Physics completely broken with Oculus Quest and Link

[StalkerU]

Very weird situation:

1.) It worked flawlessly before the beta with the old Oculus SDK.

2.) Strangely enough, it still works if you play wirelessly using SteamVR with Virtual Desktop (sideloading the VR part of VD). Unfortunately, the lag is a little too high this method and the fast pace of the game really gets wrecked by the compression struggling to keep up.

3.) THE LINK METHOD. A lot of people notice the horrible static SFX that happens when you shoot things. This itself is a deal breaker, but it's just a side effect. The game doesn't play full speed. It spends most of its time in slow motion with periodic moments of speeding way up.

I suspect this is why the SFX are so garbled. They're playing in slo-mo. (You can even hear the garbled SFX by going into the options menu and raising the SFX level. You'll hear awful static in your ears.

The main issue, though, is the constant slow down. It turns a zen experience into sludge. The game is running at 72hz, too. Displaying the Steam Performance graph onto my screen while playing shows that I hover around 4ms render time and never exceeded 4.5ms despite how awful the screeching and slowdown gets.

EDIT:

Just realized there's another beta and I can't even get the beta to launch for me. Gives me this error box:

call to init() failure !! - Errcode: 00000002

[Wild Hogs (2008)]

I'm having these issues too, did you ever come up with a fix?

[StalkerU]

Originally posted by beavis_sinatra:

I'm having these issues too, did you ever come up with a fix?

No. And it's even more frustrating than I thought. I still have an HTC Vive. With the Vive, I don't have the sound issues, but I still have issues where it's not running smoothly and I'm missing/banging into gates I shouldn't be because I'm too slow.

I actually found a way to download old builds from Steam (the ones with only Oculus support), but it's mostly the same issues. On two separate occassions, I was able to play the game as it was supposed to work (using Quest and Link). And it's amazing that way. But I could never isolate how I managed to get it running properly those two times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VXsAiNdelk

This is how agile you're supposed to be. And it's amazing when your ship is responsive like that. But aside from those couple times with my Quest, neither my Quest nor Vive runs this game properly.

MaV1 also has some issues for me. It's not as bad as Polybius, but there's some less noticable issues with that game too:( It's clearly some kind of engine issue for me.

[VanAlphen]

You should post any technical issues you have with Polybius on their YakYak forum as well. If you're a new member you may need to visit their Discord channel to get validated. Giles recently posted that after Moose Life maybe he'll have a look try/to fix the other loose ends of MAVOL1/Polybius.

[StalkerU]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/f57tk4/dwm_multiple_monitors_with_different_refresh_rate/

I never even knew this was an issue. It kinda looks and sounds exactly like my issues (things aren't smooth, ship is slow, etc). It sounds like there are still some issues with the fix, but setting the monitor at 144hz while Quest ran at 72hz would be a perfect 2X match and seemingly work.

Is anyone with this issue a Windows Insider? I'm loathe to be an early adapter on these things, but would change my mind if I knew it would fix these issues.

[Wild Hogs (2008)]

Hey everyone!

This is obviously not an ideal solution, but I managed to get Polybius to be totally playable on Quest by streaming it over the wifi using ALVR. ALVR is installable from Sidequest and you'll want the Experimental v7 server from Github to get it working.

I'm in pretty ideal conditions for it (PC is cabled to router, Quest is on 5ghz wifi) but for a game like Polybius with minimal movement and no motion controllers I found the game basically identical to how I would expect the experience to be with tethered VR. I had no issues with compression or latency and all the Quest related bugs were gone.

[StalkerU]

Originally posted by beavis_sinatra:

Hey everyone!

This is obviously not an ideal solution, but I managed to get Polybius to be totally playable on Quest by streaming it over the wifi using ALVR. ALVR is installable from Sidequest and you'll want the Experimental v7 server from Github to get it working.

I'm in pretty ideal conditions for it (PC is cabled to router, Quest is on 5ghz wifi) but for a game like Polybius with minimal movement and no motion controllers I found the game basically identical to how I would expect the experience to be with tethered VR. I had no issues with compression or latency and all the Quest related bugs were gone.

Yeah. I've tried playing it with ALVR and also own Virtual Desktop on the Quest. The issue, for me, is this only gets rid of the audio crackling.

I just tested it with the latest beta branch of VD (hoping for a miracle), and in that early tunnel level, it was taking me around 6 seconds to completely go around the tube.

Just stuck in sludge. It's like playing with a broken controller that's stuck at 20 percent.

I heard there's an infamous Windows bug that causes multi-monitor setups to not function properly, but I don't have enough hope that I'm willing to be a beta tester for that.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/f57tk4/dwm_multiple_monitors_with_different_refresh_rate/

It actually sounds like maybe it's the demon Giles has been fighting with, but Windows betas can be pretty dicy (I've heard). Not willing to risk it when I'm skeptical it's going to fix it for me.

[Squibblie]

If you still have the issue with your ship moving slowly try modifying the in game settings for dead zone and sensitivity. I changed these yesterday (mainly I reduced the dead zone) and my ship suddenly moves really quick. I can dodge the flags really quickly now (previously I'd lose several shields on some levels just because my ship would move way too slow).

[StalkerU]

Originally posted by Squibblie:

If you still have the issue with your ship moving slowly try modifying the in game settings for dead zone and sensitivity. I changed these yesterday (mainly I reduced the dead zone) and my ship suddenly moves really quick. I can dodge the flags really quickly now (previously I'd lose several shields on some levels just because my ship would move way too slow).

Whoa. So this just solved a huge part of the problem.

The screeching audio is maybe solved also? *knock on wood* Last couple times I tried playing it, it would basically crash on me (as opposed to MaV which began working perfectly about 2 months ago). But I just seemingly had a good session.

I had some stupidly slow slowdown on the slalom level and on a whim, just turned the super sampling down a bit (had it unneccesarily high for this game). That seemed to fix that level? I don't want to declare victory yet, but maybe. I'll play it again tomorrow and see if I'm still feeling good about it.

[Squibblie]

On the subject of supersampling, have you been changing this via steamvr's resolution setting? I tried upping the resolution as my frame times are really low (3-4ms) but it made no difference. I'm running on WMR at 90fps so I can go up to 11ms per frame without dropping frames. But no matter what resolution I set it to the frame time stays at 3-4ms. It's not a big deal - I just feel like I should be taxing the gpu a bit more.

[StalkerU]

Originally posted by Squibblie:

On the subject of supersampling, have you been changing this via steamvr's resolution setting? I tried upping the resolution as my frame times are really low (3-4ms) but it made no difference. I'm running on WMR at 90fps so I can go up to 11ms per frame without dropping frames. But no matter what resolution I set it to the frame time stays at 3-4ms. It's not a big deal - I just feel like I should be taxing the gpu a bit more.

I haven't played it yet today (knock on wood), but yeah. I have the default value (which is currently above 1). Then I had game specific settings (which I applied another value too). That may or may not have been too high.

Then I also have a multiplier that I recently added to the Oculus Debug tool. So it's possible I was running at a pretty crazy resolution and maybe this is one of those games that runs slows if the framerate isn't being met. It seems unlikely, but I hope it was the issue.

This is a recent thing though. For the longest time I had my base multiplier at 1 and Polybius was running at default. Most of these issues were issues before this. And I'm hoping beyond hope this is the issue I had with my first playthrough yesterday and the fix wasn't just random luck. I wouldn't have thought it could be an issue, but maybe I had such a crazy resolution that it played a role yesterday on my first try.

[giulio.ale]

Are there any other updates on these Polybius issues? This a great game but ruined experience from audio stuttering and slow downs :-(. I got oculus 2 tethered and i7 11th gen laptop with RTX 3070 8 gb, 16 gb ram, and starting level 4 lot of crackling noise. Today I'll try lowering dead zone and closing game window on pc while playing. This game should deserve a lot of attention it's legal dope it's marvellous.

[Rocky Suezo]

I'm in the same boat also. I loved this on the PS4, so I bought it thinking I'd use the Oculus 2 (linked) but I just doesn't run right. I tried a few different things from the previous comment sections, but the play is still uneven and is plagued with slowdown. Unfortunately, I'm about to give up on it.

[otter sitting at a computer]

Does anyone have a solution? Using a quest 2 and a 3070 via airlink, the steam performance graph shows that its running really well but its still in the yellow so the actual fps is very slow. sometimes it goes back to green for a second or two like its supposed to but it goes back to being slow which makes it very unplayable.

[giulio.ale]

I did resolve some of the issues lowering oculus resolution, but still far to be perfect. I'm quite frustrated this game cannot be played at 100% :-(. I use link cable, by the way as I fear air link would be worse.

[Simbabbad]

There is actually a simple solution: turn the beta on, it's the older version that works with Oculus.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/906120/discussions/0/4390400383728187407/