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Why does Meta Quest – Horizon Worlds look so terible?

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Re: Why does Meta Quest – Horizon Worlds look so terible?

#61

Post by throwaway2016a »

LarsDu wrote: post #50

I'm in the process of developing a small indie game for the Oculus Quest. It's not easy to get good graphics, but one really obvious thing that is missing from Horizon World's is really simple -- textures. I suspect the development team ditched most textures entirely as you can reduce virtually all rendering to a very small number of draw calls by having everything share a single texture. This saves the engineering t…

I think it is more that they are afraid that if they allow for anyone to upload texture they will end up with a large amount of inappropriate content on it. So they settled on a limited set of built in ones.

Re: Why does Meta Quest – Horizon Worlds look so terible?

#62

Post by throwaway2016a »

What I don't see anyone mentioning is that Horizon Worlds has an emphasis on being able to create your entire world inside of the app using tools in VR.

I suspect that a lot of the content creation has to do with that.

For example:

- Art director? Most of the content is user generated.

- Game developers on the team? Why? Their goal is not to make the game themselves but to make tools that let other people make stuff.

- Lack of user uploaded texture. Well, that can be easily abused so better to not allow user uploaded textures at all.

- No way to sculpt custom shapes. Well... that would be hard to do at scale in pure VR and allowing them to upload models from computers essentially creates two classes of creators. The regular people and the pros.

Etc.

I don't work for Meta and have no idea if any of this is accurate but I think it seems plausible.

Re: Why does Meta Quest – Horizon Worlds look so terible?

#64

Post by _jezell_ »

Because Facebook is trying to cobble together crap on top of Unity. They are using an inferior engine built by someone else and designed to make mobile games. There's no way they will rule the metaverse without owning the engine and getting serious about the non hardware side of the problem.

Too bad Epic isn't making a metaverse platform play.

Re: Why does Meta Quest – Horizon Worlds look so terible?

#65

Post by allenu »

This looks so bad. The lighting is so awful. Why is the background brighter than the actual avatars themselves?

I assume their wrists are held up like that because in the real world, everybody is holding up their controllers. Maybe they're all sitting at their desks in this call and are resting their hands on their desks with the controllers in hand?

These all seem like basic UX and aesthetic issues that someone could've seen early on and corrected. If nobody caught these issues, then that's troubling. Or, if somebody caught them but couldn't do anything about them, that's also troubling.

Re: Why does Meta Quest – Horizon Worlds look so terible?

#66

Post by georgewsinger »

The root problem IMO is Meta jamming all of VR through a social network ("Metaverse") framing, when it should be segmenting it into separate "VR productivity" and "VR gaming" products that people might actually want.[1]

[1] https://simulavr.com/blog/we-dont-want-the-metaverse/

Re: Why does Meta Quest – Horizon Worlds look so terible?

#67

Post by ffhhj »

Apocryphon wrote: post #22

It feels like a central problem with these "total sandbox" games/virtual platforms is that there's no underlying aesthetic or- as OP mentions, art direction- to anchor it. So it stands for nothing. I suppose Second Life and Roblox are major exceptions to that, and have been wildly successful, but do we really need another version of those platforms but far more limited and in VR? It reminds me of IMVU, which is surpr…

IMVU had nicer graphics 15 years ago.

Re: Why does Meta Quest – Horizon Worlds look so terible?

#68

Post by truemotive »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #62

What I don't see anyone mentioning is that Horizon Worlds has an emphasis on being able to create your entire world inside of the app using tools in VR. I suspect that a lot of the content creation has to do with that. For example: - Art director? Most of the content is user generated. - Game developers on the team? Why? Their goal is not to make the game themselves but to make tools that let other people make stuff.…

If any of this is potentially true, the entire senior executive layer should be walked out of the building on a plank by pirates.

Re: Why does Meta Quest – Horizon Worlds look so terible?

#69

Post by truemotive »

_jezell_ wrote: post #64

Because Facebook is trying to cobble together crap on top of Unity. They are using an inferior engine built by someone else and designed to make mobile games. There's no way they will rule the metaverse without owning the engine and getting serious about the non hardware side of the problem. Too bad Epic isn't making a metaverse platform play.

The paintbrushes aren’t at fault when the painter hasn’t learned the fundamentals of painting. Unity is extremely powerful.

Re: Why does Meta Quest – Horizon Worlds look so terible?

#70

Post by porcc »

westoncb wrote: post #26
lwneal wrote: post #12

The Oculus/Meta Quest 2 runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2. That chip's GPU, the Adreno 650, has a pixel fill rate of 14 GP/s. Compare this to a GPU like the NVidia RTX 3090, which has a fill rate of 190 GP/s. Lighting, textures, transparency, and many of the effects that make things look good in modern games, at the resolution and framerate required for smooth VR, can't currently be done on a $400 headset. At least i…

There are plenty of games and apps on Quest 2 that look far better and run with good performance though... Horizons is weird because it's an ugly outlier relative to other Quest 2 titles . It feels like some kinda misstep imo.

Like which ones? I think Horizon is on par at least but definitely a step above the competition. Rec Room pales in comparison.
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