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Steam Frame starts at $1059

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Re: Steam Frame starts at $1059

#91
post #16

Half-Life Alyx is the greatest gaming experience I have ever had the pleasure to witness. I now occasionally VR golf. It's a steep price for a niche with not a lot of games.

HL:A is incredible, and I think it's still the best single-player VR game ever made, but it's almost seven years old now. It's pretty clear that this software ecosystem is dead.

I'm looking forward to the modding community finally having full, unfettered access to a single hardware deploy target that will allow them to do a lot of interesting work that may be technically possible right now, but is very hard in a complicated and heterogeneous ecosystem, both because it is technically difficult to set up, and because the technical difficulty of doing the set up prevents any community from getting over the activation energy to grow and become self-sustaining.

In particular, I don't know if the Steam Frame will have the power for this, but something like a native ARM build of Dolphin (so no FEX) that exposes the 3D nature of polygonal games is very interesting to me. If you can cross your eyes to get stereo you can see what that would look like for something like Super Mario 3D Galaxy here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmgdqCL2toE (I find a conventional, unfolding phone to be a pretty good size for that. On a big monitor getting it small enough to cross eyes can be a challenge.) In general any emulation target that has 3D polygons is really interesting to me. I'm also pretty interested in what full 3D does to Skies of Arcadia (could be a complete disappointment, could be absolutely amazing) and Sin & Punishment: Star Successor, where I feel like the game that was a bit crowded and struggling with being 2D in SD might just come alive. (Assuming they didn't play too many games with the distance that doesn't work if we see it in true 3D.)

I gather the modding community is already gearing up for modding more games to be true 3D in the VR space. That is, not necessarily VR (though there's a mod community for that as well), but having a visible screen floating in 3D VR space where the screen itself is fully 3D. There is also a wide variety of games from the past couple of decades that I suspect might be very difficult to "convert to VR" but might be relatively easy to trick into rendering full 3D instead of down to 2D.

Nothing really stops any of this from happening now, but I've tried to set it up before and I was unsuccessful with my current stack. Being able to give out instructions that say "Install the Dolphin3D Build from the Flatpak Store and load up your ROMs" rather than the current set of ad hoc complex instructions that I couldn't even get through successfully could be a game changer.

I will giggle like a schoolgirl if the reason why Steam Frames sell like hot cakes in six to twelve months is that they become recognized as the premier way to emulate 3D systems from the Playstation forward. Overclocking, texture packs, modding, all that's great, but how about all those things and true 3D for a lot of games?

Re: Steam Frame starts at $1059

#92
post #7

At basically quest 3 levels of on device performance, this thing better have amazing software. This price is way too high. Our expectations have been warped by Meta's decade long subsidization of VR hardware

I feel much the same. I don't think I'll be moving on from my Quest 3 until the hardware kicks the bucket.

Its a steep premium to not have zucc peering through your headset cameras.

Re: Steam Frame starts at $1059

#93
post #16

Half-Life Alyx is the greatest gaming experience I have ever had the pleasure to witness. I now occasionally VR golf. It's a steep price for a niche with not a lot of games.

It's pretty good, but it would have been good enough as a non-VR title. The thought of digging out my VR headset to play it makes me shudder. I never even managed to finish it, played through most of it and then couldn't bring myself to get my VR headset out again.

Re: Steam Frame starts at $1059

#94
post #16

Half-Life Alyx is the greatest gaming experience I have ever had the pleasure to witness. I now occasionally VR golf. It's a steep price for a niche with not a lot of games.

Interesting that Alyx is still listed as "Windows only" even though the reviews say it includes a native Linux port:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/546560/HalfLife_Alyx/

Re: Steam Frame starts at $1059

#95
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m somewhat surprised nobody has pointed one of those hacking models at a Rift CV1 and said “make it work without all the Facebook junk, preferably in Linux.”

... You know, now there's an idea ... But in seriousness, I've gone down this rabbithole ever year or two for about as long as I've had the darn thing (including one especially masochistic attempt at making it work on ppc64le), and any time I have gotten an open stack to drive it, the result has always been unusable with regard to input jitter and "general feel". Which is to say, yes, people have already figured out…

Well it’s news to me that things are already at the state of just needing better filtering. Maybe it is time to dust mine off…

Re: Steam Frame starts at $1059

#96
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone is missing maybe the biggest point - this isn't just a VR device. You can run some/many (depending on your library) of your regular Steam games on a 'flat screen' inside the VR environment, which makes this much more like a SteamDeck with a giant private screen for a lot of people.

Not trying to proselytize an opinion here, but every time I think about VR Goggles + a virtual flat screen, I think about how entire industries exist to make us comfortable while we watch our real flat screens. A VR option would allow me to just lay comatose-like in my bed, goggles affixed to my face, as I watch whatever. It terrifies me, partly because of how good I bet it could feel.

Honestly, with apps like Immersed, custom two-hand keyboards, and trackball mice, it is already feasible to lie comatose in bed with a VR headset strapped to your face and get through an entire day of software development.

Re: Steam Frame starts at $1059

#98

At current hardware prices, this is worth buying to use as a server!

This does make me excited for the possibility, several years down the line of a Valve ARM Linux laptop with decent battery life. I wonder if anyone will rip out the compute unit out of the headset and try to use it as mini PC, just because you can, it seems like fun.

Re: Steam Frame starts at $1059

#99
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone is missing maybe the biggest point - this isn't just a VR device. You can run some/many (depending on your library) of your regular Steam games on a 'flat screen' inside the VR environment, which makes this much more like a SteamDeck with a giant private screen for a lot of people.

Not trying to proselytize an opinion here, but every time I think about VR Goggles + a virtual flat screen, I think about how entire industries exist to make us comfortable while we watch our real flat screens. A VR option would allow me to just lay comatose-like in my bed, goggles affixed to my face, as I watch whatever. It terrifies me, partly because of how good I bet it could feel.

I don’t know. I can’t even take a nap while having my glasses on, so the thought of lying down with a much weightier VR headset pressing down on my face doesn’t sound super comfortable.

Re: Steam Frame starts at $1059

#100
post #47
post #16

Half-Life Alyx is the greatest gaming experience I have ever had the pleasure to witness. I now occasionally VR golf. It's a steep price for a niche with not a lot of games.

Everyone is missing maybe the biggest point - this isn't just a VR device. You can run some/many (depending on your library) of your regular Steam games on a 'flat screen' inside the VR environment, which makes this much more like a SteamDeck with a giant private screen for a lot of people.

I don’t see that as the biggest point. I really don’t have much interest in playing normal games in VR.

I could see how a kid might want that on Quest when they don’t have their own TV. And it might be nice on a plane.

But $1000 is a lot for that. I know people say that watching video in the Vision Pro is really nice, I wasn’t that thrilled when I tried it, but it felt to me more like a “you can do this because you have the hardware“ not a “this is why you buy it” feature.

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