that it performs and looks they way it does and be happy with the increased immersion and near-real-world-scale that it offers but I fully understand your frustrations. Many people have voiced similar issues with VR for this game but I've never seen any of this addressed by SCS officially and even the main person responsible for the VR branch doesn't post much anymore. It seems like an abandoned aspect of the game that just gets updated in-line with the main game updates but doesn't receive any actual development itself. There obviously aren't enough VR users of the game to warrant any actual development on it but without any official explanation of what's happening or whether the VR branch is even considered a part of the game, we're all left in the dark really.

Maybe the VR branch was an experiment and they quickly realised it didn't work well enough and so they abandoned it but still allowed users to access it anyway. Regardless, I'd still rather play in VR as I much prefer it over desktop now, even though it does look a bit of a dog's dinner.

[Some newbie driver]

Primarily the main issue is a lack of multi-core CPU support but I don't know if this is something they can add to the current game engine or would require completely rebuilding the game which I don't see happening any time soon

With the exception of the Convoy mode, all the big changes done in the game since DX11 had been steps to reach the multi-core support. We know for example that a completely new render code is being worked on; that would be another step.

And you are right; it's pointless to request and expect specific VR-focused updates when the base game isn't ready to deliver acceptable modern performance on modern hardware not even on regular mode. Once they had worked the basics to have a modern game up to date, VR will have a lot more performance too and SCS will be ready to assign more efforts specifically for VR version (if they wish to).

Regards

[plykkegaard]

Yes the core engine needs to be rebuild to support multi core
You need to be really careful with the redesign otherwise you can ruin it all, nothing we will ever see but nevertheless
The name of the engine will not change

[dhrto]

I'm just glad the VR branch now almost released together with the main branch of the game. There used to be a couple a days waiting time in the past. But I believe Komat said a while back that he optimized/automated the build process of the VR branch so it is less work. I still hold the hope that one day VR will be a feature of the main branch and not a separate version anymore, and that you can just choose your version when launching the game, just like you do now between DX11, OpenGL, 32/64 bit etc.

[Appusle]

I knew only one employee worked on it, for which i'm very grateful, though I still see it as being offered by the company itself, given it gets pushed through the Beta branch of Steam. A mod either installs through the horrid steam workshop or via manual installation. Not through the beta branch of Steam. So therefor, even if it is unofficial I see it as being released by the company. and so I do expect some responsibility from the company. this is hopefully understandable. (I mean they green lit the release afterall.)

I'm also not asking 100% VR support yet, Just to ask the person working on th

I am asking however to look into the AA issue's the game has. Even at 2560x1440 SMAA doesnt seem to work properly either. Or perhaps other games have tuned SMAA to be more agressive than what SCS has done. I may seem rather harsh on them, but that is not with the wrong intentions. But I do hope that I don't sound unfair either because i realise their job isn't easy, developing your own engine, making a game ontop of it, thats not easy. I mean.. Look at Cyberpunk, and that team was far bigger.. hehe..

Off topic, a bit.
Size contraints within the team is something I face everyday at work. It's a real struggle so by no means am I trying to undercut that issue. But I also don't want to make it seem it isn't an issue. But perhaps my time spent in IT has made me a little jaded towards these things. "Growing" your team isn't easy either especially in game development, as far as I know their aren't many people who are available let alone qualified to work on game engine's which is a whole other beast than just a game. Usually when people decide to study gamedevelopment they go into it with "I play vidya games, lets make one!" to then realise it's one hell of a grind and stop. Same with IT though.

On the otherhand... if they can't grow their team why not ditch the idea of making a game engine and just.. knock on Epic's door? THey have shown time and time again they are willing to alter their engine to fit the needs of the dev's. They even added 1:1 camera tracking so that The Mandalorian could be filmed, inside of unreal engine while being able to physically move an actual camera to actually shoot the actors within 3D space. If your team is small, and you can't grow quickly enough, outsourcing isn't out of the ordinary, but I also see the benefit of having an in-house made engine. And this might be out of the question in general, having your own engine is granting a whole lot more freedom.

Honestly, To modernize Prism3D a whole rebuild from the ground up is likely needed, so little by little whole engine will need to be replaced so that is a ton of work.

[Madkine]

Honestly, To modernize Prism3D a whole rebuild from the ground up is likely needed, so little by little whole engine will need to be replaced so that is a ton of work.

Yes and they've been doing that for at least the last 4 years in a major way and there is still several years of effort to go. (Though in reality it never ends, every release of the game includes some aspect of upgrading the engine, even when they aren't telling us about it.)

[Some newbie driver]

Appulse, regarding AA, and those are (almost) literal words from a developer here in the forums not so many months ago: "We are not going to waste time changing the current AA while we are working on a complete new render system" Thus, it suggests that any AA made for current render system would had to be thrown to the bin as completely useless for the new system.

And no, knocking on Epics door is no solution. First of all, something the devs already told us, those "fancy" engines that you find in so many games aren't suited for everything. Specifically, Epic's Unreal Engine that (almost literal words again) "would not give us the features we (SCS) need for the game". Second of all, change the core engine mean to rewrite all the code around it. That means to stop the active development of the game for around 2 years the less. SCS is an independent company, no big game editor corporation is behind SCS funding them with all the money needed to keep the company afloat for so long time.

We will all have to wait they keep doing the changes at the pace they are able. That's not going to change no matter how much we ask for things.

Regards