MADiSON VR is eventually going to make me cry myself to sleep, but we will have to wait a few more weeks thanks to a quality update.
It seems the team behind MADiSON VR are taking things to the heart with their most recent release to the game. The VR edition has been delayed 5 times now due to last minute quality updates, but what is surely the last delay has happened.
According to the developers, Unity has added 90hz mode to the SDK, which allows the game to be updated from 60/120. Which is oddly overall great news for PSVR2 as a whole. The previous SDK prevented games developed on Unity to utilize eye tracking foveated rendering, while maintaining the same visuals. The new update allows both features to work alongside each other. So perhaps some other games that had similar issues will also get the update, along with some upcoming releases also getting a slight update.
The team notes that this is a straightforward development, so we shouldn’t see any further delays. The ultimate delay stems from Sony requiring a 5 day verification update, among some other minor issues, so they are piecing together what is “the final release” of the game.
Our ambition is to create a realistic and daunting atmosphere with MADiSON VR. And we achieved this through realistic real-time lighting and shadows. These elements heavily utilise the CPU on all platforms.
To make this possible in VR, we use a technique called “Single-Pass Rendering” so that resource-heavy operations are only done once per frame. Unfortunately, our use of this previously precluded us from also using the eye-tracked dynamic foveated rendering (DFR) feature on PSVR 2, as the Unity PSVR 2 implementation had a known issue with this combination. Without DFR, it would have only been possible to release using the 60/120 (interpolation) mode, which worked adequately, however we always felt fell a little short of the quality we were striving for. As of 22nd March Unity’s new SDK, now opens up DFR and by extension the possibility to hit the 90hz mode. A last minute improvement we simply can’t ignore.
No official release date was set beyond a release window of “a few weeks,” but that hasn’t killed my excitement. With how great the initial game is, combined with how much heart i’ve seen in development, this could potentially be THE best PSVR2 experience.
