The Hawken Closed Beta 2 gives me a chance to dabble in two of 2012s cutting edge gaming developments ..cloud gaming and (head mounted display) hmd gaming. When I signed up for Hawken many moons ago it was using my gaming rig, with gpus connected to multiple monitors ready to play maxed out when the alpha arrived. Then it died..and I did not care, I found cloud gaming and hmds to replace my 30 inch LCDS with 100 inch and 40 inch ghost free 3D wearable displays...powered by USB!
All this using the humble Intel HD 3000 ...
Taking Hawken with you .. you got tablet ..you got Hawken...
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Hawken Closed Beta 2 on the new iPad ( well old new iPad )
Hawken Closed Beta 2 on the Google Nexus 7 again played using Splashtop HD:
2D gaming using the ST1080 and Cinemizer OLED head mounted displays
Hawken Beta 2 gives me the perfect excuse to further test gaming with hmds..not that I need an excuse to test hmds..,. Here is a little of the meagre wisdom I have gleaned from being a user of hmds for over a year now.
hmd burn in phase:
The second you put on a hmd you go into a form of visual adjustment, your brain is booting up the illusion of the display in front of you. Give it a few minutes or so and the image clears, text becomes clear on the ST1080 and Cinemizer your eyes adjust and that text that looked a little wobbly starts to clear up. Using a hmd as display is unlike any other display you have been using, the lighting the device uses, optics and fitting all have to come together. It takes time for instance to get used to the brightness of the ST1080 once your eyes adjust you are in for an awesome experience. So give it 5 minutes to burn in. The Carl Zeiss is as simple to put on as the ST1080, has excellent dioptre adjustments and produces an image takes little mental adjustment to get used to.For quick plays of games the way it comes together is awesome. But then it does take longer to set up on your laptop...
immersion :
Hawken looks amazing on both these hmds, with the ST1080 you get a VAST image, lighter colours and options to go up and beyond ( if you are crazy) 1080p. The Cinemizer OLED however brings far richer colours, deep blacks and on par sound with the ST1080. FPS games simply rock on hmds ..at least ones with clear pictures (sorry HMZT owners) .. and both the ST1080 and Cinemizer OLED are blessed with clear pictures. This is not VR but there are many reasons why we do not want VR for FPS games..
The Screen Size issue:
The only way you know one hmd screen is bigger than the other is constantly taking one off and putting on the other. After a while staring at the 40 inch 2m distance Cinemizer OLED screen looks just the same as the initially vast ST1080 100 inch at 10 feet display . Barring the colour and ergonomic differences..
You see after a significant period of time staring at a rectangle of light in a dark enclosed hmd your brain just tells you it is a rectangle of light not a cinema screen. You have no point of reference to measure the scale, true you will find yourself looking around the screen more when using the ST1080 or HMZT series, but having used the Cinemizer OLED I would say that the fact that you see your picture without having to work your eyes around a giant screen is far more beneficial in long term serious use than the short wow of wow I am sitting too close to a cinema screen and having to look around it ..feeling you get with larger field of view hmds... In a game as twitch fast as Hawken you want to take in as much of the screen as you can between each blink of your eye and the smaller fov and screen size of the Cinemizer comes into it`s own here , although the larger ST1080 display does help make you feel like your in the cockpit of a giant mech!
Resolution : how does a 872 by 500 res hmd face off against a native 1080p ST1080?If we are pushing things, the ST1080 will be better for higher resolutions, but like all larger fov hmds you spend time looking around the screen with your eyes, in a FPS like Hawken that is time enough for someone to swoop in from the other side of your fov and take you out. Simply because the screen is so large and as I stated earlier with hmds your eyes have to work to focus on any point of that large screen as well as you having to hunt that point of the screen:
FOV : field of view and how it affects your Hawken gaming:
This astonishingly is where I start to argue for a smaller fov in hmds for FPS games, as with a smaller FOV you can see everything on screen at once, the mech hiding in the top corner of the screen is just a smaller eye movement away than with a larger fov hmd. You cannot compare hmds in the same way you would compare fovs and large screen sizes of TVs, with hmds optics mess with your eyes to create the illusion of your 40, 100 or 720 inch display. So your eyes are having to work to reach the mech standing in the top corner of the screen, this is is where sweetspot issues destroy the experience on the HMZT series. On the ST1080 the higher resolution and far larger clear field of view counter this. Even better on a smaller fov hmd like the Cinemizer there is just less distance and optics to have to work through to focus on any point of the screen. In this case the Sharpshooter perched in his sniping spot has just been locked onto by your Rocketeers missiles without you even having to move your eyes or head!. So wonder of wonders if you actually want to play for points then a smaller fov hmd like the Cinemizer OLED is far more useful than the awe of the vast field of view in the ST1080 .. playing with it can enhance your KDR (note I said YOUR KDR) ...
Colour:
The colour reproduction on the Cinemizer OLED is excellent it is not quite as wide a gamut as a display ported 2500 by 1600 PC display but the blacks, and no back light issues really do make for an excellent portable display that let`s the world of Hawken really come to life. The LCOS display of the ST1080 offers brighter colour reproduction due to the nature of the display. Now consider the only way you know this is to take one off and put on the other so you are not really losing anything playing with either .. I swap them for fashion more than function ..but I am.. cool... like...dat...n`est ce pas?
There is a marked difference between colour reproduction on the Cinemizer and ST1080 , which is to be expected! It also has a profound effect on 3D in Hawken....
So which hmd would I use to play ? Well both, the ST1080 gives you the wow of a vast screen replicating the cockpit of Hawkens mechs, whilst if you really want to get the edge on your enemies the Cinemizer gives you just the right sized and coloured screen for you to maximize or minimise your KDR.. Plus you really can take it with you ..in fact you could take both with you and it would still weigh less than a Sony HMZT 2 ..and be alot less painful...
The crucial thing is in the smd ST1080 and Carl Zeiss Cinemizer OLED you have two viable options to replace your laptop or desktop display as your main gaming display, each bringing its own quirks and benefits. One of which is :
The crucial thing is in the smd ST1080 and Carl Zeiss Cinemizer OLED you have two viable options to replace your laptop or desktop display as your main gaming display, each bringing its own quirks and benefits. One of which is :
Portability:
Both HMDs were run off just a usb lead connected to my X220T, a single USB lead ! Now consider the power you are saving as well as space, portability .. of course you could play on your laptop screen but why when you got your own uninterrupted personal display strapped to your head? You could have excel on your laptop screen and be playing Hawken on the hmd and no one would know... handy for boring office meetings or lectures...
Plug and Play ?
The ST1080 is plug and play, it has awesomely easy to use big round buttons for dummies on its control unit, the hmd lead goes directly into the unit and head phones are easy to slot into the hmd itself. When you connect it to your PC it is automatically detected as a 1080p 3D enabled display by Windows 8. Playing Hawken the game scales to full screen so you can still get 3D gaming even at 1024 by 768 res. With the right hardware you could have an awesome 1080p 3D Hawken fest using Tridef 3D. Technically it is still the most powerful HMD out there even with the 2nd gen of HMZT and the new upstart from Zeiss.
The Cinemizer OLED is picked up as a 720p monitor by my laptop , in addition it keeps the laptop screen on.When playing with Tridef 3D you have to set the Cinemizer screen to be your main display. It does not at this stage automatically switch off my laptop display. This should eventually be sorted out with OS or firmware updates.To set higher resolutions you will have to do this manually and lacking the native 1080p pixel power of the ST1080 it can be more tricky. Once you have 1080p content playing though the experience is easily comparable to that of the HMZT1 or 2 albeit with a smaller fov but with a crystal clear picture and in a device you can take anywhere ..
What of the state of the Hawken Beta 2 code itself?
The first few days of Beta 2 were different to Beta 1 in that whilst you could get on to a server every time, there was serious lag when 5 or 6 mechs turned up to the party and started to boogie .. this could not be a hardware issue as I ran the game at speed using the same hardware in the first Beta period and was astonished at the speed. Perhaps with the devs adding servers, pings took a time to catch up... or my neighbours nicking my wifi...
Anyhoo by the 4th day everything was fine : so here is some sustained Hawken gameplay at ultra texture , high environment and 1024 by 768 recorded with FRAP which does hit the FPS a little :
And so on to 3D Hawken gaming using Tridef 3D using the ST1080 and Cinemizer OLED
When gaming in 3D the effect is far more prominent when playing using the Carl Zeiss Cinemizer OLED. This could just be a function of the Tridef software . When playing Hawken the richer colours, deeper blacks coupled with a smaller screen size, means your brain is able to splice the over under images easier than on the larger display of the ST1080. Swap them round and yes you immediately perceive a drop in screen size but you also clearly see the difference OLED brings. Couple this with a fast gaming laptop and you have a display that will actually improve your gameplay, not just wow you with a giant screen size.
So all in all the Hawken Beta 2 was a great joy to be part of and thegameveda will return with more Hawken hopefully running on the Oculus Rift
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