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Old 12-03-2001, 12:21 PM   #49
Amaron
Elite Waterdeep Guard
 

Join Date: November 20, 2001
Location: TN
Posts: 24
I posted this in a thread where people were discussing motion sickness in games and I've gotten a lot of feedback about it so I figured I'd put it in the tip section here for any future people suffering from this.

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Hey guys I just wanted to say don't loose help yet . I've a lot of info for you here. Let me go into the full disertation because I can't imagine something more horrible than not being able to play a great game simply because it made me sick.

Here are the basics. First off motion sickness is not what we're talking about here most likely. Motion sickness is usually due to your eyes telling you something different than your inner ears are feeling. It happens when for instance you sit in a car reading and not watching the road. This CAN happen on a computer but it usually dosn't unless your sitting WAY to close to the monitor or the monitor is the size of an IMAX screen . In other words because you see the stuff isn't moving around the monitor your brain isn't telling you to puke because your ears and your eyes agree. This is why you don't hear much about people getting sick watching tv car chase scenes too. But it can happen so make sure your not sitting to close and make sure there is a lot of clutter around your monitor like cups, numerous game magazines, books, diet coke cans...oh wait thats my desk come up with your own set of junk! Hehe seriously though with all this extraneous STATIONARY info coming into your eyes it helps your brain figure it out a lot easier. Some people say put post it notes on your monitor also for example. The reason this helps is as long as most of the stuff you see looks stationary your brain classifies the monitor simply as a moving object.

Unfortunately if this sickness only happens to you with certain games its most likely that what your suffering from is called simulation sickness. The main difference is your getting sick in this case not because your ear and eyes arn't jiving but because your FINGERS and your eyes arn't jiving. This is analogous to the fact that some people get sick being a passenger in a car but it's much rarer for someone to get motion sick when they are the one driving the car. If you ever puked watching someone else play 3d games this is what im talking about and prolly what your suffering from. If your computer isn't doing what you want it to reliably when you tell it to do it then you'll get sick. Your brain wires pathways to do things automatically whenever you learn some new method of motion. For instance when you turn right in the game you think about turning right and your brain kind of subconciously pushes the right key. Your brain has this sort of set expectation about WHEN the screen is going to change in relation to when you push that key. So if your eyes dont' tell your brain what it expects to see it gets confused . This is why some games can cause more problems than others. If a game dosn't give you reliable reaction time due to somewhat sloppy codding or memory leaks or whatever then you can get simulation sickness quickly. Unfortunately it's not as simple as getting your framerates up . My advice to you is try the following.

Put a buncha stuff around your monitor and push it back for starters. Don't let it sit in front of a beige wall that fills up your main cone of vision. If you have an LCD monitor with a very very thin border put post it notes ALL around it so the border looks much bigger. Perhaps try not to run in wide screen mode let the char portraits show etc.

Now if your still having problems start changing settings. The first thing to try is change video modes. I've met people who can simply switch between directx and opengl and it all the sudden dosn't make them sick anymore. Try software rendering too. If the screen is jerky make sure you turn down the resolution the game runs in or the bit depth. I can't say for certain but I'd bet my apples turning off anti aliasing might help a lot due to the way it alters the screen to make it look so smooth. Change mip maping options as well to see if that helps. It's hard to know what will work due to the nature of how a screen refreshe's itself. The best analogy I can think of is this. All those options are apples and every drawing to the screen requires set amount of apples for each option. Now the screen refresh's are like buckets. You want to get all the options to add up right so that the bucket never overflows. This makes the whole process of drawing and refreshing happen steady and reliably and lets your brain get used to it. Basically screw around with the video till you get something that works. If you have spare video cards plop them in and try them out too. If none of that works you might still have one option left even if it's not the most plesurable option.

Basically for those of us who actually know what a cramp is we've got to admit our brains don't work as well as they used too. Teenagers can handle 3d easily because their brain rewires so quickly. If your old enough to have actually seen star wars the first time though your not so lucky. What that means basically is you might get some luck by sitting down dropping some motion sickness drugs and grinning and bearing it for a couple days even if you do get drowsy. After a while your brain might get used to it and you'll find it goes away. Try watching tv while playing to look away ever 2 minutes and not get bored possibly.

I really really hope this helps some of you I had this problem once with quake 2 and I know how much it sucked. I wish you good luck and don't give up if this dosn't happen to you with every 3d game you know of then chances are you will be able to change something in such a way that the game works out for you. Please lete me know if you can get past it I'll cross my fingers for you till then .

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Someone on another board this got cross posted to asked about how the inner ear feels and I thought I'd explain that quick to to clear any problems up. Your ear has a kind of set of bubbles in it with fluid in them. In a way they work like a carpenters level. When your body shifts the fluid shifts. Your inner ear detects the shift by thousands and thousands of microscopic hairs along the wall of the bubble. The shifting hairs tell your body which way its leaning kind of like how you feel which way the wind is blowing over your skin.

Anyways sorry for the uber long post [img]smile.gif[/img] .
Amaron is offline   Reply With Quote