A bug caused by a door in a game you may have heard of called "Half Life 2"
152 points by fanf
152 points by fanf
2013 around the time the Oculus DK1 emerge
Am I that old suddenly? Where has the time gone by?
I feel liek the VR technologies have kinda fizzled out, at least out of mainstream. Am I just in the bubble, or is the tech really not that useful (or used)?
No one has solved the root problem with VR, which is that different people use different subsets of the visual cues for depth in different proportions. VR reproduces three of the seven (if I remember correctly) and the lack of the others makes 10-20% of people motion sick. It’s very hard to sell a technology when a five-minute demo is sufficient for one in five people to say ‘this makes me feel sick. I hate it’.
Am I just in the bubble, or is the tech really not that useful (or used)?
I think the tech is fine but the user experience isn't "mainstream ready" - for me, with my Rift S, I have to make sure the PC is working fine, the OS doesn't need any updates, the Oculus software is updated, the games are updated, it's been at last half an hour since Steam finished updating[0]; the hand controllers have fresh batteries; I've got enough space, enough energy (the headset isn't heavy but it's not light), it's not too warm (it gets sweaty real fast), etc.
I suspect the standalone headsets (especially Valve's new one) will be better (to some degree) but it's still a lot more involved than just picking up, e.g., the Switch 2 or its controller.
[0] My Windows install is sufficiently haunted that it takes >30 minutes for Steam to do an update due to ... whatever the hell is going on with post-boot processes.
I try to play table tennis on my Oculus Quest 2 before work every day. I spend more time doing some warmup than getting into the game. Literally the headset takes 1 minute to get into the game, and I do all maintenance once I'm done.
I think it's more a lack of killer apps. Table tennis on VR is a killer app: I like table tennis and I really can't play real life, so despite a major limitation (no doubles play, which I love while I find singles play a bit meh), VR is a godsend for me.
But for example, my GF loved Beat Saber, but it was much more of a hassle- in a big part because we used PSVR at the time (the Quest is uncomfortable for her and the experience is much more annoying), so she hasn't played in ages. Small details can make it or break it.
I think there are few killer apps like table tennis and Beat Saber, and they are highly dependent on the user- not everyone loves table tennis or slashing blocks to music. So I think it's wonderful, but I see no "mainstream" killer app.
Table tennis on VR is a killer app
Good point, I forgot I had that installed. I'll have to try and resurrect my PC + Rift.
I like table tennis and I really can't play real life
I used to play a lot in real life but I'm down to one working knee these days and it would be disaster.
I see no "mainstream" killer app.
I think if 3D films were still a thing, things like BigScreen would be a decent selling point. Google Earth is pretty good in VR but there's too much that's not "real" 3D to make it truly interesting.
The devs really recommend playing in-device to reduce latency.
Oh, I can play real-life table tennis. It's just I have to find a table and an opponent, neither of which is easy. Whereas I pop the Quest, I can play at home, with opponents from all over the world. (They have great workarounds for latency.)
FWIW, I've had one player beat me heavily playing seated due to injuries. The game does not have wheelchair rules, but I think VR makes adaptation nicer: you can place the table easily at different heights, etc. Depending on your condition, you might have a good experience.
...
I'm taking a look at Gaussian splatting. There's a Meta demo of some digitized spaces that you can walk around in that are pretty impressive. And I found a company that claimed to have "animated" Gaussian splat scenes, but IIRC they didn't work on my headset.
I find 360º videos interesting, but I wouldn't imagine anyone getting a headset for that.
Sony gave mainstreaming a good try with PSVR. But at the end of the day there were only a handful of great games for it—RE7, Beat Saber, Tetris Effect, Wipeout, Astro Bot. Besides such headliners there were mostly a bunch of short experiences, or limited VR modes in this or that game. For an enthusiast like me it nonetheless took effort to get in and out of a session, so there were times when I'd use it and times when I'd set it aside for ages. With PSVR 2 they tried again, but it seemed like the same financial weight wasn't put behind expanding the catalog, and it did fizzle.
This sort of thing does help explain why Valve have never updated their games for other architectures, but I am surprised it took so long to find this. The Orange Box version came out for the PS3 and Xbox 360 in 2007, and neither had fp80 support.
I am more astounded that the original source code of Half Life 2 still compiled. That is something that Rockstar famously couldn‘t do and used cracks instead.
Why do people write entire articles as a series of microblog posts? It’s incredibly annoying to read.
I don't know if you've ever used blogs and microblogs together before, but I feel like the primary reason is the effort needed.
With a full-blown blog post, you end up spending a lot of time caring for minute little details, not to mention the workflow being more like "sit down and do the thing." With a microblog it is much easier to dump your thoughts without really thinking about the quality too much, and still end up with something interesting to read.
Here's a link which makes it read just like a blog post:
https://www.mastoreader.io/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmastodon.gamedev.place%2F%40TomF%2F115589875974658415
Because the "series of microblog posts" is a stream of consciousness retelling, with no edition. An article has a much larger assumption of effort, for writer and reader both.
Don’t people write them in text editor as a set of paragraphs to send one by one to microblog anyway?
I was sure everyone does that. Writing directly to social network is not a comfortable experience. I guess I’m not representative
Not everybody: I can remember two different people explicitly stating that they can write large streams of prose right into a microblogging form paragraph by paragraph but cannot do it into a text editor.
Sometimes you just start writing and don't realize it's going to be longer than a handful of posts until you're halfway thru.
It's not the case for everyone, but some people are just not going to write long form things in an organised way. There are no options of how you're going to read it. It's either the thoughts as they happen or nothing, take it or leave it. Foone being one famous example.
Doesn’t Mastodon have a short length limit on posts? Twitter of course did/does, and I think it “taught” people to write like that. Yet another reason to hate Twitter.
At this day and age it’s probably due to the small attention span. I know that most untrained ppl can 300-600 words. More than that, is very hard to keep your audience.
Because "articles" are an idiotic idea which is needlessly taxing for the brain.
Real knowledge is transmitted by small chunks of digestible thoughts. For example look at Wittgenstein's Tractatus or primary school mathematics textbooks.
One though = two or three sentences headed by a § sign.
I liked this. Is there a traditional blog post version? I keep a list of fun bugs, but I don't think a link to a mastodon post will be durable. Blogs of course disappear, but they tend to disappear less.
You could, possibly, save the html page and mirror it on your website
Copyright. I'm sure the author won't get angry with attribution etc. but it's still dicey.
I might make a summary and link to the thread. I make summaries for the links because I worry about link rot and want to leave us enough bread crumbs that we can find the material through a search. archive/waybackmachine still exist for now, of course.