• 0 Posts
  • 34 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

help-circle

  • Dude, don’t worry about it, like I said, save your money. If it’s not important to you, it’s better to keep it that way.

    It is important to me, I’m gonna keep doing it.

    As we get higher and higher frame rate, there are certainly more and more people that won’t care.

    But you can’t say it doesn’t make a difference, in blind testing(name of the testing style, obviously) people who freshly walked into a room with a game running and were asked if it was 60 fps or 120 fps guessed right 100% of the time, literally no errors made, they were not gamers. But they did have one training attempt each of walking in on each setting knowing which one it was that time.

    So literally everyone -can- see the difference, but not everyone cares.

    It is a real thing anyway, unlike cable quality for digital audio.


  • I very much know how other people feel about it, we can be different and both our opinions can still be valid. I don’t think at any point in there I said that everyone is wearing their headset 16 hours a day.

    But the matter remains that one headset has sold 4x as much as the steamdeck, and the second most sold is 2-3x as much as the steam deck… so why is the steam deck considered a good seller and VR is considered dying?

    I was just making a pre-emptive counterpoint to the arguments people usually make against VR. That the headsets “aren’t comfortable”, which has been less and less true for the out of the box experience over time, and has never been true for people that are willing to tailor the experience to their individual headshape and preferences. I have always worn my headsets for 8+ hours even right from the dk2 days, first step: battery bank on the back, to get the weight counter balanced and for older headsets a different choice of facial interface was often a good idea. Eventually, once I tried a few options, I determined my personal best comfort came from “halo” style headstraps. So I have since just been buying BoBoVR’s kit for each headset I buy that is an all-in-one cenversion kit to take headsets from 2 hours of play time to infinity with no other adjustment needed.

    I think honestly most people have only tried VR once or twice, and don’t even know what state it is in now. The Quest 3 crossed a threshold, now that you can use it as a 4k 120hz screen, it’s the first headset I would say is clear enough that normal people would find it worth using. I do still think the tech barrier is a bit too high. I’m very aware that if I didn’t show her how, my Mom would have had trouble figuring out on her own how to do virtual calls with my sister in New Zealand. But she very much appreciates being able to sit in the same room as her and have face to face conversations now. And even though desktop streaming is something built right into the headset, the default option isn’t the one that would sell people on it, Virtual Desktop is so much better. If in the future that becomes the default, and the desktop streaming client half of it is just baked into the headset software. Or if the default solution just learns from Virtual Desktop and at least looks as good as it even without all the extra bells and whistles… either one would be a huge help. The built-in desktop streamer just hasn’t been revisited since the screens are clear enough to actually see 4k, so it’s still unoptimised and kind of muddy looking.

    But, my Mom did figure out on her own how to launch and play Tetris Effect, she loves it. Also Puzzling Places and Cubism. My mom is a bit of a gamer though. She doesn’t like anything with killing, but she has made some exceptions like for Stardew Valley. My Dad on the other hand still needs me to launch games for him from the phone app, hehe. He just “doesn’t want to break it”, to be fair he prefers the Quest pro, which is still a pretty expensive headset. So I can understand his hesitation, he’s used to windows 95… where you very much could break it by clicking the wrong thing. But he loves city building games, and there are a few good ones to choose from in VR. Cities:Skylines VR for “professional” city building ported to VR, and Little Cities for “fun” city building made for VR first are his favourites so far.

    My brother only really got into it when I gave their family my old Quest 2, he still just plays the default “normal people” games like beatsaber and other exercise stuff. But he doesn’t have his VR legs yet, he does want to play adventure/rpg games with me, but they tend not to have comfort settings, as they would be kinda ruined with teleporting and stuff. I explained to him how to go about training for not needing the safety features any more, but he keeps taking it too far any time he tries, he likes the games so much that he doesn’t want to stop playing so soon when he first starts feeling the symptoms. But that is the most important part, otherwise you are working to make your VR sickness worse instead…

    So yeah, there are definitely hurdles still. Maybe there should be supervised programs for getting your VR legs. You very much need to stop as soon as you notice the very first symptom for you, usually face flush, but can be different per person. The earlier you stop, the more you convince your brain it doesn’t need to “save you from the poison berries”. The bodies reaction to a vestibular mismatch is to assume you must have eaten poison, and it should save you by throwing up. But you can train it to leave you alone. Done well, you can gain as much as 5 more minutes of playtime each attempt. Doesn’t take long until you don’t even have to think about it any more.






  • Presumably, they want to get everyone used to their environment so that when their hardware lead doesn’t mean as much in the future, there will be hesitation to leave. We know they aren’t currently doing anything untoward as there is plenty of overlap between paranoid tech experts and people interested in pioneering new tech. Can’t hide from them. The software and network traffic has been thouroughly vetted and everything is so far doing exactly what it would need to or purports to do.

    As long as you go into it knowing you will be changing platforms at some point in the future and hedge all software purchases against that in your mind, the only remaining downside is whether you can stomache giving them your money.

    And if that ever changes, it won’t go hidden.

    There is also something to be said for the fact that everyone in the Meta community see VR as thriving and growing, and everyone that is outside of it sees VR as stagnating or shrinking. So their money is doing that too presumably.

    Their ultimate main goal is also, of course, marrying the tech from VR headsets to the tech from AR glasses. Which will be a true ubiquitous product. Being the first one there will be a huge pay day.



  • Stand alone headsets can play PCVR games too, especially steam games, that is the most accessible market for PCVR on standalone. Most do it wirelessly, which likely isn’t as bad as you are thinking, but some also still do it with wired and some even with uncompressed video over wire. But honestly, as the resolution and bitrate keep going up, the difference between raw and compressed gets harder and harder to spot. At this point, you can only really tell in side by side comparisons of still frames which feed is compressed.

    The main remaining problem of compressed streams is the total latency added, most importantly the decompressing time, since it’s done on the headsets mobile hardware. And the networking time. Though a dedicated network device, either a router or a bespoke VR streaming tool can get that down to 5ms or less now. My streams total latency to my wireless headset is about 30ms now. I wouldn’t be able to professionally compete in a frame counting fighter game… but that is about the only type of game where that level of latency is too much. Heck, people of my generation grew up through a point in time where TV screen latency was over 100ms… And while I will admit that there is still a benefit to sub 14ms latency, it’s not as big of a difference as it used to be. And that is only when I stream PCVR stuff, it’s still under that for stand alone content. Which also is not as bad as you likely think it is.

    I have a total of about 250 VR games currently, and I only buy about 10% of the ones I want to buy. But I have also been in VR for 10 years now. About 150 of my games are standalone and about 100 PCVR. With about 30 of them being titles that gave both versions for the price of one. There is no shortage of games, I could not possibly play even all of just the good ones.

    A VR headset is basically a console now, except one you can stream your PC to if you want. Even just for flat games too, I have a Virtual 4k 120hz monitor in my VR headset because in real life my 4k screen is an older TV that can only do 60 hz pc input or a very janky 120hz for 1080p. The nice thing about streaming to a VR headset instead of some hand held device, other than 4k 120fps, is that I don’t have to look at my hands or hold my hands up to my eyes to play. My neck feels so much better than it did when Phone, Switch, and Steamdeck were the best way to game away from a computer.

    My headset is comfortable, I can, and unfortunately often do, wear it for 16 hours a day. I have a single third party mod for it that was less than 100 dollars to convert it from a 2 hour headset, to an infinity headset. There are multiple options, but I went with BoBoVR, dumb name, but quality product.

    But my headset has basically replaced my computer monitor, I haven’t used my computer in person in like 2 years now. When I want to play a game on my computer, I just stay in my recliner, put my headset on and open Virtual Desktop, the same software I use to stream PCVR when I’m in the mood to be in the game instead.

    There is basically no downside anymore, they aren’t even expensive. While a Quest 3 is notably better, the lower end 3s is a totally viable headset at 300USD, notably cheaper than most consoles. Just do yourself a favor, if a Quest 3 seems too expensive, do not try it on. Stay with 3s and don’t see how much greener the grass is for a little bit more, it’s very easy to talk your way up to a real Quest 3.

    Also, Steam deck has sold about 5 million units extrapolating from last known good data, Quest 2 sold over 20 million, Quest 3 is seemingly up to 10-15 million so far judging from old sales data for pacing and some recently reported hardware ratios from game devs, and still has about 4-5 more years left of active sales.

    So if the Steam deck is a “huge market”, then I don’t know what you would call the stand alone VR market now. Considering that is just one brand of standalone headset. It’s the market leader, sure, but there are other brands that do at least as well as the steam deck. Distant second as that may make them, seems like it’s still relevant to include given the context.





  • VR desktop streamers, do the same thing but optionally in multimonitor 4k and don’t have to look at our hands the whole time. Also can play on a recliner comfortably. My neck is in so much better shape since I started using my VR headset to stream instead of a phone or other handheld. Plus the screens are 20 feet away, nice on the eyes. And still take up 80 degrees of my field of view. Not sure what effective size that makes them, but it’s bigger and nicer looking than a theatre screen.


  • Yeah, part of it was that smoking cigarettes was absolutely off the table. Almost no upside, all downside. And we were kids long before vapes was a thing, but that would certainly have fallen under the same umbrella. They were both addicted to nicotine for decades and could definitely attest to how hard it was to quit. They both did eventually manage, but it was pretty obvious how big of a deal it was for them, with alot of failed attempts.

    Weed is for sure not a great idea for teens, but that wasn’t known at the time. And part of it not being taboo meant that none of us ended up being habitual anyway. But yeah, certainly had they known that at the time it would have been added to the con list for it.



  • Being so out of touch with your kid is one of the main ways to create attention seeking behaviour. Not the only way, of course, but it’s still generally a bad idea to have no relationship with your kids.

    My parents knew exactly what we were up to, and in most cases, our first time experimenting with anything like that was supervised by our parents. They wanted to make sure we knew what we were getting into and how to be safe despite taking risks like that. They didn’t really have to worry about me, I’m Autistic and have no interest in drinking or smoking anything, but my older brother and the older of my younger sisters very much partook in any of the safer recreational substances. One advantage of talking with your kids about this stuff is that when you warn them which ones are actually the problem, they have no reason not to trust your advice. There are some “not even once” drugs. There are some “you gotta try it once” drugs, and there are some “it’s not a good way to spend your money, but otherwise fun” drugs.

    Me personally, drug of choice is videogames. Way cheaper high. Though it can be habit forming, make sure it never feels like a priority over doing real-life stuff.


  • In the stream, he mentions it being tetris gym. And the options screen confirms it. Tetris gym is accepted by the community as faithful in all the ways that matter for being allowed to be used for records. The main thing it patches out are the crashes. It also patches in the ability to run the game as either ntsc or pal, as that makes a huge difference in nes tetris. And critically in dogplayingtetris’s case it allows the ability to disable pausing the game. His controller is well worn, so his start button goes off randomly on it’s own.

    This article actually seems pretty uninformed, probably just in a rush to be first to post. Their explanation of the crashes is wrong, and they seem unaware that the speed is actually the same once you pass the first initial batch of levels that used to be considered the “human playable” levels. Of course, not anymore.

    Also no mentions of literally the biggest challenge faced, level 235 and it’s need to clear 800 lines instead of the usual 10 to pass it. So it’s 80 levels baked into one. And it’s one of the top 5 worst color schemes for readability to boot. Like, if the game was actually designed to be played this way it would almost like it was made as an intentional final boss, lol. Instead of just being a result of a look-up table eating code that is nowhere near the “table”, and is instead on the floor, or the nearby garbage can… hehe