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John Carmack reviews VR app “Just Relax”

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Re: John Carmack reviews VR app “Just Relax”

#31

Post by dingo_bat »

dmix wrote: post #28
dingo_bat wrote: post #23

The Oculus Home app (GearVR/S7 edge) recently received an update that has literally blown everything out of the water in terms of quality. I simply don't feel like launching an app now, just want to look at the scenery. I didn't see anything about it on HN, so here are a couple of links about the update: https://www.vrfocus.com/2017/03/carmack-on-oculus-home-updat... https://uploadvr.com/new-john-carmack-software-dou…

> Static images with mip maps or proper prefiltering can go up to around 18 pixels per degree if you really want the most detail in the center. I'm not very familiar with VR. What does he mean here by "center"?

Center just means center of the rendered scene. I dunno how to explain it clearly, but just think of wherever you are looking at any moment.

Re: John Carmack reviews VR app “Just Relax”

#32

Post by JustSomeNobody »

eklavya wrote: post #16

Did I miss something? Should you give someone feedback on a public post? Writing generically about something you noticed would be fine but to specifically talk about a project, I don't know, I would feel super uncomfortable if it was done to me.

Maybe in return for his time, he gets to post it publicly? It could prove useful to others, surely.

Re: John Carmack reviews VR app “Just Relax”

#33

Post by greggman »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #20
vvanders wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building an engine takes years and a large(~30+) team if you want to match UE4/Unity in terms of productivity.

I'm very familiar with what it takes. We built a mobile AR engine based on OpenGL starting back in 2013 that launched in 2015. I'm sure FB has more than enough fantastic personnel and resources to build a great engine.

Sure you made an engine, I doubt it has 1/50th of the real feature of the top engines. Can it import layers for photoshop or do you have to save as .PNGs. Can you import Maya, 3DS Max, Blender, and others or only some exported format like Collada. Do you have support for Right to Left text, All of Unicode? Do you run on 15 platforms including things 3DS, Switch, ... Do you have an IDE non-programmers can use? Does it have undo? Is it localized into other languages? Does it have a plugin system? Can those plugins be loaded and unloaded while it's running to do you have to exit, recompile, and restart to use plugins. Do you have shader editors? Animation Edtiors? Can you apply different animations to portions of a character? Do you have physics? How about phyiscally based animations?

I'm sure you're going to tell me "yes" to all of those but sorry, as someone who's made several engines myself NES, Amiga, 3D0, DOS, Windows, PS1, PS2, PS3/XBOX 360, I know from experience that just "making an engine" is like 3% of the real work involved in getting to the level of Unreal and Unity.

It's very easy to "make an engine", it's a lot harder to fill it out with features and tools.

Re: John Carmack reviews VR app “Just Relax”

#34

Post by AndrewKemendo »

greggman wrote: post #33
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm very familiar with what it takes. We built a mobile AR engine based on OpenGL starting back in 2013 that launched in 2015. I'm sure FB has more than enough fantastic personnel and resources to build a great engine.

Sure you made an engine, I doubt it has 1/50th of the real feature of the top engines. Can it import layers for photoshop or do you have to save as .PNGs. Can you import Maya, 3DS Max, Blender, and others or only some exported format like Collada. Do you have support for Right to Left text, All of Unicode? Do you run on 15 platforms including things 3DS, Switch, ... Do you have an IDE non-programmers can use? Does it…

Right which is totally out of scope of Facebook's capabilities right?

Give me a break. You can pile up an infinite list of capabilities for any kind of ide, engine, editor etc... Point is, if anyone can do it its Facebook and it would be great for the dev community.

Take that chip of your shoulder for a minute.

Re: John Carmack reviews VR app “Just Relax”

#35

Post by stagger87 »

davesque wrote: post #30

I expected this to be an insightful post by Carmack about the current trends and concerns in the VR industry. It turned out to be what sounds like an entirely predictable review that could have been written by anyone with a bit of technical knowledge of a poorly designed VR app. Not very interesting. Don't really understand why this is getting so much attention.

I think it is awesome Carmack takes the time to do this. He clearly cares about VR and the experience users have with VR, even on seemingly trivial apps such as this one. I imagine most developers in this space would love to be peer reviewed by Carmack. Some of his comments seem to be nuanced rendering suggestions, I'm not sure anyone with a 'bit of technical knowledge' could provide this level of feedback.

Re: John Carmack reviews VR app “Just Relax”

#36

Post by vvanders »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #34
greggman wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure you made an engine, I doubt it has 1/50th of the real feature of the top engines. Can it import layers for photoshop or do you have to save as .PNGs. Can you import Maya, 3DS Max, Blender, and others or only some exported format like Collada. Do you have support for Right to Left text, All of Unicode? Do you run on 15 platforms including things 3DS, Switch, ... Do you have an IDE non-programmers can use? Does it…

Right which is totally out of scope of Facebook's capabilities right? Give me a break. You can pile up an infinite list of capabilities for any kind of ide, engine, editor etc... Point is, if anyone can do it its Facebook and it would be great for the dev community. Take that chip of your shoulder for a minute.

There's no chip on his shoulder, all of those things listed are stuff that UE supports out of the box. There's also a ton of things not mentioned like the cinematic editor, scripting system, cooking process, etc.

Honestly even if Facebook could, I'm not sure I want them to. I've got enough privacy concerns around what they do on the web. The last thing I need is to have a game engine that's used to mine every piece of data then can from me. When you have a non-games company controlling a platform their concerns are going to be above what's best for the content creators(see also: publishers).

Re: John Carmack reviews VR app “Just Relax”

#37

Post by vvanders »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #29
vvanders wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Game engine != Productivity(artist/designer) focused game engine. I've worked on UE3 based titles, in-house engines and quite a few in-between. Building a new engine from the ground up is easily in the 10s of millions if not more which is why you rarely see new entries into the market. Sure FB could do it, but it probably makes more sense to worth with UE4/Unity to augment them. You'll be able to draw from a large ba…

I don't disagree with any of that. However the point is it would be huge for the development community but a relatively small project for Facebook. Would solidify platform lock in even further.

Why do I want a platform lock? As a gamedev that's the worst thing that can happen unless there's substantial compensation on the other side of the equation.

Re: John Carmack reviews VR app “Just Relax”

#38

Post by jjeaff »

monkmartinez wrote: post #15
hashhar wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why growth is measured as a percentage? Obviously the growth rate for Facebook can NEVER be greater than the growth rate of the population of people born into households with internet. And that can be nowhere near 20% YOY even. It's what is responsible for the stupid fallacy that PC is dying. It's not dying - it's has more longevity. A machine I built in 2008 is still going strong. Only had to upgr…

If Facebook went away tomorrow, no one on the planet would be adversely harmed. IMO, investors price in the fact that most social networks are ephemeral. Grow or have stock price hammered into dust.

I would argue that productivity would increase and social stress would decrease. I can't think of any harmful effect of Facebook disappearing except for a few lost jobs.

Re: John Carmack reviews VR app “Just Relax”

#39

Post by Animats »

If you like forest scenes, there's Speedtree.[1] Speedtree is a commercial terrain and vegetation generator for games. It can procedurally generate huge landscapes in real time, and has level of detail handling so the world will fit in memory. There are some Speedtree demos where you can walk around in a forest. It's like a game with good visuals, except nothing happens. Very peaceful.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9Z142aOsm4

Re: John Carmack reviews VR app “Just Relax”

#40

Post by meheleventyone »

dmix wrote: post #28
dingo_bat wrote: post #23

The Oculus Home app (GearVR/S7 edge) recently received an update that has literally blown everything out of the water in terms of quality. I simply don't feel like launching an app now, just want to look at the scenery. I didn't see anything about it on HN, so here are a couple of links about the update: https://www.vrfocus.com/2017/03/carmack-on-oculus-home-updat... https://uploadvr.com/new-john-carmack-software-dou…

> Static images with mip maps or proper prefiltering can go up to around 18 pixels per degree if you really want the most detail in the center. I'm not very familiar with VR. What does he mean here by "center"?

Mobile VR works by rendering both eyes to the screen. The result is then seen through lenses. As a result pixel density is highest in the center of each eye. So in this case center means the portion of the screen under the midpoint of each lens.
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