Some Thoughts on Glider Island

[Me_in_VR]

I absolutely love this game and I'm excited to see what is coming this spring.
A few things I wanted to mention are:

• performance issues with steamVR. I'm using oculus rift so it requires the oculus software to be running as well as the SteamVR client. This caused some sluggishness, and jitter that affected performance in game. I've started using a tool called OpenComposite that makes launching SteamVR unnecessary and gave a huge performance boost. I wish it was available directly through the Oculus Store, and I hope that the developer expands to that market in the future. I've also improved performance by turning of ASW and tweaking supersampling with the Oculus Tray Tool.
  
• I would love to see a free-flight mode, possibly with ridiculous booster speeds, and just to be able to keep flying to study and get a good feel of all the environments and layouts.
  
• I feel like there should be a pause/restart menu which could be mapped to the rift's left controllers menu button. So many runs I've started only to realize that my calibration was off and I have to slowly get to the end of the lauch platform to die and start over.
  
• Alternate ring routes and challenges to keep things dynamic. Seems like new ring layouts could be created to force players to find new strategies and pathways around the islands, and possibly shake up leaderboards.

[joeysipos]

Thank you cmcosta81 for the feedback, love suggestions like this!

• I am working on trying to improve performance. I actually just found an issue where menu UI was rendering when it shouldn't have been, fixed it and nearly doubled the frame rate. I might try to push out a hot fix for that here this week.
  
  
• Free flight mode is good idea. There is actually a trick you can do in game, where if you press "y" on the keyboard it pauses the game and enables slew mode so you can pan around the map, but you need a joystick or xbox controller to move the camera around. I will try to program it so everyone knows about this and you can use the hand controllers to cruse the map. This will fix the pause and play issues as well as the ability to scope out the map. I am also working on a native version for the Oculus Store, but that probably won't get released till around May or June. Also PS4 VR btw ;)
  
  
• Pause issue should be fixed with what I mention above.
  
  
• I thought about multiple ring layouts, suck as 3 layouts per map. I have to think about this more. The new version will be a bit more dynamic because there is more wildlife/ mobile objects that spruce up the gameplay a little.

I will probably make the beta available come middle of March for the new version. Part of me is thinking I should just call it Glider Island 2 instead of Glider Island - Remastered since it is quite radically different. But once I get the beta out I will do a poll to see what people think...

[Me_in_VR]

I'm excited to play when it becomes available.

[mrcheez]

Definitely get it up on Oculus Store if you can. I play using a Rift as well, and many of us prefer to play via the Oculus app rather than having to start up Steam. Not sure how that affects cross-play though.

I'm interested to try Open Composite that the OP mentioned as I too occasionally get some stutter.