I (slowly) played through TOTF2 Career on medium difficulty over the last couple of weeks, and won every fight, but I never once knocked down (much less out) an opponent. In fact, I have never managed to get a knockdown in TOTF2--whether in singleplayer or multiplayer. I don't have this issue in TOTF1: typically I win fights there by TKO (and I've beaten every opponent on Outclassed). Any suggestions for what I might be doing wrong?
Can one use the Meta Scene API in a sideloaded Quest app and, if so, how?
I noticed that if I simply install my apk via adb, I get the permission popup on start, but even if I activate the permission, the app cannot access any of the room furniture data. However, if I create an entry in MQDH for the app, upload it to a production channel, fill out enough basic data in the web-based Meta developer dashboard, then I can pull up a mockup of a store page for the app (e.g., click View PDP in MQDH), and if I install the app on my headset through the Install button on the mockup, then my app magically starts being able to access the room furniture data. (Plus, it magically shows up in the standard library on my device as a regular non-sideloaded app, which is a nice touch.)
Afterwards, I can uninstall the app, install it via adb, and the room furniture data still works. I can even change the app keys, and the data still works--the availability of the data is linked to the app id, not the app keys.
Question: What if I want to make the app available to someone else to sideload (e.g., via Sidequest)? Will the app on their headset be able to access the Meta Scene API, once I've registeed the app id with Meta as above? Or would the user need to create their own dummy MQDH entry? Are there any apps on SideQuest that use the Meta Scene API?
If anyone is kind enough to help me test if my app manages to access the Meta Scene API, I have an apk here: https://github.com/arpruss/quest_lightgun/releases/tag/0.01
Before running this, you need to use the Quest room editor to tag an item of furniture as a screen (e.g., a TV) before starting the app. Then if the app works, it should start in MR, draw a blue rectangle over the screen, and if you point the right touch controller to the screen, it should draw a red ball. If it doesn't find the screen in your room, you will see nothing but passthrough.
The app also streams data to the log with the location where the controller is pointing and the state of the controllers buttons. The point of the app is to let you use a touch controller as a lightgun with emulated games like Duck Hunt running on the marked screen. This weekend I have actually successfully played Duck Hunt this way on my Raspberry PI (using this python script which reads the log via adb and emulates an absolute mouse), but the precision is not as good as I'd like yet.
I used play NES Power Pad games with a NES emulator and two DDR pads joined together, but I bought a cheap almost-like-new Power Pad on ebay. I spent a couple of hours making a USB adapter for it using a $3 blue pill microcontroller. THe adapter emulates the qwer/asdf/zxcv keys which you can use with Nestopia and fceumm. Here are build instructions.
It's been a while since I've played Eggsplode (my favorite Power Pad game), and it was fun to play it last night, for the first time on an original Power Pad.
It's been quiet since I've taken on the moderatorship. To get things started, what fitness games have you played in the last week and on what platforms?
This subreddit was up for adoption, and as I have a lot of interest in exergaming, I thought I'd take over moderation, and say a bit about myself.
I collect, emulate and use fitness games.
One of my projects has been to make old exergames work with newer and more easily accessible hardware. For instance, in this Instructable, I use two Wii DDR pads to emulate a NES power pad. This set up got me 317,600 points in Eggsplode!, emulated on an RPI 3B+, using binaries from an original cartridge. Look through my other Instructables for more DIY exergaming content.
My exergaming collection includes:
While I do a significant amount of physical activity with exergaming, most of my physical activity is non-screen-based: I rock climb, kayak, bike, swim, and play a variety of racquet sports.
I would like to adopt r/Fitness_Gaming.
I personally collect, emulate and use all sorts of fitness gaming hardware and software. I enjoy things like old NES power pad games (I have the TwinGalaxies record for Eggsplode! under emulation), Wii, XBox 360 Kinect, Quest 2, Android, etc. I am the maintainer of Open Saber Plus for Quest. I have a series of Exergaming emulation posts on Instructables showing how to use older fitness games with newer hardware (e.g., NES power pad games with a pair of Wii DDR pad games, or running Computer Athlete with my elliptical and custom-made controllers). Lately, I've been playing TOTF 1/2 on Quest and Nike+ Kinect Training on XBox 360.
I made a fairly complete SDK (minus the data acquisition functions) for my 1990s HP1653B Logic Analyzer (and made a serial-to-ADB adapter so I can use an old Apple keyboard/mouse), and I can now run all Infocom Z-machine games with my port of Frotz. Here's Journey. I am playing Nord and Bert through with my 13-year-old daughter. I can also run old Curses-based Linux games (Larn pictured).
My main hobby project since December was getting code running on my early 1990s HP1653B Logic Analyzer. The Logic Analyzer has a 68000 processor, 1mb RAM, 64kb ROM, 4x32kb video memory with a complicated 4-plane overlay scheme providing three (!) gray levels at up to around 640x400, a 3.5" floppy drive (replaced by a Gotek for my convenience) and both RS232c and HPIB ports. It was made as a lab instrument rather than a computer, but it came with both test and system code on floppies, which I dumped and reverse-engineered enough of with Ghidra to enable me to write a library that lets me run assembly and C code on it. My reverse-engineering journey is partly described here.
A particularly fun moment of my reverse engineering was when I wanted a copy of the ROM but didn't yet know how to write to disk or the serial port, though I did know how to write to the screen. I ended up displaying the ROM binary as a series of QR codes, which I captured with my Sony camera running on a timer, and then turned into binaries.
I'm now at the point where I can run various games. My first one was a port of my Wiztris falling blocks game (originally written by me in the early 2000s for a Z80-based Sharp OZ-7xx organizer). I also ported Dave Griffith's Frotz Z-machine emulator so I can run all Infocom Z-machine games (including the graphical ones, but with no sound support). I'm in the middle of a play-through of Nord and Bert with my 13-year-old daughter. The photo I attached is of Infocom's Journey (mouse works!). And I ported PDCursesMod, so a lot of old Unix games can work--the photo shows Larn.
Many of you will recognize the keyboard and mouse. They are old Apple ADB units (I think the keyboard is from a Quadra), and I made an ADB-to-serial adapter to interface them with the HP unit.
This is retrocomputing that never was. As far as I know, there never was any software for the HP1653B besides the official HP oscilloscope / logic analyzer software, though HP engineers did release some games for one of the HP16500 models, and at least one old HP oscilloscope had a Tetris clone built-in.
It's not a great gaming system. There are no sprites. And you can't just directly write a pixel color to video memory. Instead, you first write to a hardware register that specifies a read/write mode (e.g., clear all bitplanes, write ones to bitplanes 0 and 2, etc.) and then write the pixels. Getting scrolling working at a decent speed took a fair amount of careful assembly work. But it's been fun!
I plan to eventually write up more detailed instructions on how to build and install your own code.
The main thing I haven't reverse-engineered are the oscilloscope and logic analyzer functions. They still work. I just switch the Gotek to the HP system disk image (well, somewhat modified: I added a screenshot function that saves an image to disk). I recently used the oscilloscope to try to diagnose a start porblem on my car.
Because I use Open Saber Plus as a fitness game, I have previously added options to stretch the game arena horizontally to force more body movement, and have now added an option to have big blocks if you want to focus on exercise rather than precision.
You get can the game from SideQuest:
https://sidequestvr.com/app/41477/open-saber-plus
or Github:
I have a Q2 with only one profile with v205 firmware. Whenever it boots up, it gives me a black (or dark gray) screen. I have to press the power button twice to get to home. This happens regardless of whether I have home set to MR or Loft (normally I have Loft disabled), and regardless of whether I have WiFi on or off. Does anyone else have this (minor) problem?
I can't figure out how to see when an opponent (I almost only play single player, so AI opponent) is hitting me until it's too late. This is in both TOTF 1 and 2. Much of the time the punch looks completely out of nowhere: I notice it only when it lands (in TOTF 2, I see my field of view lighting up). Sometimes I do see it just before it lands, but by then it's too late to move. How should I train to see and react to opponent attacks earlier?
I've beaten all the opponents on all the levels in TOTF 1 (at 2500/2500/2500), and I've played for over a year, so my inability hasn't completely stopped me from winning. I started on TOTF 2 recently; so far I am playing career on medium, and I've beaten the first eight or so opponents on my first try. But except on TOTF 1's easy mode (and maybe also some of the easier normal opponents) where the opponent movements are exaggeratedly slow, I don't think I have ever dodged or blocked a punch a single time in reaction to seeing it coming.
I move around a lot while I play, shifting my head, circling my opponent, attacking while running by the opponent, randomly moving, etc. And I have noticed with some TOTF 1 opponents that if I attack a certain way this will elicit a certain kind of counter, and I can dodge that counter, for instance by moving sideways as soon as I've punched. But even then I still don't actually see the counter--I just expect it. As I said, I just can't notice an attack and then counter it.
My reaction time is pretty much average for human beings in general, so presumably below average for gamers, and I've been gaming for 40+ years, so it's unlikely to improve now.
Suggestions?
I am a sucker for exergames, and Squatopia is one of three favorites on my Quest 2 (along with TOTF 1 and 2), even though it doesn't seem to get talked about much.
The free version of Squatopia (which is all I use) comes with one roguelike mode where an endless array of interesting looking monsters shoot at you, and you can shoot back by making moves like squats, jabs, lunges, etc. (squats and jabs are unlocked at the beginning of the game). When monsters die they give you coins which result in powerups. Every so often there is a boss. I've never gotten past the second boss. There is enough variation in the powerups and monsters to make the game fun to repeat.
It's pretty good exercise. There is something about doing fast-paced squats and punches in the context of a game that seems to leave me more sweaty (in a good way) than just counting reps. I sometimes end up with pleasantly sore legs, even though I am a pretty fit guy (I have two Guinness indoor rock climbing records IRL--lots of squat-like moves on the wall in those records). And because punch strength doesn't seem to matter in Squatopia, I am not tempted to punch too hard and hurt myself like I sometimes do in TOTF 1.
Normally I play in MR so I don't punch something by mistake (though I did once play in a basement room whose ceiling was too low, and punched the ceiling), though for the video I set it to immersive.
I occasionally have had some problems with squats not getting recognized. I found the developers responsive to these problems when I reported them, and now the problems are rare. When I do have the problem, it tends to come up as soon as the roguelike game starts, and I just exit and restart, and then it works fine. When it works, the squat recognition is 100%.
The developers are continuing to update the game. It's rather fun to see what new monsters get added from time to time.
Music volume has a separate control from sound effects, which is important for me as I'm one of the rare people who doesn't like music, and I can turn it off (I turned it on for the video).
We've had our Bosch 800 dishwasher for about a month and ran it over 25 times. Whenever we open it after a wash, there is a very strong plasticky smell. Is that normal? Is there anything we can do? (It worries my spouse.) In case it matters, we always use the CrystalDry feature.
Can one indefinitely block forced background firmware updates by setting all one's WiFi connections to metered, as long as one is careful not to trigger the update manually (maybe just by checking if there is a pending update)?
When I do dumpsys jobscheduler with adb, the output includes this line:
Background metered allowed: {1000=true, 10002=false, 10023=true, 10034=true, 10041=true, 10049=true, 10063=true, 10066=true, 10119=true, 10166=true, 10172=true}
UID 10002 is com.oculus.updater. That suggests to me that the job scheduler is not going to allow the updater to run over a metered connection.
As I remember, in old firmware revisions, there used to be no way to disable automatic app updates. But now (at least in v2.05, but perhaps in earlier ones, too) in Settings | Privacy | Installed apps, there is an option to disable automatic app updates.
Does that actually work? The reason I ask is that we all know that the firmware update checkbox doesn't do much!
It seems to work for me--I had automatic app updates off for a while, and some of my apps look like they are behind the latest version. But what are other users' experiences?
On principle, I don't like apps updating behind the scenes. Once something works, it is nice to have it stay. Plus I don't want to waste battery.
I've made some new updates to OpenSaberPlus, my version of the OpenSaber block-cutting game that can use (most of) the music and maps from the famous block-cutting game. The apk is available on SideQuest or you can get it directly from the github releases page: https://github.com/arpruss/OpenSaberPlus/releases/
New features:
Some old features:
I finally got TOTF 2, as I planned to do after beating all the AIs on Outclassed in TOTF 1 on 2500/2500/2500 (I don't want to play on harder settings as I might get injured) in both orthodox and southpaw stances. My interest is largely in single-player. I do find the TOTF 2 single-player fighting better than TOTF 1's, but I found some interface things in TOTF 2 really annoying, while TOTF 1's interface felt really polished for my use case.
I play only in MR, and I wear winter mitts (partly for a bit of realism and partly to protect controllers from sweat), so this colors my experience. Maybe I am missing some options in the settings, in which case I would be grateful for suggestions.
There is one interface thing I really like: the clear visual feedback when you are hit.
I've been experimenting with DNS blocking on my router and a Quest 2, and I found something some promising things for those of us who want to freeze the Quest to the current firmware version. (Remember that one can't use adb to disable the updater past v79.) Most of my experimenting was with v85, but I had to stop experimenting when I accidentally let it download v205.
I did my DNS blocking on my router (I can ssh to it) using its dnsmasq, but you can also use pihole or some other firewall.
Method 1: Block graph.oculus.com and nothing else.
Results:
Method 2: Block these domains (the asterisk indicates when you need to block subdomains, too)
Results:
Another domain: Adding blocking of *.facebook.com to both methods might harden the method, and things still seem to work similarly (I haven't tested everything).
Combination: When you switch your router from Method 2 to Method 1 (and maybe the other way around, to be safe), you should simultaneously reboot your headset. If you are in Method 2 and Software Update is trying to update, when you switch to Method 1, that update can succeed. Rebooting when switching seems to help.
Theoretical Idea: Switch between Methods 1 and 2, with a reboot in between. Normally keep router on Method 2. When you want to download new games, reboot headset while switching to Method 1. Download games. Then switch to Method 1 to play multiplayer games.
Warning: As I noted above, an update did sneak past me. That was when I blocked *.fbcdn.net and nothing else. I think blocking the other two cdn domains would have stopped it, but since no updates are currently available for either of my headsets, I cannot test.
I've been experimenting with DNS blocking on my router and a Quest 2 that has v85, and I found something somewhat promising.
Normally, when you go to Software Update in it, it says that v2.05 is available and will auto-update in August. I found a list of domains to block online, and found that if I blocked them all, then Software Update said everything is up to date, but of course I also ended up blocking game downloads. I then experimented with blocking various subsets of domains, until I found that blocking graph.oculus.com (and nothing more--this is important, as I tried different combinations, and this was the one that worked) has the following results, some good and some bad:
Of course, the real test is what happens on August 9 when the forced update comes.
My other headset is on v2.5 and is up to date, so I can't check if this works on it. Others can experiment.
I blocked the connection by having my router to work as a DNS server, and adding
127.0.0.1 graph.oculus.com
to /etc/hosts. I then set up the WiFi connection on the headset to use static IP and use my router's IP for all three of Gateway, DNS 1 and DNS 2. Presumably you can do the same thing with pihole. I have this set up for one SSID, and I have second SSID on the router that uses the standard Google DNS, so I can always turn off the blocking by switching SSIDs.
For a long time I was resisting upgrading from v79 to v2.5, both on principle (I hate forced updates) and because I was afraid it would lock something down in the system that I might want to tweak. But I was suffering from two bugs in v79 firmware: (a) shutdown didn't always work but sometimes left the device with a black faintly lit screen and (b) I had the IPD notification pop up every so often (I used an adb script to turn it off, but it was annoying having to run the script on boot).
I finally updated. I am very happy the two bugs disappeared: now I can reliably shut down my headset and have it ready. The Navigator UI is a bit annoying but not completely terrible--and one can turn it off and/or use Lightning Launcher. Loft isn't great, but one can disable it. I can still run adb scripts. I have to do an extra click to start Android Settings, but that's not a big deal. I am scared of the fact that now I can't disable updates, and so things may break in the future.
Why am I posting? Well, if you're still on v79 or earlier and have the two bugs I had, maybe it's time to update. Or maybe people can have a discussion.