3595

Free VR puzzle game in Steam

3596

I tried a ‘serious’ racing game in VR for the first time. Dirt Rally was the chosen.

It was pretty fun!

3597

Dirt Rally is great.

For more track/street based I think my fave is Project Cars 2, in terms of amount of content, visuals, and great VR implementation. Feels better with a wheel of course. :)

3598

If you think cars are fun, try a plane!

3599

This afternoon I was ‘visiting’ a VR museum. I’ve seen another before, but this was better. It’s called The OmniGallery. It has 60 classic paintings, and sculptures too. I was surprised at the high quality of some of them, you could get close and see the brush strokes.

It made me wish some big company like Google or FB releases a big compilation like this for VR, with thousands of works, using really high res scans/photos (I guess museums already do that?). For example here I found that the Met released 400k works, and Google has an Art project with 50K.

edit: Oh, I found another one
https://store.steampowered.com/app/…tion_VR_Museum/ - which is paid in Steam and Free on Oculus because…reasons? - Great picture quality, polished, a gallery dedicated to Dutch painters.
Also one for Finnish painters, this was is more amateur, but hey, free

Also, I’m growing accustomed to the double-tap see-through. Super useful to unstuck the cable from the chair, take the 360 pad, turn of an alarm fro the phone that start ringing, etc.

In other news: Walking Dead Saints & Sinners 21% off deal in GMG
https://www.greenmangaming.com/es/g…nts-sinners-pc/

3600

If you think planes are fun, try a space fighter!

3601

How is Everspace in VR? I take it you use a gamepad and not the native controllers for your VR rig?

3602

Opinions vary but I came to think it was great. Yes gamepad. Took me a while to get into it, but once I’d kind of grokked everything, it was a lot of fun. The 3d space and scale really means something when you can boost off in any direction.

3603

Is watching movies using a headset a good experience? What’s the cheapest way to do this?

3604

Oculus Go, probably; I’ve tried it on Gear VR and it’s OK: it does a reasonably good job of emulating a movie-theater-sized screen, but the resolution is limited by your device (the Galaxy S6 was designed more or less with GVR in mind from the ground up as far as I can tell, so its resolution is actually very good; I’ve since moved on to an S8… OGo is probably similar).

The brain is a funny thing; if the content is engaging, I really don’t mind watching a movie on a phone: within minutes my neural network does this little magic trick of ‘frame = reality’ (less some rational sense). The screen size is more of a physical comfort thing, unless we are talking about an actual movie theater which comes with its own set of tangential qualia.

What I’m trying to say is, I usually just prefer watching Netflix or YouTube on my phone although I could plug the same phone into GVR and have it be a headset. I wouldn’t recommend VR if you are only interested in watching movies; it’s more of a neat aside. VR’s main strength (to me) is the ability to render extensive digital spaces as 3D Euclidean analog.

…and now, for some customary mainstream snark (but Forbe’s editor likes this one, apparently):

3605

I’m (finally, I delayed it several times) playing Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners.

There is something that bothers me and is the total lack of ability to save, it only has very sparse checkpoints, I shouldn’t even call it checkpoints, as it will only save between levels. Also, for a game where looting is so important, your bag is fairly small, I fill it with just exploring 50% a house, and well, there is usually no reason to stay in a map once your bag is full (with the exception of whatever main quest you have), you can only lose resources/health/stamina and not gain anything in exchange. So you are going to come back to the safehouse and return to the levels a lot, there is a good number of upgrades to unlock with the crafting resources. I know you can get a fourth inventory page with an upgrade, but instead of ‘3, then 4’, I wish it would be ‘4, then 5’ inventory pages.

The game is more ambitious than say, Half Life Alyx: there are non-linear levels, there is a bit of stealth possible (avoiding zombies or soldiers), there are crafting and upgrades, there are caches to discover, there are melee weapons, both one and two handed, there are several firearms, there is a bow, you can push zombies with your hands or weapons, the AI can be interesting like, making zombies attack other humans, etc. You even can hold the flashlight in your hand unlike Alyx cough cough
It doesn’t have the level of polish desired in all this, but it’s pretty decent, given the scope. Well, there is one thing where the scope isn’t so big, the world it self is, for what I read, just 9-10 maps, and the maps are usually 3 streets and 2 enterable buildings each, so it makes you visit the same locations several times.

But perhaps what it has surprised me and I wanted to comment it is how it seems fairly hardcore. Not only there is a health and stamina meter, you also deplete your max. stamina and max health, so if you sprint a lot or kill zombies in a row, you will tire out and lose max. stamina, making the bar smaller. And if you consume food found while looting, it will recover the max. stamina but lose max health. Health is recovered with bandages, but it isn’t insta-healing effect, but a slower hp increase regen. Resting in your base won’t recover the max. health meter, you need medicine. And the gunfights from what I’ve seen are fairly lethal, you lose health quickly and to recover is a fairly involved process that can’t be done in the middle of combat: accessing the inventor is in real time, and you need to pick the bandage and apply it. Believe me, I tried and ended dead :P
This all makes the experience feel as more authentic, a kind of immersive survival horror, and making the whole loot & craft essential, it isn’t like in other games where said mechanics feel put just because there are popular and they have to do the typical bullet point list features.
Now, if only I could save before infiltrating a tower outpost…

3606

Just tried this out on Link with my Quest - I set it to 16 players and I got some stuttering at times. Wow though, that was awesome. I lost my leg & arm at some point so I sat there on the ground, blasting away with my gauss cannon or mass driver, whatever it was. Very cool stuff.

3607

What exactly do they plan to use to drive 2 8k displays at a high enough refresh for vr? I guess something like sli or crossfire to share the load across multiple gpus?

3608

It’s a good summary of all Apple’s hires/acquisitions over the years but before anyone gets toooo excited, the latest rumours in that ‘incredibly powerful AR/VR headset’ link are dated April 2018 and the picture there is from a 2008 patent. :)

3609

Any day now. Can’t wait!

3610

I feel this is relevant

(and that one is actually news from the past days ;)

3611

This workout app/game seems like a cross between Beat Saber and OnShape. But perhaps what I read today was the most striking ‘feature’ it has…

3612

Ouch. There’s a stationary bike app for Oculus Quest that allows you to ride anywhere Google Earth has data. Requires a Bluetooth pedal adapter for the bike - $100. They also have classes, but that’s another $100 / year. Best part is it isn’t even in the Oculus store for whatever reason so you have to sideload it!

3613

I use Beat Saber today as a workout, and am intrigued by the idea of something explicitly built to be a workout. Especially if it has constant new content and stuff to keep things fresh.

$20/month isn’t so bad if they keep things much more interesting than Beat Saber, but I guess we’ll see

3614

Modded Beat Saber already has lots of content so… :P