221–230 of 471 posts
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.
Tangentially related: If I wanted to play Half-Life: Alyx, and spend as little money as possible whilst still having a good experience, what do I need? (I already own a beefy desktop computer)
here's a great video about exactly this, might be outdated as it's 6 years old
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.
You may not realise that we are currently in the midst of a VR Mod rennaisance: https://pcvrcentral.com/ Have you seen G-Rebels? Gunman-Contracts? NMS. Games such as Doom 2016, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Half Life 2, many many more are being modded currently. I'd also recommend games such as Pistol Whip and Synth Riders if you'd like to exercise at home. There are now many good quality games, and I purchased a headset…
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I suspect that the current design of VR/AR is not likely to get cheap enough and light/small enough to catch on in a big way. Kind of seems like diminishing returns on headset improvements at this point.
The first VR system that many of us used was the W Industries / Virtuality system in the early 1990's. Those were $60k in 1991 which is $140k today. If the price of leading edge VR price drops two orders of magnitude every 35 years or so, it's probably only going to be another 10-15 years for $200 headsets. So it's not here yet, but will be soon.
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So it may be a good wirk machine to use during long flights, with a compact wireless keyboard. Unless you fly first class, using a laptop on a plane is painful.
Also only possible if you've got a power outlet (Surprisingly even today many long haul flights do not) as its only got just over an hour of battery life.
I want this for one reason and one reason only: DCS. Anyone know how well it works/doesn't work yet? I've waited for years to get a VR heads for DCS (its a flight simulator folks) .. and now, maybe, this is it.
Once you hit the advanced 3rd Gen or any 4th Gen fighter or attack aircraft (essentially anything where you go "heads down" for any significant portion of the aircrafts mission profile) VR becomes more of a liability than an asset.
For those aircraft being a pilot is secondary to being a systems operator.
Think of an F-14; you have the front seat who would want to be in VR because they fly the aircraft, but the RIO would NOT want to be because they have very little need to be, especially since it makes interfacing with their mission systems so much harder. AH-64's are the same split.
Now if you are the sole person in the aircraft and need to do both missions being able to operate the systems fluently and smoothly via dedicated interfaces FAR exceeds any benefit from being in VR.
I've done it all, and I far prefer flying in VR. But for accomplishing complex mission profiles multiscreen with each being an MFD and a rich control set far beat that immersion.
Perhaps the best mix is using a curved UW and trackir plus dedicated MFD screens. Once you get that setup its amazing for that advanced capability set.
All of this assumes you want to use the full capability set of an airframe, or use an attack profile at all. If all you want is to use them for A2A, then VR is wonderful as long as you have a full HOTAS set, understand the preset modes on everything, and memorize the controls and alternate control schemes properly for BVR to close in conversion, countermeasures, etc.
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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/
For good reason. Last time I checked (this year), Alyx crashes Mesa (i.e. your Vulkan layer) when the player enters an in-game load zone. This happens with native linux and the proton windows version.
The Steam Frame looks like a heck of a device. At the cost, though, I question why they didn't include a better pass-through camera. A device with onboard processing and a good pass-through camera would be very neat. If they were trying to make this an affordable device I'd understand, but it's over a thousand dollars.
> If they were trying to make this an affordable device I'd understand, but it's over a thousand dollars.
It costs less than a third of the Vision Pro, and less than the Meta Quest Pro. It's relatively affordable, for a RAM crisis.
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The XReal is practically guaranteed to have sold less units than any generation of the Quest hardware.
Which means? We should buy the Meta Quest / Quest Pro headset? I don't think so. Maybe that's the reason why the Meta Quest Pro is in "so much demand" that Meta is no longer selling them anymore. Apple is not even bothering to restock Vision Pro either. So much demand /s I am saying VR had a great run. We are not in the Covid era anymore which the Quest greatly benefited from this. VR has a very limited future and it…
I am saying that too. AR had a comparatively terrible run - it's possible that Apple's Vision Pro moved even less units than XReal.
VR is niche, but a real market. It coexists with the AR world and still outsells it consistently, despite being a terribly unpopular market segment.
It means that your claim of AR glasses eventual popularity is even more spurious than a guy with a Rift DK1 saying that VR is destined for mainstream success. They're both wishcasting.
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The race/flight sim market is still going strong, but I guess it's the exception that proves the rule. It's extremely difficult to make a non-vehicle-based game that actually plays well in VR.
Incidentally I made a vehicle based game in VR ( https://roguestargun.com ), but currently I have no idea how to upload the APK to Steam to run on-device for the steam frame.