WMR is gonna be deprecated anyway
Yeah. And I guess there were some people who really got into that ecosystem, and that sucks for them. But I guess not enough of them, in the end.
The real scary thing is the whole Apple headset, coming along and disrupting the whole VR situation. I mainly just want to keep playing Hotdogs Horseshoes & Hand Grenades, and whatever VR games come to the game bundle scene, in peace.
But I’d also really appreciate it if devs remembered that left-handed people exist. Looking directly at the No Man’s Sky devs, while I’m saying this. They have updated that game so many goddamn times, but just no love for lefty VR users.
EDIT: later, I’ll have to go check the recent patch notes, in the year-and-a-half since I’ve played it, just to make sure it hasn’t been added.
I have a Reverb G2 so I’m one of them.
Thing is, for gaming you can just use SteamVR and they would be responsible for the controller mapping. You can also install all kinds of OpenXR layers that no doubt deal with this.
Wait…I never realized that. The same Steam control re-mapping that works outside of VR will work with VR controllers?
I have to go and see about this, later. I feel like a moron.
Please report back, I tried like a year and a half ago and nothing worked.
Will do. I am slightly, like, daunted by the prospect, because I find Steam’s interface for remapping controllers to be powerful, yet more than a little obtuse. It SEEMS straightforward, all the way up until you actually start to remap stuff, but then things never seem to work the way you think you’ve set them up.
Yeah I’ve had some remapping shenanigans happen too, most lately on my now borked deck (don’t leave it plugged in when a cat is nearby lol), bit I haven’t tried remapping anything in vr.
Condolences on your deck. I had some luck remapping the Steam Controller, and I’ve done a little bit on my deck. The thing I’m curious about is how that interface will handle the “which hand is which” situation. Remapping buttons to act as other buttons is straightforward enough. Telling the interface that I just want the right hand to exist as the left hand, and vice versa? That seems like it’ll be weird.
Anyway, I’ll give it a try when I have time and report back.
I have messed around in the remapping menu system just a little bit, and I’m not sure how it’s gonna go. The thing I’m looking for is a way to actually tell the game that the right controller is the left controller, and vice versa.
I can remap buttons, but as far as I can tell, that’ll just remap the actual buttons, themselves. For example, there’s no reason for “No Man’s Sky” to attach the multitool to my left hand, just because I’ve swapped the BUTTON MAPPING to my left hand.
I haven’t tried it, but I assume the game will still have the tool bound to my right hand, even though I have to press the buttons on the left controller. Obviously, that isn’t what I want.
Now, that doesn’t mean that there ISN’T a way for the Steam remapping system to basically lie to the game and bind the multitool to my left hand. But that STILL won’t ever be a full solution. There’s no way that the Steam remapping system can tell the game to flip the models for tools and weapons across the Y axis, so they don’t look backwards. And so my thumb is on the right side, if the game has a hand model.
I hasten to add that I only really started having this problem when I switched from the HTC Vive to the Quest 2. The Vive’s wand controllers were symmetrical. If a game had no left-hand support, I could just swap hands. The virtual hand’s thumb would be on the wrong side, and sometimes the weapon/tool would look stupid, but whatever.
The Quest controllers are handed, though. So I can’t just do that anymore. So we’re still always gonna be left with at least some version of the original meme, where devs should add “flip everything around” support, at the level of their software.
Yeah, now that I’m thinking back to it that’s what I remember unfortunately. Dumb!
Yup. I really do think it might be an intractable problem, in terms of fixing it on the user end. I haven’t had a chance to dig into the interface much more, so I still can’t rule out the possibility that Steam could lie to the game and identify the left controller as the right controller, and vice versa…but there really isn’t anything that could ever be done about flipped hand models, guns, etc.
Since devs will always have to fix that stuff, it truly would just be easier to have a single “left handed mode” checkbox, in the settings for all games. For that matter, many VR games ask you about your dominant hand, when you run them for the first time, and set the setting at that point. That should just be considered a standard practice.
Play more beat saber and just be ambidextrous. Skill issue.
I fully have no problem with Beat Saber. I mean, I’m still not actually good, by the high standards of that game…but it’s not something I need a left-handed mode for.
I just want all games to let me fire weapons with my left hand, really. And pick up and manipulate stuff with my left hand. And maybe flip any other controls, between the hands, like whatever the buttons are mapped to, in any specific game.
All that stuff should be virtually free, in terms of development costs. But a surprising amount of games just forget about us lefties.
I use the left hand mode to break my habit of memorizing the song itself. It’s good practice.
So I am actually ambidextrous and originally a southpaw gamer. I wasn’t really able to play FPS well until the original Halo came out. I remember being super excited that it had an actual southpaw option. Then when Minecraft came out for Xbox I was disappointed because there was no southpaw option and I was really afraid I’d never get the hang of the controls. But I forced myself to play it and somehow Minecraft rewired my brain to where I can play default controls no problem now. I think playing a creative game with no precision pressure really helped.
Why not use SteamVR and just remap the controllers? It’s a basic feature
Someone else suggested that, and I never really realized that the controller mapping extended to the VR controllers. I don’t know WHY I didn’t think about that. I went into the interface and poked around some, and it’s not immediately obvious how to tell it “make the game think the left controller is the right controller.”
Maybe there’s a way to do it, but it’s not readily apparent.
The situation I’m talking about is where, like, a game will simply place the a tool or weapon in your right hand. Maybe I’ve already remapped the controls for it to my left controller, but that doesn’t mean the game knows it should bind the model and animations for that weapon or tool to my left motion-tracked controller, instead.
So I’ll be left with waving the tool around in my right hand, but…being able to press the buttons that actually fire that gun with my left hand?
Not exactly useful, if that’s all the remapping can do. Now, like I said, there may be a way for SteamVR to tell the game “right is left” on a universal basis. I just haven’t found it.
Whenever I’m making a game that I’ll never finish and that nobody will ever play, I always think about people with one hand, colorblindness, etc. Accessibility seems like a priority whenever you’re making something for the public at large. Of course it’s different when you actually have to finish something. But still.
Accessibility seems to become more and more of a priority, across the industry, with every year. And kudos to you for always thinking about it. I do think that left-handed support is something that can easily get forgotten, because it’s not a disability. Basically, if nobody on the dev team is left handed, and the team has never made a VR game, it’s a pretty good bet that they will at least need to be reminded.
Not a VR question, but how would lefties like the ability to map a regular gamepad so the dpad and face buttons are swapped?
It seems like I have heard of a few lefties who might remap controls like that, but I would have absolutely NO ABILITY to use a controller set up like that.
I know there are still a few southpaws out there, who use left-handed mice. I tried that once, probably back in the early 1990s, back when all I had to do was remap the two buttons that the mouse had, and try using it with my left hand. I couldn’t ever do it.
I throw objects with my left hand AND catch objects with my left hand (I was a disaster on the baseball field), I tie shoelace and necktie knots backwards/mirrored from a right-hander’s perspective, I bowl a bowling ball with my left hand, I use a pool cue with the butt of the stick in my left hand, I aim weapons with my left hand on the trigger, and I write/draw with my left hand…but I somehow managed to get locked into using a mouse in my right hand, instantly.
I guess that’s just as well, because I don’t even know what a user who mouses with the left hand does, instead of WASD. The numpad, or something? The arrow keys? Still use WASD, but with the keyboard shoved over to the right-hand side of the desk? The mind boggles.
But yeah, VR stuff is a pain, because it involves grabbing and shooting. Grabbing and shooting are just fully left-handed things, for me.
I’ve spent enough time mousing right that trying to switch would be a major pain, plus I’ve been using my greater dexterity with various interfaces over the years, and I really can’t see trying to use an Azeron in my off hand.
There are a few 3/DS games that do this for lefties and it was great.
That doesn’t surprise me, it’s what the switches joypads do when you separate them.
Quest users not having these problems at all
I’ve been a lefty for decades. Have I thought about flipping controls or using a mouse to my left? Yes.
But I’ve never wanted to actually do it. I didn’t even bother to play guitar hero left handed because it was too much trouble when taking turns.
