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Any word on this?
Regarding keeping your saves - yes, it _is_ possible. We've invested extra effort to make sure the saves are kept compatible so, you can manually copy the PlayerProfile file over, and it should work. It will even re-award you all the achievements you earned in flat version.
Here's the procedure:
1. Make sure you exit both games.
2. Turn off Steam cloud on Talos VR, so it doesn't overwrite your new copy with the cloud contents.
3. Backup your current Talos VR profile,located in
<steam folder>userdata\<your user id>\552440\remote\
4. Copy the flat profile from
<steam folder>userdata\<your user id>\257510\remote\
over your VR profile.
5. Start the Talos VR version of the game and select Play>The Talos Principle>Continue in the menu to continue where you left off in flat version. When you do that, it will start awarding you the same achievement it has remembered from the flat save.
NOTES:
i) This is provided for your convenience only, and it may void your warranty. We cannot guarantee that such converted profile will not have some issues in the future gameplay. If it does, we cannot help you with that.
ii) In any case we recommend that you play the VR version from the beginning - for better experience, and to prevent eventual issues.
iii) No, you cannot copy a save game from some one else. Saves are still tied to Steam profiles, even though they are portable between flat and VR.
iv) You can only copy from flat to VR, not the other way around. If you attempt to copy VR profile back to the flat version, it will not load, because the old version of the engine is not compatible with it.
Of course, my intention is to play through the VR edition in it's entirety!
But I may wish to go back & play the flat version in future, for any number of reasons (broken headset, unsupported future headset, friend who hates VR wants to try the game, etc). Or perhaps (not specific to Talos Principle) I might want to sometimes use VR for a game & sometimes not (also for various reasons), dipping in & out, especially as longer games are now starting to release which support VR *optionally*.
So, I'm genuinely intrigued what swayed the decision to make the VR edition a separate product, rather than a (paid, obviously, to reward all the hard work!) DLC to the original...
- it could have allowed saves to carry in both directions without hacky unreliable methods
- owners of the game who buy a VR headset wouldn't have to restart
- flat & VR could have a unified workshop (not sure if this is possible with 2 separate apps?)
- ahievements could seamlessly carry across
- any future fixes/features/content could have reflected on both flat & VR without duplicate effort, or risk of the editions getting out of step
This especially puzzles me because the game is essentially the same in VR, enough that the above workaround is possible. The main differences with the VR edition are surely the input method & display device, and the associated work to handle each of those & optimise accordingly for those devices, much like you'd optimise for different specs & resolutions or need to handle different control devices/keyboard/mouse. I wouldn't want to trivialise those tasks, but paid DLC could have rewarded all that effort just as well as a paid separate release.
I'm not sure I see the benefits of a separate app, beyond possibly reducing the risk of accidentally introducing bugs into the flat version while working on the VR features.
Anyway, thanks again for trying to provide a workaround. Perhaps a future sequel, built from the beginning with optional support for VR, could be provided as a single entity...? :)
You dont get paid enough to keep answering the question, dont worry about it.
What are the differences (besides controller/display device)? That the saves could carry over is what seemed to confirm that the actual puzzles that make up the game are the same...?
A Vr game is quite different for a normal one. The game has to be projected twice, once for each eye which comes with its own performance and optimization goals to be met.
Things like motion blur, field of view, and other visual settings to ensure the beautiful fidelity is successfully transferred between mediums is important as well as the reduction of motion sickness.
Scale becomes more important though I don't think thus was a big issue for them since their first person was already polished
My biggest concern is all the reading, text is difficult to read in VR and u hope they've made some. Kind of adjustment to make it easier.
I'm short, a quick port will work but Croteam wanted to create that anxiety inducing presence. When you stand on the shore and look out into the ocean you should truly feel small and miniscule and that sort of presence doesn't happen with a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ port.
The differences between flat and VR are huge. I've covered this before in several posts when we were working on VR versions for Serious Sam games. I'm really tired that the general public still thing that's a "just" thing.
And this particular thing is exactly what's killing the prospective progress of VR. In order for VR to work, it has to pay off to developers. But that's not going really well: On one hand, the market is small, and you can't sell many copies. (Compare this: http://steamspy.com/app/465240 and this: http://steamspy.com/app/41070 . If you think we are suckers for selling little, here's one of the most famous VR bestsellers: http://steamspy.com/app/418650 and here's one of our puny old backcatalog titles: http://steamspy.com/app/41060 ). On the other hand, making a game work in VR is a huge effort.
How is it a huge effort, you may ask? Here's some bullet points:
- There's a huge amount of technical implementations just to render all 3D effects in VR properly. Mirrors, particles, imposter sprites, fog, lensflares... many things require special treatment.
- Then to optimize that, because the game needs to render twice as much and run at 90 FPS.
- There are specific VR-only optimizations that relate to rendering things for both eyes kinda-in-one-pass. It's called Nvidia VRWorks and AMD LiquidVR. WIthout those, the game would not run at satisfactory speed. It's a big change to the entire rendering system, to the shaders, shadow calculations, etc.
- Everything related to HUD needs to be completely changed. Not just changed, but rethought and changed the approach, because many things that work in flat don't work in VR.
- Using tracked controllers instead of crosshair and use buttons, especially in Talos where you have to operate objects by grabbing and placing is a super complicated change with so many intricate details.
- In order to make teleporting movement that correctly moves you only to those places where you can physically get, and that triggers all collision events as you "infinitely fast" pass through, we had to implement special player physics that runs at a different speed than the rest of the world. In Talos, this is further complicated by riding on platforms carried by past players - who were teleported when recorded.
- There are multiple different movement modes and a whole slew of special "motion sickness prevention" techniques. (And we can still see quite a few improvements that will be coming in the future updates.) Just imagine the whole thing with fans that throw you around, and different options that we provided to the player regarding that, depending on whether you have heavy motion sickness, or if you prefer full locomotion.
- And such a huge collection of many details and tuneups required just for VR that it's hard to even recall them all.
In short, we didn't spend several man-years on this just because we had nothing better to do. But because it was necessary to make it even playable. There's so much more that we'd like to add, but we'll see if the community even wants it...
As for why a VR version of a game is not a DLC, but a separate product, this is again something we've been through before. There's several reasons, and they both rest on the wrong assumption on the part of people who think it should be a DLC. The assumption is that if you make a VR DLC for the base flat game, it will sell more copies of the base game to people who don't already have it, but want the VR version.
The reasons this is not correct are:
(a) DLCs don't sell well as the baseline. PC gamers just have some inborn repulsion to DLCs and publishers have long learned that it is more use - given all the same content - to ship a new game than a DLC. See e.g. New Order and Old Blood. Why is it so? No one knows, but that's how it is.
(b) There's no good way to promote a DLC to people who don't own the base game. That's just how Steam is set up, and Valve is not changing that just for this. That system is too complex to touch.
(c) If the game was already available for some time, there might be many gifts, 3rd party keys, etc for the game already out and selling at low prices on G2A. Putting out the DLC would just reuse those keys and wouldn't really bring much money to the developer, but only to key resellers and gray market.
(d) The base game has been out for a while now has significant seasonal discounts. The VR version needs to be discounted at different rates.
etc
So the main point is - is this VR version of the game worth to you the price we ask for it? If yes, please buy it and enjoy it. We will make sure to support it, like we always do.
If you don't, then don't buy. If not enough people choose that it does, then we won't be doing VR in the future - no hard feelings. It's that simple.
My concern is I liked the reading but it's pretty hard in Vr to read text. Were there any special steps taken to make it easier to enjoy the text stories in the game?
I hope I didn't give the impression that I think implementing VR is a "just" swap-this-out kind of thing, or that it wasn't worthy of a fair price. I was just surprised that it was a separate release, when the store page gave me the impression the puzzles/story were identical, including the DLC puzzles.
I only have a very basic idea of some of the kinds of things that can cause issues for a VR version of a game, having experienced poor handling in other VR games of things like text (as M.Luminos mentions), motion options, controls/UI, etc. And it's very interesting to read of examples specific to this game. It's clear that some of those are not so quickly/easily fixed. And of course, I hope you are rewarded for your hard work, as I said above. I have no problem with paying for a good VR implementation.
One thing that hadn't occurred to me quite so much is that... the levels (the logical thought processes & actions required to solve them, which is what I was referring to in my offending remark you quoted above!) may be "essentially the same" (or "the same in gist"), but once all those tweaks to triggers/timing/placements have been made, the exact same level would no longer work in both environments. Perhaps one solution might have been if the game could present a different variation of the "same" level depending on whether you're in VR or flat mode (since you aren't saving mid-puzzle object positions, etc.), but anyway...
The most interesting info re: my original query on "DLC vs. separate game" is towards the end of your post. Definitely some things I hadn't considered, which could indeed be good reasons for having a separate product, such as (c) "existing keys", and (d) "separate discount rates" in the future. So, thank you again for taking the time to go into that detail.
I still feel it's a shame that there won't be tighter integration & sharing of saves/workshop between the products. Perhaps VR might ultimately reach a point where it's feasible for you to do that in a future title, starting out fresh on a project with these things in mind, especially with the experience you now have. I suppose at least (a) & (b) from your list (regarding DLCs) wouldn't be an issue if VR was built-in as an optional feature from the start.
Anyway, I wish you success with TTP VR, as I'd definitely like to see more similarly fleshed out VR games in future. :)
So, these levels are running on the latest engine (same one as used with Serious Sam Fusion 2017), and (theoretically) support both VR and flat. We could make a kind of a "fusion" version of flat and VR Talos. What we'll certainly do in the future is re-ship an update to the flat Talos so that it runs on the Serious Engine 2017. (This would be a free update for existing owners, just like for Sam.) Then, it will be possible to use same workshop. But there's again so many other adjustments and other work needed before that's ready, so we couldn't do this yet.