I remember a year or two ago, there was talk about how meta was imminently about to open up access to the Quest passthrough cameras to 3rd party devs.
People were excited for a new era of interesting experiments along with even more interesting privacy risks.
Haven't heard anything about it for a while. Did Meta abandon that idea? Did it happen but no one did anything newsworthy with it?
I would dearly love to know (even as a rough ballpark) how much Sony paid to Capcom to add VR to RE8 and RE4R.
It would be really interesting to hear what is the price to bribe a AAA company into adding a decent VR mode to their games.
A pretty far fetched idea, but it would be nice if VRChat could license and rebadge Pico 4 Enterprise, and sell it as a collaboration with Pico trackers included. Sell it at a sustainable price that makes a modest profit.
A relatively inexpensive headset with face + eye tracking and foot tracking in a convenient package would be perfect to recommend to people wanting to get into VRChat. It's tough these days to send people to base stations + used Quest Pro + MixedVR etc ...
There's a certain subset of players who really want a pve only mode. But it might not be healthy for the game to split the playerbase like that, and it might not be the vision for the game that the devs want.
Here's a compromise idea that might satisfy some of those players, while not going fully into a pve-only mode.
Have a new type of special map event. Can't think of a good name.
In this event, when loading into the map, each player or team chooses to be PvE or PvP. The following mechanics apply only to this kind of map event.
PvE players cannot hurt or be hurt by other PvE players. Including traps, grenades, explosions, etc. I guess people can still troll by leading Arc to you, can't really solve that.
PvP players can hurt and be hurt by PvE players, and other PvP players. However, every PvP player is clearly marked on your HUD and your map.
So yeah, people who want a mostly PvE experience can load into one of these maps with the full confidence that no one can rat them unexpectedly. Sufficiently masochistic PvP players can invade these maps and get a lot of action, as probably they will be enemy number one for the entire PvE population in that map. Or at the very least, they are clearly visible on the map so PvE players can avoid them.
Or if a map somehow had a majority of PvP players, then it would be a huge battle Royale free for all.
I think it would be a fun experiment, at least?
Typo in my title. It's meant to be "One day I'd like to see..."
Think of IRC. Still surviving after these years.
Anyone can run a server, and different servers have different purposes and reputations. Anyone can write their own implementation of a server as well.
Anyone can make an IRC client, and as long as they implement the protocol correctly they can connect to any IRC server. Dedicated PC apps, web, mobile, etc.
I guess there's also more recent open source social media software like Matrix.
I hope one day we will see a social VR platform structured like this. Have a defined protocol for network communication, avatar format, environment format, etc. Have the main team run an official server and an official client, but let the open source community be free to write their own servers and clients.
Avatars and environments can be standard formats, same as VRChat and vtubers etc.
The only centralised control I would want to see, is for the main team to maintain a list of servers, with the community providing information and reputation data. And a blacklist of shady servers that are not recommended for whatever reason.
Resonite has the possibility of heading in this direction, which is good to see.
Valve is the defacto platform holder for PCVR.
Traditionally, platform holders have various responsibilities, such as funding first party games as loss leaders, developing and promoting the platform, etc.
Valve has been hard at work developing SteamVR, but they've really neglected the other parts. They haven't funded any noteworthy VR games after HL Alyx, nor have they kept their hardware offerings up to date.
Imagine an alternate timeline, where after the Index launched, then Alyx, then Valve brings a steady stream of official VR ports of their own games (working together with modders) - Half Life 1 and 2, Left 4 Dead, Portal, Counterstrike, Team fortress, heck, maybe even Dota. And an Index 2.0 along the way, with increased resolution and a more robust Knuckles 2.0 controller.
Imagine if Valve had set up a small incubator fund, directly paying prominent indies like Deep Rock Galactic to officially incorporate existing flat2VR mods, or companies like Capcom to bring already existing VR modes from RE7, 8 and 4R to PCVR.
flat2VR is the superpower of PCVR and console VR. Standalones can't do it, because the games need to be entirely ported to Android.
If Valve had fully embraced all the responsibilities of being the PCVR platform holder, I still can't say whether PCVR will be wildly profitable today. But I can definitely say that the perception of PCVR being dead and neglected would be far less, and PCVR would be in a much happier place right now.
Valve is releasing the Frame soon, and they have a 2nd chance to do it right this time. This time, I hope they will properly support PCVR, port their own games to VR, fund third party VR modes, and keep their hardware up to date and widely available.
Currently I play flat2VR modded games like Cyberpunk VR mod with my Quest 3, using Virtual Desktop's gamepad emulation feature.
This lets me use my motion controllers as a gamepad, so I can play standing and physically turn.
The 4 button + dpad layout of the Frame controllers is ideal for this, but without Virtual Desktop, does Steam Link natively have gamepad emulation in the same way?
Although I haven't spent a lot of time with speech to text, my early explorations have been pretty disappointing. Not to mention there's sometimes nuance lost or errors when going from speech to text to LLM.
Just wondering, with some models being multimodal and able to accept audio and video, is SillyTavern able to skip the STT step and just send the audio directly to the model?
A niche industry driven by passion where you mostly don't make money. Sound familiar?
Of course, no one makes a game assuming that they will fail to break even. But at this point, we've had so many indies making their first VR game in their garage, releasing to a deafening silence, that it should be clear what the odds are.
Imagine if all of those indie devs could somehow all collaborate on some big shared project? Either something new, or contributing to something like OpenMW-VR?
Easier said than done, for sure.
But still, it feels like that's the only way to make something that can really last, that will grow over time, rather than yet another low budget sandbox zombie shooter or punch-the-blocks rhythm game...
Hi, I really like the music in DMC1, more than the rest of the series.
Can anyone recommend other artists and/or game OSTs with similar music?
What would the genre be called anyways? I think I heard "industrial rock" at some point, but does that capture the synth elements?
Hi, these days I make Japanese curry using the premade curry blocks.
However, I have a jar of Japanese curry powder left over from my ill fated attempts to make things from scratch.
Can I reduce the amount of curry blocks when making the curry, and add some Japanese curry powder directly to boost the curry flavour, afterwards?
Normally when using the curry powder you make a roux and then cook the curry powder while darkening the roux. I'm just confused about whether that's a necessary process to bring out the flavour of the curry powder or cook it somehow? Or can I just skip that and add the curry powder directly?
Thanks!
Edit: thanks for the advice everyone! It's been very helpful.
Ok, let's say you had a very specific, one-time-use superpower.
You are able to cause a larger company A, to fully buy out a smaller company B. In order to improve the VR industry.
The parent company will try to run the smaller company to the best of its ability, but it won't run at a loss or pour millions down the drain.
Which companies A and B would you use this power on?
So here's my pick, it's maybe a bit unusual. I want Toyota to buy Pimax. Toyota seems to be a well trusted company with a culture of quality and customer service, so I would like to see them apply that to fix up Pimax's issues as a company. And it's not unusual for Japanese companies to have their fingers in very diverse pies. (Eg. Yamaha....)