51–59 of 59 posts
I'm anxious to see how much Valve has learned since the launch of Steam a decade ago. Steam is great now, but it sucked pretty hard when it first came out. I remember the genuine shock I felt at having the friends functionality actually work the way I expected it to after about 4 years of pure shit. I have no doubt this will eventually be awesome, only question is how long it will take.
I want to hear veteran RTS and FPS player weigh in on that controller. Bringing PC-style gaming into the living room would be a dream.
Honestly, I think they have some way to go, but I'm optimistic they can make it work.
Using one of the sides to control a regular mouse in a game like Civ 5 I found that it was not even as good as a regular laptop touchpad. I suspect that a lot of the reason for that may be software though. There is a lot of subtle stuff going on with the motion of a laptop touchpad that has been built up over a decade of iteration and they just didn't have it tuned right.
Using it to control an FPS was interesting, but I was unable to tell if it would be better or worse than, say, a 360 controller in the long term. You certainly can't just pick it up and expect to do well with it quickly. I'm certain that more muscle memory would develop in that area over time though.
At the time I tried it, the haptics were only used to emit a clicking sound that was faster the faster you moved your finger along the surface. It vibrates the surface which makes it feel sort of like you are moving your finger across lots of small bumps rather than a flat surface.
>We’ve had to make the difficult decision to limit our beta to the U.S. only, because of regulatory hurdles. This was not our original plan, and it means we can’t collect beta feedback from Steam customers world-wide, which is pretty unfortunate. All things considered, we’re sure it was the right decision, because the alternative was to delay the whole beta beyond the point when we’d be able to incorporate any feedba…
It's not like there is functionality that would require worldwide test data is there? Steam is the same all over the world. It's not like the XBone where 90% of it's features only work in the US.
I'm very hopeful about the prospect for improvement of linux graphics drivers. It seems to have a been a chicken and egg sort of problem in past; I really hope contributions from valve will create some momentum, especially for the FOSS drivers. It seemed hopeless to me only a couple of years ago, but then it wasn't so long ago that you couldn't suspend your laptop without "blowing your balls off" as Con Kolivas remar…
http://www.engadget.com/2013/11/04/valve-steam-machine-hands...
But I assume it'll be Debian, but we'll see.
I'd love a Gaming OS which I can do a few things in a terminal, e.g. media server.
I want to hear veteran RTS and FPS player weigh in on that controller. Bringing PC-style gaming into the living room would be a dream.
I gave one a go for about 20 minutes a couple of months ago. Honestly, I think they have some way to go, but I'm optimistic they can make it work. Using one of the sides to control a regular mouse in a game like Civ 5 I found that it was not even as good as a regular laptop touchpad. I suspect that a lot of the reason for that may be software though. There is a lot of subtle stuff going on with the motion of a laptop…
I'm very hopeful about the prospect for improvement of linux graphics drivers. It seems to have a been a chicken and egg sort of problem in past; I really hope contributions from valve will create some momentum, especially for the FOSS drivers. It seemed hopeless to me only a couple of years ago, but then it wasn't so long ago that you couldn't suspend your laptop without "blowing your balls off" as Con Kolivas remar…
According to Engadget it isn't based on Ubuntu or anything? http://www.engadget.com/2013/11/04/valve-steam-machine-hands... But I assume it'll be Debian, but we'll see. I'd love a Gaming OS which I can do a few things in a terminal, e.g. media server.
I figure I should be working anyway...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In particular, I'm hopeful that the radeon and intel FOSS drivers will improve (although I guess that nvidia said they will help with nouveau now: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/09/nvidia... ). I gather Valve has given significant feedback to all three vendors ( http://www.pcworld.com/article/2049369/amd-nvidia-ramp-up-li... and: http://games.slashdot.org/story/12/08/31/1551230/valve-finds... ), a…
AFAIK Intel is pushing Wayland. As for Mir, I'm not aware of any group outside of Canonical with the slightest amount of interest.
As it is now, Steam is easy to install on Ubuntu, and possible, but maybe a bit of a pain for other distros, depending on which one. It would be sad if Steam eventually only worked well on SteamOS, because of fragmentation in the graphics stack. If I wanted to choose my OS solely on the basis of what works well for gaming, I would be running Windows.
Then again maybe Intel and Valve will sort of bring some adult supervision to the distros by putting some pressure on everyone to pick one graphics stack and live with it. I'm not sure whether I think this is a good thing or not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The current consoles are plenty powerful for this type of thing, don't forget they are basically just gaming PCs in compact cases this generation and share almost the exact same hardware (Xbox One and PS4).
Really ? Even the Occulus Rift co-founder mentioned they are far away from where they need to be. WHen you want to do virtual reality, you need constant 60 fps (or more, ideally) in order to give a good impression of movement in all directions. XBone and PS4 are already struggling to display a SINGLE 1080p screen at 60 fps already, let's not dream too much. They are massively underpowered, and the AMD APU is notoriou…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really ? Even the Occulus Rift co-founder mentioned they are far away from where they need to be. WHen you want to do virtual reality, you need constant 60 fps (or more, ideally) in order to give a good impression of movement in all directions. XBone and PS4 are already struggling to display a SINGLE 1080p screen at 60 fps already, let's not dream too much. They are massively underpowered, and the AMD APU is notoriou…
One of my coworkers has a Occulus dev kit.. I'm pretty sure it's just a single screen in there so 1080p Occulus would only require a single 1080p stream as far as I know, which current consoles are more then capable of.