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

That link doesn’t work for me.

I wanted to talk of the three paid games from AppLab I bought until now. The three are kind of ‘Early Access’ games, in different status of completion.

Deisim. I bought this because it was only 8€, and I still had some on my Oculus account from referrals, and I had read it will increase in price on the next update.
Right now it seems very much half a game? Like, really work in progress. Or maybe I just don’t ‘get it’. What’s the point of having offensive miracles if it seems there are no enemy civilizations/deities? Is it just for the sandbox appeal of being a god and send plagues to your people at random? It seems counterintuitive to me as the only vague implied goal you have is to help your people to advance to the last civ stage.
Or if it’s supposed to be like SimCity is that there are no direct enemies but the ever increasing needs and complexities of your city and the limited resources, the game still much more in that area. Right now you toss heretics to the void from time to time and use the rain spell to stop random fires, that’s it.
The game is a bit weird, in how is potentially a bit more complex than it seems, but it’s all obscured by the UI, like needing several resources to advance to the next stage or trading being a thing that’s possible (you see little crates moving on their own), but the lack of interaction with most systems make it moot. You can’t really drill down in what the cities are doing.
In any case it seems things are really going to change in the next update, where cities can splinter into kingdom and they can fight each other.

Black Hole Pool. There was a point where the dev changed the environment and changed radically how the controls worked. It was unplayable to me, I was pissed and wrote a negative review. He did a pretty bad job at replying the review, he basically denied there was an update in the first place, saying maybe I was in a beta. Like uhhh? You are the dev of the game, you should know what are your beta players or if there is a beta in the first place (I’m a regular customer). Denying there was an update was hilarious, because the entire environment changed from a flat to a moody pub. Like, how anyone is going to miss that change.
In any case, I will give him props in one thing: despite his bad handling of PR, weeks later he updated the controls to be usable again so he really took the feedback I gave him. The new environment is very nice, it has AI and multiplayer, the physics are excellent, the graphics are good, it has youtube integrated so you can put whatever music you want, so I can recommend it for 10 bucks , if you like pool in RL. The only flaw right now is that the AI at medium difficulty still makes too many penalties.
Still, it’s a ‘Early Access’ game, and I hope the game will get some new features. Like alternative games beyond 8-ball, or a replay feature.

Peco Peco. Bought after playing the last Puzzling Places beta, as it seemed potentially a similar style of jigsaw puzzle game, but on the cheap, only 5 bucks, and having more than 30 puzzles. This is where me being a cheapass bite my ass. It’s just not good, cheap or not, it makes so many mistakes.
Instead of using real life photogrametry like in Puzzling Places, the idea is that they have 3d models, some like dioramas, like a fantasy mage tower, or a viking boat fighting a giant serpent, or a model of a old typewriter or a astrolab. Some of them are cool!
The first issue is how the model are split into pieces. It seems they use a 3d sphere to do a boolean intersection and split them, so all pieces have the same big convex/concave curves, instead of having the typical jigsaw shape with little… I don’t know to call them… arms? that sprout from the central area, that serve you to guide you in how different pieces connect. Without them is much harder to connect pieces. Maybe to compensate this, the puzzles have something like 60 pieces, instead of 300.
Another issue in the pieces themselves, is how some of them have a piece of model, then a gap or ‘void’ in them, and then a floating corner magically attached to the rest of the pieces. This doesn’t feel right to me, but it’s very subjective. It feels as that should be another piece.
The second issue is the scale. Most puzzles scale is just too big. I commented it with the dev and they said people seems to like the big scale, which made me eyes roll. Yes, it’s cool to see a big diorama completed, and part of it is the scale of it, but once you go beyond that first gimmick impression, the scale is a clear detractor for the gameplay. In half the puzzles you have so much clutter, as the big size of the pieces makes very easy to obstruct each other, or take several in your hands to compare them, or contemplate several in one glance to know which next pieces to pick. Even rotating them in your hand to see how they can connect can be a bother, from their sheer size!
Another ~puzzling~ decision: this is a jigsaw puzzle game that doesn’t show you a reference of the finished model. Yes, you read that right. You can’t compare what you have with the typical photo of the finished puzzle to now the red ones go in the top left area or whatever.
The game had an obnoxious music and no option to turn it off, but at least that changed two weeks ago, they changed the music to some more low key.
A new feature they also have included is a ‘force grab’ to pick far away pieces, but it still needs more polishing, it’s very arbitrary when it works and when it doesn’t.

Finally, the game system to connect pieces is unpolished, and sometimes it will let you connect pieces when there was still a missing pieces in between them. Imagine having pieces A->B->C, connected in that order, from left to right. Well, if they are narrow pieces, you can by dumb luck snap A and C together (with the void in between them, but fixed in place), before finding B. It fees like cheating.

This has the old horrible music, which after 20 minutes focusing in a puzzle while it’s droning, you will learn to hate it.

I’ve read a pair of reviews, and the impression they gave me is, “it’s a fun FPS coop game, the shooting is good, but for 5 maps and 6 weapons (and 0 melee weapons, or things like bows, or anything unique) wait until it’s $20-25”.

Some old colleagues of mine released their project ‘Dead Second’ on App Lab. Early access bullet-time light-gun game:

Came across this post on reddit. Is this true?! If we all got that Anker USB-C hub adapter we’d gain 10 fps?

He is saying (no idea if it’s true or not) to not use usb hubs connected to your gpu, even if your gpu has usb, because potentially the usb is being fed part of the power the gpu would use to use gpu-things.

From the context, he is talking of PC VR, not Quest 2, because they mention using display ports, etc.
The solution isn’t using this or that one hub adapter, but connecting the usb cable to any other usb from your mother board.

Oculus just bumped up the referral to $60 to both people until 12/31. Log In with Facebook | Oculus

So uhh, anyone want a referral? 😃

Wait how does that work exactly?

@BrianRubin Every Quest 2 hardware can be referred by someone else one time. But it doesn’t matter if you already set it up, you can factory reset it and claim the referral bonus.

So the steps are:

(You have to be logged into your Oculus account for all these links.)

  1. Check to make sure you have cloud saves on, and check if the games you care about support them. You can check the games here: Log In with Facebook | Oculus

Turn on cloud saves here:

If an important game does NOT support cloud saves, your choices are to setup SideQuest and manually back it up, or just not go through the referral process. You can also back them up manually like this: How do I transfer files from my Oculus Quest to my Quest 2?

  1. While your Quest 2 is connected to WiFi, go to this web page on your computer Log In with Facebook | Oculus and ‘Delete Device Data’ on your Quest 2. This will factory reset the Quest 2.

  2. Wait until the Quest 2 is reset. Confirm that it is back in ‘brand new out of the box’ mode and not setup. So look through the headset and you should see the very first step in setting up a brand new Quest 2. If you want to be extra careful, uninstall the Oculus App on your phone. Some people seem to think it automatically setup the Quest or something. Though you shouldn’t have to do this.

  3. Click on somebody’s referral link. Very import that the Quest 2 is NOT SETUP and linked to your account at the time you go through the link. You can turn the Quest 2 off too to be extra careful For example, this is my referral link, which would work for $60 for people IN THE US only though and I would super appreciate it!

(I think the referral does have to be in the same country or region though, my link would be US only)

  1. Go through the steps on the referral link until the the website says you are all set.

  2. NOW setup your Quest 2, just like it was a new purchase. Reinstall the Oculus mobile app, or if you never uninstalled it, just setup your Quest 2 again. This should be a process in which you have to get a numeric code in the Quest 2 headset and type it into the Oculus Mobile app to link them together. Complete the Quest 2 setup until you are back at the home screen. Your cloud saves should sync, or if you backed up saves manually you’ll have to copy them back.

  3. Profit! 📈💲💰💸 🥽 Now you and the person who’s link you clicked on have $60 in store credit. You can check your credit at the website Payment Methods page Log In with Facebook | Oculus

This deal used to be $30 to both, so it’s doubled right now! (Only doubled in the US actually!)

It depends on the country.

I think I mentioned in another topic that I joined Reality Labs at Meta earlier this year. The product I’m working on, Horizon Worlds, just left invite-only beta today and is now available to all Quest 2 users 18+ in the US and Canada. (Sorry, @krayzkrok!)

I’m a content designer (writer/UX) and not a public rep, and I’m still getting my legs in the creation tools and stuff, so I’ll have to defer any questions to official channels.

I’ve been having fun with it. I’m not an artist and my programming skills long ago fossilized, but I’ve been able to create some fun stuff using the in-VR creation tools.

Very cool!

Definitely on the multiplayer!

US and Canada launch… I’d look to the press and PR announcements for future plans.

also

Wow, I never thought I’d have reason to play Among Us again. That looks fun.

I was trying today the Risk of Rain 2 VR mod, and something I didn’t expect, is the bad performance :( (relative to the graphics offered, which aren’t precisely HL Alyx, hell it kinda looks like native Quest games). I guess it’s because the VR isn’t properly native, that’s why it has problems getting good framerate. To compare, I run the game normal version (non-VR) at 160-200 fps, but in VR I’m falling to 50-60 fps lots of times.

Thanks for the detailed instructions! Just ran through it using your link, and it seems to have worked.

Awesome, thanks. I was waiting on RE4 to drop in price, but now I have no excuse.

I know! God I wish I could get my neck back in shape so I can support my VR headset on my head for more than a few minutes.

I just tried the Gaga pack for Beat Sabre (Steam VR) last night. Mostly OK, but wow I think they’ve changed something in the game code because performance on my OG HTC Vive was really CRAP compared to before. Stuttery and unpleasant. Guessing I’m going to have to wade into the Steam VR settings menus to see if something has maybe changed to make things worse recently.

Diego