How to do Apeture Robot Repair in a smallish room

[Brad_Herman]

I see a bunch of people posting about having a space to small for Apeture Robot Repair. It's possible to do this demo in a smallish room as the only 2 things you need to reach are the charge port in the start and the drawers. What's the trick? You have to reconfigure your space in room setup. Move your start position to the corner with about 1.5' of reach before you hit a wall and have it start up facing the shorter direction you have. It took some trial and error but we found a layout that let us run it.

[76561198193036657]

Don't you also need to reach the switch next to the door? This is what I ran into trying something like this. Since the drawers and the door switch are on opposite sides along the long axis of the room, I couldn't find a configuration that works (our office is about a foot too small). Is there another way to open the door?

[Toji]

I asked this in http://steamcommunity.com/app/358720/discussions/0/530646715635682329/ and the answer was "The demo was designed for their GDC booth size" which is sensible. It certainly works best when you can really walk around.

Barring that, though, a quick hack to get around physical room limits is to use the console command "vr_player_offset_move_looking_xy 10" to nudge your virtual self in the direction you are looking.

[Brad_Herman]

Originally posted by Ryan:

Don't you also need to reach the switch next to the door? This is what I ran into trying something like this. Since the drawers and the door switch are on opposite sides along the long axis of the room, I couldn't find a configuration that works (our office is about a foot too small). Is there another way to open the door?

That switch is next to the charge ports in the start. If you can reach the charge ports to start it you should be able to make it to the swtich.

[cliffski]

thanks for that hack, its awesome. I think long term, VR needs a standard button or hand gesture that 'moves' the player forwards, for this sort of eventuality.

[PersonGuy]

I just shipped a new version of Aperture that has a bandaid fix for this. Press in the track pads to extend your reach and you should be able to interact with everything in a smaller tracked space. This isn't intended to be a 'good' solution, but should get you by for now.

[Brad_Herman]

Confirmed. I was able to do the whole demo standing in one spot. Not quite as fun as full walk around but the important thing is that it does work.

[stopmotioner]

This works well, I ran into just one small issue: pressing the track pad counts as interaction, which caused a few extra tugs on the drawers when I tried to reposition the controller.

[PersonGuy]

Thanks for point that out. I just shipped another version to fix that and what I think is an improvement on 'Dhalsim Mode'. In this version you hold the trackpad button down to keep your reach extended. It does a multiplication mapping instead of just putting the controllers at the end of long sticks.

[stopmotioner]

That's a nice improvement, it feels a bit more fluid and retains a good amount of flexibility.

I ran a couple new playtesters through it today. Somewhat surprisingly, they kept their physical controller motionless while in Dhalsim mode. If they missed their target, they'd retract the controller, reposition their body, and try again, implying that they thought the controller could only extend a fixed distance. I'd still call it a success, they didn't seem hindered by this.