Half-Life 2 sickness

[Gwarsbane]

http://www.planethalflife.com

Half-Life 2 – Sickness Update  34 Comments
11/23/2004 7:23 PST | Half-Life 2 | by Briggsy
Over at Halflife2.net forums, Anguished has posted an Official email from Bill Van Buren @ Valve concerning the FOV. It seems this is not the cause of the motion sickness. Or so they say. However most of you seem to be getting motion sickness when driving the airboat or the Buggy, unfortunately there is nothing you can do to stop this from happening, some people say forcing the refresh rate to 75 will help. Some people say forcing the FOV to 90 will help. You could try all of these if you with but we will probably just have to live with it.

We've been rigorously playing and testing Half-Life 2, Counterstrike Source and Half-Life Source for a long time now - and we've found nothing to suggest that the FOV change is a significant factor in causing motion sickness. We have, however, put a great deal of work and attention into reducing the motion sickness that can be experienced in the vehicles in Half-Life 2. During our early playtests, many of us were experiencing motion sickness from driving the buggy and the airboat - especially the airboat. We've done a lot of work on tuning the experience to reduce any ill effects - especially looking at how we manage the players head/view in relationship to the movement of the vehicles. Interestingly, for all of the vehicle sequences we revert back to FOV 90 so that you have more peripheral vision which is helpful when moving at these faster speeds. Even so, some people still do experience some motion sickness effects from long stretches in the vehicles - personally, I find that I am most affected by the intense jarring that occurs when you slam into something in the airboat at high speed - like when you miss a jump or something.

You can read the full email here.

[Power and Glory]

I've been lucky and have not experienced this. I guess playing these types of games for the last 10 years helped.

[DragonLady23]

WOW lol sounds like EverQuest all over again:P

[[CAKE]anonymity]

I didnt think it was that bad. Its nothing compared to the headsway in the orginal dark forces.

[Wha?]

I was thinking about that (that being headsway in Dark Forces), and I bet that's exactly what the problem is. While you are moving fluidly (ie. running around), you tend to focus on distant objects, and relatively slow moving details--or suffer more rapidly onset motion sickness, as in GRITS' case. Headswaying creates motion your brain isn't expecting, just like bouncing over stuff and running into things in vehichles. Another factor is how much of your monitor is in you view space. The more of your real FOV is full of moving shapes, the larger the effect (same reason you can read on a bus, but not in a car). Screen tears might cause some aggrivation of it too.

[GRITS]

so it is an IQ issue...... that explains why "some" people don't have a problem with it :P

[[CAKE]anonymity]

Who said anything about an IQ?

btw I caught that GRITS <_<

[FuzzyShoting]

A few tips I've gotten to reduce motion sickness:

* do what you can to increase framerate/reduce framerate fluctuation (reduce screen res, sound and video quality settings)
* setting fps_max to something reasonable may help
* activating mat_vsync may help
* switching from FOV 75 (default) to FOV 90 may help

Other tips I've received:

* while in vehicles, run into less things
* throw up... you'll feel better for a while

Also try this:

(Read more at HalfLife2.net.)

1) Update your monitor's drivers.

2) Find out the Maximum Refresh Rate that your monitor supports for the resolution that you prefer gaming on (lowering resolution will result in higher possible refresh rates). This step is just for informational purposes. You may skip it since Step 4 completes this.

3) Download RefreshForce (Google it).

4) Tell it to "Auto Find" your refresh rates and modes. Click Apply.

5) Go to Steam --> Right click Half-Life 2 --> select Properties --> Launch Options.

Now you can specify the width, height and refresh rate of the screen on which you will be playing. Mine, for example is this: -w 1024 -h 768 -refresh 100

This means I am running a resolution of 1024x768 at a refresh rate of 100hz.

6) Click OK and close the Properties window.

7) It's best to restart your computer now, since you applied that RefreshForce fix.