There’s a new Dev Blog up, introducing our new sliding locomotion option and the steps we’re taking to balance it with teleportation. Read on for more: https://blog.orbusvr.com/balancing-teleportation-and-touchpad-locomotion/
Feel free to discuss it below as well!
and if you do it too often you may actually end up in an "out of body"
experience where your avatar can’t keep up with you. Not sure how we
would indicate that to the player, though.
No. Very much no. It’s a very bad experience to suddenly be ripped out of your body.
Personally I don’t think anything needs to be done for roomscale movement. I should be able to jump out of the way of that dragons breath as opposed to teledoging it if I choose. As long as we all have the same tools available, it should balance out.
EDIT:
As far as in combat movement goes. I don’t think you should eliminate trackpad movement. Just slow it down. Most MMOs will reduce your movement speed in combat. You were previously doing this with teleportation, making it charge slower in combat. Reduce the “slide” by the same percentage. Trackpad/slide users will just have to physically dodge. I find that more immersive and rewarding anyway.
PvP is always hard to balance, it might be reasonable to segregate locomotion styles in PvP unless you’re planning open world PvP?
I agree with Master, at no point should we be ripped out of our bodies, if you don’t let room scale move around in their room freely you may as well just restrict the game to standing room only.
A person who is dodging manually, even if they are a parkour master, could not ever hope to exceed the speed at which someone using teleport could dodge, and anyone trying to would end up destroying their headset and possibly their play space.
Room scale’s balance is in hazard and physical fatigue, there’s no reason to “worry” about people dodging too fast with roomscale.
PvP’s only major imbalance is instant teleportation - as has been suggested previously, having the teleportee’s avatar follow the cursor and then teleporting the camera to the avatar on release would fix that problem. Otherwise you will need to segregate teleportaiton and sliding pvp somehow.
Two thoughts regarding locomotion:
For non-teleport dodging in combat, what about having a short fixed-distance dash the player activates by clicking in the track pad used for movement? I’m not sure how to balance the movement speed of this with teleportation, but it would allow sliding locomotion to be viable in combat. Maybe have a movement speed penalty for the duration of the dash cool down? Or maybe even prevent movement for the cool down.
PLEASE make it so attempting to teleport beyond the max range teleports you to max range. It is so hard to travel an optimum distance the way it is set up now, and attempting to do so but failing results in no movement at all.
"And it also precluded you from making “smaller” teleportation jumps more quickly – so if you want to only go 5 meters at a time, or make a small adjustment, you still had to wait the full 2 seconds to teleport again, which means you would fall way behind someone using the sliding locomotion unless you perfectly teleported the full distance every single time.
Instead, we came up with a mechanic where when you go to teleport, the teleportation grid “builds up” over time, indicating how far you can currently go. Here’s a quick example:
So if you teleport only half the distance each time, you can teleport twice as often."
All distances are ‘optimal’
Though you could make the argument that it would be less clicks to go from point A to B. If that’s what you meant than I would agree you have a point.