Tarquinn2049

Just so anyone that had to suffer through this knows, the company that makes them, that you have to order them through, always makes sure to remind buyers that they will likely need at least 10% left handed ones too. Because, of course, they made left-handed ones. If your school didn’t have left-handed ones or didn’t have enough, that was a choice they made.

It’s never been ok to pirate a console that is still on the market. Though, part of that is how rare it has been for emulation to be feasible for a current console. But either way, it has always been demonstrably illegal. And especially in the case of yuzu where they were completely flaunting and charging money to play games that weren’t even released yet. I honestly put most of Nintendo’s current war path on their shoulders. That’s not just riding the backs of giants, that’s climbing into their faces and flicking them… ask any insect, that is a good way to get yeeted to the ground and for the giant to stop tolerating the previously benign presence of the rest of the insects.

Nintendo has definitely done some over reaches, but going after Switch pirates is not a good example of that.

Basically when not playing VR games, it’ll function like an upgrade to the steam deck. Instead of having to look at a screen attached to your hands, further developing the neck pain most people have nowadays from phone games and handheld gaming, you can sit comfortably instead, no matter where you are. And it’ll be able to stream games up to 4k, instead of the 1280×800 of the current steamdeck. When running flat games natively it might be restricted to 1080p, if not artificially, then at least practically.

But it does also play VR games when you want that.

An upside compared to other standalones is that it should be much easier to port older PCVR games to run on it natively. And there are a ton of good old VR games now that have stood the test of time that most people still haven’t gotten to try. And with a bit of work, a low settings version of half-life alyx could probably run natively now. Along-side a potential flat screen release of half-life 3. Who knows. Would be an interesting way to celebrate it’s function. Now that we have solid evidence that Half-Life 3 is actually nearing completion. And a ton of rumours linking it to a similar timeline as Deckard.

The main goal of deckard is more of a Virtual theater screen steam deck. It can also play VR games, but streaming(or playing locally) your flat games to your comfortable recliner is what it does best. The 4 face buttons are hugely important for that. As for the index control, there are so few examples of good ways to use the touch pads, and other headsets are doing full handtracking while holding the controllers completely visually now. So no need for expensive hardware built into the controller anymore, grip and trigger at perfect fidelity and the other fingers at hand tracking fidelity is more than enough. Hand tracking fidelity constantly improves with software updates, too.

If this gets deckard down to a price people are willing to pay, good for all of us, even those of us that would choose to pay more, and odds are there might be a more expensive option too anyway. Maybe even the ability to just use index controls if you got them.

We like to use the Mandarin X pronunciation, for a popular example: Xiaomi is pronounced “Show Me”.

Careful with alarm fatigue. It’s unfortunately something your brain does without your permission. If you ever find setting lots of alarms stops being helpful, that is likely what happened. Basically, since you will end up brushing off a decent portion of those alarms as you are either still on task or don’t need to be on task yet “this time”, your brain will slowly think of those alarms as less important, no matter how important you want them to still be.

It can help to set as many different alarm sounds as possible. Sometimes, that can make it feel like each alarm is different, and they won’t all be lumped into the same category in your subconscious.

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.

What game would you finally consider good? Do you even know what people play in VR? There are literally thousands of games. I personally own 250 from over the 10 years, and that’s me holding back. There are so many more that I wanted to play if I had more time to do so.

And even outside of bespoke VR games, a VR headset is an awesome monitor replacement now for your regular computer games too. My Virtual monitor is 4k 120hz, that I can use while sitting in a recliner.

Fps matters for everything, 120 fps is just the new normal, can’t go back. When we used to play games at 15 fps and the new normal became 30, we couldn’t go back, 15 fps looked so bad once you got used to seeing stuff at 30 fps. Same for 60 fps in it’s day, and 120 fps now.

If you haven’t gotten used to 120 fps yet, and you want to save money, put it off as long as you can. You won’t be able to go back.

Hmm, that puts me at BRI of 2.1, and BMI of 35.4

Those both seem incredibly off.

But I do have extra dense bones apparently, which tends to be mostly what screws with my BMI, and my ability to float/swim. But they seem really hard to break, not that I try very hard… but none of them have broken yet. And I’ve been in situations that seem like they should have broken.

Either way, I weigh alot more than I look like I should, not quite “Wolverine getting on a motorbike”, but a bit like that.

Kinda makes me wish those “guess your weight” carnival experts were something I could see in real life, only ever seen it on TV.

Yeah true, not having to switch phones every couple years is a plus. I don’t do contract, just buy the phone I want and pick the network I want to use it with. Then use that phone for as long as I can stand to. Eventually the upgrade is positive enough to outweigh having to get used to the physicalities of a new phone. New muscle memory, especially for typing on a screen based keyboard is so annoying.

Hehe yeah, nice added benefits to everything, but ourside of gaming it would be hard to justify the price of a high-end phone. Heck even with gaming it can still be hard, lol.

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.

Generally for gaming. It’s like PCs, you can totally get by with a 100 dollar second hand computer… unless you want to play a game made this year.

Typing this on a 120hz 4k gaming phone.

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.

Yes, I have no facebook account. It hasn’t been a problem. Other than the logo on the headset, I haven’t seen any other downside to it being a meta ptoduct. The money they have put in to make sure they are and remain ahead of everyone else for tech means that until there is an actual downside, I pretty much have to use their headsets. But I will have no trouble jumping ship if there ever is a downside, or if anyone else even comes close to catching up.

Ah ok, they already have a built-in hand-wavey mechanic to explain it. That’s handy. Extrapolation from their inability to think creatively and only mimic, it seems like that would indeed set up for physical mimicry too. But that would probably get old fast, since it would have to be at the expense of gaining stuff naturally with levels. You’d either have to be trained everything you want to know, or have the DM set up encouters that makes sense for picking it up eventually. Maybe fun for the first couple levels, but just unnecessary tedium as it goes on.

Certainly makes more sense fun-wise to retcon the scope of the curse to a more limited handicap. Something that fits the scope of a single hardship slot.

Awesome, I love the idea of building a working library of dialogue to make use of. Technically mimicry would mean having no actual understanding of the phrases actual meaning so it would have to be coincidental to say something useful in context… but it would be such a fun mechanic I would find some way to hand-wave it into making sense.

Might also be fun to extend the mimicry to physical mimicry too. Maybe picking up something that you have seen X number of times. Though that would add even more data tracking, hehe.

The process of making a game on your own involves failing to make the first 10 games you try to make on your own.

Ultimately, it sounds like you already have a good handle on everything that goes into it, and are just hoping to hear it’s not actually as hard as you think it is… it is hard. Know that going in, and assess if you will be able to do it. But give yourself a bit of benefit, getting most of the way tends to increase your resiliance to the final hurdles.