renderer Stereoscopy support

[MirceaKitsune]

I'm well aware that the engine doesn't have actual support for VR headsets. Last I heard that was being worked on and I hope we will be seeing this feature next year.

But what about basic stereoscopy with proper eye separation? Red-cyan anaglyph, side-by-side separation, interlaced... will those modes be supported? Someone said that idTech 4 should have come with such support, but when I tried setting the cvars in TheDarkMod nothing happened.

I ask because I have red-cyan glasses, and as of this month also a cheap VR headset. The headset only works as a standard display on my Linux box, I can't use head tracking nor even tell my computer I have a headset... I can however watch anything that supports separated stereoscopy in fullscreen. So far Xonotic is the only game that I can play this way... for TDM given its scenery and pace, this would be a formidable way to experience it! Is there any way to enable at least basic stereoscopic, and if not can TDM 2.08 please consider this as a feature?

[cabalistic]

Stereoscopic support was only added with Doom3 BFG, but TDM is based on the older Doom3 engine. Therefore, there is no stereoscopic support whatsoever.

[MirceaKitsune]

6 hours ago, cabalistic said:

Stereoscopic support was only added with Doom3 BFG, but TDM is based on the older Doom3 engine. Therefore, there is no stereoscopic support whatsoever.

Ah... that makes sense and explains what I heard. How difficult would it be to add this, possibly porting the component from Doom 3 BFG if that route is easier? Is it something we can hope for in the next release? With VR becoming more common, at least support for standard stereoscopy would be a very welcome feature if the team can look into it.

[duzenko]

Makes you wonder how you do red\cyan thing on a regular PC

Is it, like monochrome, or??

[MirceaKitsune]

1 hour ago, duzenko said:

Makes you wonder how you do red\cyan thing on a regular PC

Is it, like monochrome, or??

Red-cyan mode works on any screen, it's the only mode that does. However it messes up the colors a lot so it's less than ideal.

For VR the mode that's needed is side-by-side stereoscopy, one view on each half of the screen. It doesn't even need to be rounded with lens distortion as you see in most cases, though you will need to increase the FOV by roughly 50% since the lenses only see a part of the screen in the middle so it would appear very zoomed in. The HUD also won't be visible since you generally can't see the screen edges, all panels would need to be moved around the crosshair where they're easier to see... here's how I made a VR friendly HUD in Xonotic using the builtin editor:

Edited October 17, 2019 by MirceaKitsune

[cabalistic]

Well, I did get VR rendering working in my PoC, but it turned out that performance is too bad in many maps. That's why I abandoned the effort until perhaps one day enough performance bottlenecks are solved to make it more feasible.

A basic stereoscopic rendering would not be as performance critical and is not terribly difficult, but there are some gotchas. In particular, some optimizations in the engine do not play nicely with stereoscopic rendering, so it's still some effort to put in. GIven that the renderer is undergoing some major changes at the moment, I don't think the time is right to add this, as TDM has enough to do for 2.08. Also, as long as that work is ongoing, the renderer is fairly unstable codewise, so that makes adding (and maintaining) stereo support more work.

[nbohr1more]

Doom 3 \ TDM's affinity for low color saturation aesthetics or even black and white shader filters...

 

Means that red-cyan glasses would probably work better for us than with other games...

[HMart]

Personally I have a 3D screen and I don't play games that way for the most part, I don't even remember the last time I played a game using the 3D capability of my screen, but for VR I comprehend why people would want it.

Btw idtech 3 (quake 3 engine) if i'm not mistaken has stereo capabilities perhaps someone with good knowledge of rendering code could see how it was done back then? Or even see how BFG does it? 

On my basic comprehension on how this stereo stuff works, it could be made by rendering two views (using two player cameras?!) with a small separation between them, then you just, interleave them for a 3D screen (like mine) or you color one view red and the other cyan for all screens, how that would be done on code is for a rendering programer to think about.