Virtual reality: to boldly game like we never gamed before...

I just started a replay of Skyrim in VR and I’ve been really impressed with it after modding. There are several recent VR-specific mods that really add to the immersion of the game, such as VRIK (shows your whole body in VR, draw weapons from holsters and equip items/spells using gestures) and HIGGS (you can pick up and manipulate objects with your hands.) I’ve found melee fighting to be mediocre, but archery and spellcasting are great fun in VR. I also use Natural Locomotion (walk in place to move) which makes the game more immersive.

Of course, with thousands of mods available, it can be a huge time sink trying different ones and getting everything installed correctly. I’ve been mostly following this mod list focused on VR:

Thanks! I never actually stuck with Skyrim past the first couple of hours, but maybe it’s time to give it a shot.

It would be nice if MS would do some rudimentary VR integration for PC Game Pass. I’ve gotten No Man’s Sky, Subnautica, MSFS, and Tetris Effect to work in VR just by launching them while SteamVR is running, but it’s not user-friendly, and there’s no sign of the VR-exclusive releases by studios they own (Skyrim, Fallout 4, Hellblade, and Psychonauts)

Golf … err, mini golf is sure a weird sport. In Walkabout minigolf, as a total noob the 8 or so play seasons i did ended pretty bad, with always a few double bogeys and maybe even one hole where I reached the max amount of possible attempts.

I hadn’t played in weeks. Then yesterday night I played a game and won, -2. Today I play the next course and it wasn’t a fluke, -4 this time.
I suddenly can estimate the distances/strength better and my shots are much more straight. You would think it would be a slow and steady incremental improvement but no, it just clicked and now I’m 50% better.

I guess this is a puzzle game with story?

Really like the look of this. Seems to be basically a sci fi version of that Apple Arcade game about fixing things, which is obviously a great fit for VR. And hopefully the writing will be less twee.

Edit: Assemble With Care was the one I was thinking of.

I think I’m on level 12 of Crashland now. Whew! There’s some weird stuff that has pushed me the change up my normal strats.

My first few steps into VR (or teleports, more precisely) were inauspicious. I’ve had to put in my tinkering time in after the toddler goes to sleep. Last night I turned on the new PC. I was able to download Chrome, Firefox, and Steam, and then get the Reverb G2 plugged in. The controllers paired after I figured out where the batteries went. The PC automatically started installing Windows Mixed Media. I didn’t get as far as installing Steam VR or even any games, but it was getting late and I decided to at least try out the Cliff House.

My glasses definitely don’t fit under the G2. That was a disappointment. I’ll have to look into getting prescription lenses for the headset – and probably additional lenses for my wife, whose eyesight is even worse than mine. But I was able to squint a bit; it was okay. I took the first few teleports.

When I tried to click on a 3D video, the helmet went dark. So did the monitor. At first I thought this is just what happens when a video is loading, but the monitor no longer got a signal from the PC, even after rebooting.

I fear that I need to dig around the 3080 video card. Hopefully something isn’t seated correctly (though on a first glance everything looked okay) and is an easy fix.

Then I tried plugging the monitor into the HDMI output for the integrated graphics card, and that worked for a moment until:

The 0% never changed so eventually I shut it down and went to bed. I dunno. Something is going on. I hope it’s only one something and not many somethings. A bad video card, overheating, not enough voltage for everything, not enough goats sacrificed…

Ouch, good luck with troubleshooting. I haven’t gotten anything quite that bad, but have definitely had more weird crashes and hangs than with non-VR games.

What is the power rating on your PSU? If that is sufficient with a margin, it’s probably the mainboard by the looks of it.

1000 watts? I thought that would be enough.

Is “mainboard” the motherboard with everything hooked into it, or just the motherboard?

The motherboard. But it could also be a cooling problem, a RAM timing/voltage problem, heck even a faulty CPU. That corruption you see in the screen you posted came from the on-board video chip right, not the GPU?

Yes, that’s right, from an HDMI cable plugged into a port that wasn’t directly into the graphics card.

(About a Rogue Escape)

I hadn’t reply to this because I had written first impressions in that moment, so I didn’t know. I didn’t play for more than a week… but I resumed it today and finished it. I also played half of a second game to see if there were differences.

No, there is no replay value here. The roguelike aspect is almost non existent. And it’s actually pretty easy, I completed it in first try, without no problems.

Honestly, I believe this game had a grander design but at some point the author had to cut it down to a bare minimum. Half of the design is barely baked:
Things like the inventory system with consumables is barely used.
There is no difficulty settings so you can’t try to make it harder.
The items have a weight rating but I’m not sure if it even matters?
You find a merchant to buy and sell items… but that’s it, a single merchant in the entire game, I thought that indicated a grander adventure than what it ends up being.
At some point you gain the ability to travel between point of interests but there are just three and are very similar.
You gain a weapon so you believe there is combat… but it’s only that single weapon that you can shoot during the rest of the game.
There are three controls to distribute power between altitude, speed and radiation shields, which makes you imagine several types of situations that need different ratios… in reality you only move with the speed, and only activate the other two where there in event A (put up the shields) or event B (use the altitude lever). That’s it.

It’s a pity, I have the feeling that with 6-8 months more of development it would have transformed into one of the most interesting VR titles.

I played a demo on Steam, of a game called Antiprism.

It’s a space shooter. It has the gimmick of controlling not one, but two ships at the same time. Each one appears static in front of each hand, at ~50 cms away, and while they can be moved around, there are some invisible limits, they won’t move much further away from the default position (so just enough to avoid enemy fire).

It’s basically, another basic ass VR arcade shooter that reminds me at designs previous to 1991. Why? Let’s see:
You fire a single weapon with each ship. You don’t switch in between different weapons depending on the enemies, you don’t collect ammo, or health, or not even powerups (from what I saw in the first four levels). You don’t have items to use. By virtue of being in space, there is no enough gameplay variety in regard to scenario, like close combat vs far combat. I didn’t see any enemies that could count as doing anything worth describing.
This doesn’t mean the game is easy, it eventually gets bullet hell-y but meh, that doesn’t mean is interesting to play. It has a basic upgrade ship functionality in between missions, and that’s it.

It also made me wonder about the lack of polish of the game. For example, the game has zero feeling of the ships moving and combating through space, they are more like sock puppets in your hands. But I thought that adding some trails to them Homeworld style (so when they are still, the trail goes backwards, implying movement) and adding some slow moving stars in the background would greatly improve the feel of fighting in space.

Finally, a chess game in VR with proper multiplayer, rating, and voice chat support

played about a dozen games so far, a lady who had only played for 2 days who kept putting her hands on her head anxiety style, and a guy who was really strong but weak in the opening. great fun.

Half a year ago or so? I did some attempt to compare Quest vs Steam reviews to determine the true size of the VR market. This is the second attempt:

I saw there were five games with simultaneous Quest/pc releases in the last two months, so I wrote down their review numbers. This is, actual written reviews, not number of people who just clicked on ‘4 start’ ratings (although lot of times the review are one sentence ):

A rogue escape 14 vs 27
Larcenauats 80 vs 284
Eternal starlight 12 vs 85
Demeo 638 vs 1220
Star wars pinball 94 vs 309

That’s Steam vs Quest store, in that order. Only five, but they already represent a decent spread in small vs bigger games, and also a spread in genres. Wraith and The Wizards Dark times were omitted as they released one month before on Quest.

Adding everything, it produces a total average of 838 vs 1925 reviews, which means Quest store is around 229% (2.29x) bigger. Obviously this supposes the average user engagement is the same in both platforms. In reality I guess Steam more hardcore players would tend to write more reviews than casual Quest players??

That doesn’t tell the whole story, as Oculus uses a highly curated style of store with only a few releases per month, while Steam has a bigger number of releases on that period of time. So I thought maybe Quest numbers are a bit ‘inflated’ as the sales are concentrated over smaller number of games. On the other hand there is AppLab too.
Looking at the games in Steam, it made me believe this is a less of a factor than I thought, yes in the last two months there are more games on Steam that aren’t on Quest, than Quest games that aren’t on Steam, but most of them had 1-3 reviews, some even zero. They may well not exist (sorry indie devs :( ). Only a few made me think I had to increase slightly the Steam numbers. In the end I weighted up the Steam numbers by a (totally arbitrary!) value of +16%, while a quick look and comparison in https://vrdb.app/ to contrast Quest store vs AppLab, made me increase the Quest numbers by +7.5%.

Finally, I cross referenced this data with the May Hardware survey data from Steam (June data seems still fucked). This is the result:

Can the Vive work without external tracking? I think I might want to upgrade from my original Oculus, and as much as I like Oculus tech I’m not buying another model if it means hooking myself back into Facebook. I figure the options are the Vive Pro 2, or the HP Reverb G2.

No. I think the only option Vive-side for inside-out tracking is the Vive Cosmos.

The Vive Pro 2 uses the Lightboxes for external tracking only. The Vive Cosmos is Inside Out tracking (I have my old one that I am selling because of my upgrade). However, I bought the external tracking faceplate for the Vive Cosmos because I wasn’t happy with how it tracked. There is also the new Vive Focus which is a standalone headset but is intended for business purposes and definitely not recommended either.