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kroltan

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kroltan
·3 jaar geleden·discuss
Quite the contrary, actually. Some games check for inputs every frame, and computers nowadays can run modern games at up to hundreds of frames per second.

The simulation rate is often lower than the draw rate though. Minecraft is as low as 20 updates per second, while something like Counter Strike 2 handles events immediately and sends precise timestamps to the server, not discretized to any sampling rate beyond your hardware.
kroltan
·3 jaar geleden·discuss
Plenty of skid type people who are into tech for the aesthetics mostly.
kroltan
·3 jaar geleden·discuss
As someone who has >1000 hours in VR (and is also a game developer), the simple answer is that there really have been only maybe a dozen games. And lots of mostly identical alternatives.

Boneworks/HL:Alyx/Pavlov: Shooter, VRChat/RecRoom/etc: Social, Beat Saber/Harmonix somethingsomething: Rythm, The Room, Jet Island... Where each of those alternatives have lots of mechanical convergence, so it "feels" like playing the same game if you overlook the button mapping of the controllers.

The tech works perfectly fine, but there are so many caveats and limitations that the possible design space is quite limited, or there has been too much inbreeding. Plus, developing for VR is much more expensive as a baseline because of the increased limitations, so you end up with generally lower quality games than a traditional medium.

All in all, I would say that in a scale from "Pong" (1972) to "Outer Wilds" (2019) we are maybe just after "Wolfenstein 3D" (1992) in relation to the VR gaming landscape: Games are fun, but most of everything is really bad and played out of a lack of better options, or a clone of something actually cool.

---

My point here is I don't entirely agree with you it's a novelty, I would say it's more of a variation that can become a staple with many people, but will never* be the main/only medium. Pizza, not bread&butter.

(And yes, that's half the definition of a novelty, but that's why I say I don't entirely agree with calling it such)

* Unless we invent the actual Matrix "full-body immersion with motor suspension" tech or something functionally equivalent (and I'm not even saying that's a good idea).
kroltan
·4 jaar geleden·discuss
Oh yes, I'm reminded of another one: The Forgotten City.

A Roman-period detective-ish story with some fantasy elements (which I won't spoil here, but it's not as much a big deal to be spoiled as my previous recommendation of Outer Wilds), and some pretty good voice acting and character animations, especially if you consider the size of the team that made it!

They really went all-in with the Roman theme, from what I understand the depiction of society of the period is rather accurate given its overall plot, and it quite feels like you're there, and not in a Roman-themed theme park or something.
kroltan
·4 jaar geleden·discuss
That's a good one! Do be warned though, you have to be willing to put up with some strange gameplay choices, that fit the game's theme but are not exactly convenient.
kroltan
·4 jaar geleden·discuss
Thanks for the recommendation, I had heard of it and its many praises before, but I usually struggle with D&Dish things (I haven't looked too much into it but I assume it's similar in mechanics to Baldur's Gate, which is an excellent game too but I found the combat and minmaxing not to be my style)

Is the Enhanced Edition available on Steam any good, or should I go for the original release?
kroltan
·4 jaar geleden·discuss
I did. Went in with a bit of suspicion, because the base game was just so tight in purpose and story, but after I found "That Thing Which I Won't Spoil For Others But You Having Played Know Of" the only thought I had was "damn it, they did it again!"

Had a similar feeling about its ending, but I think it worked out fine.

(and if you're reading this as someone who hasn't played it, stop reading, there's no way to phrase this without some amount of spoilers) did you go back to the base game's ending after doing the DLC ending? "There's more to explore here", as the game would put it ::)
kroltan
·4 jaar geleden·discuss
Outer Wilds got me good on the single-player story-heavy-but-still-got-mechanics part, I wish there were more things like it. Not more of it, because the story is very tight, but more things like it, where I can somehow immerse myself in a foreign/fictional culture. Really liked Kingdom Come Deliverance and Disco Elysium too.

Beyond that, I really really miss the exact niche Atmosphir used to fill, UGC platformer with enough tools to make variations on the base mechanic, but not a full-blown game-making toolkit. I want making levels to be intrinsically captivating, to create simple new gameplay ideas, but not get lost in the myriad construction details of such things. At the time there were some neat alternatives, like GameGlobe or Project Spark, but nowadays' titles are either too mechanically restrictive (Mario Maker) or too much of a tool (Dreams).

I actually help maintain (together with a bunch of excellent people) an archival/revival server of Atmosphir, but the minuscule community makes it hard to make multiplayer levels, and getting feeback on your creations.
kroltan
·4 jaar geleden·discuss
Outer Wilds, a million times. Don't read about it, not even the entire Steam page.

Describing it vaguely, it's an archaeology knowledge-puzzle played over a tiny solar system, in one of the most immersive first-person mechanics I've ever seen.

It's (for me) the most brilliant game ever made, both mechanically and the story. It will also scratch your space travel bug a bit.
kroltan
·4 jaar geleden·discuss
We Were Here Together, and Forever, kind of fit the bill.

The original and the second title are great fun, but don't have as much a defined story.
kroltan
·4 jaar geleden·discuss
On Firefox, Ctrl+W is only unfortunate if you press Ctrl THEN W, holding W and pressing Ctrl afterwards is fine.
kroltan
·4 jaar geleden·discuss
It hasn't been tough since they made Steam. In fact, the biggest productivity issue at Valve seems to be exactly due to the fact that they don't _really_ need to do anything beyond maintaining Steam as the primary intermediary for computer games.
kroltan
·5 jaar geleden·discuss
But if _everything_ is always saved on the card, then you don't need the technical knowledge. Removing the card would leave the phone in a "factory clean" condition.
kroltan
·5 jaar geleden·discuss
My late step-mother put on an Oculus Go and played basically every rollercoaster simulator available on the device back-to-back.

It was like the Matrix scene where Neo was learning, then leaves the simulation and says "I know Kung Fu".

She used computers for social media and looking up recipes, so not very savvy at all. I don't think there's a correlation between interest in VR and technicality. Maybe between _vocal_ interest in VR and technicality.
kroltan
·5 jaar geleden·discuss
Magna is also a clash, so I'm not sure what's the benefit there.

At least manga and mangoes are funny, magna seems just posh and insufferable (which if you ask the right people, is an accurate description of those companies)
kroltan
·5 jaar geleden·discuss
No, that question is wrong, because that answer rounds up to 100%.

Maybe a vocal minority like us HN-folk, but I don't think that by ourselves we really matter in terms of numbers.
kroltan
·5 jaar geleden·discuss
Not if you read Japanese comics, or if you speak Portuguese.
kroltan
·5 jaar geleden·discuss
On one hand, it is rational if you think of Go functions "on a type" as just having an extra argument, but then one might ask, why bother with the special syntax at all?

Just go the C way and if you want to take a "self", actually take it as a regular parameter. That is: (sorry if the syntax is wrong, I have never used Go)

    func (f *Foo) sayHello() { ... }
Would become

    func sayHello(f *Foo) { ... }
Heck, if you want to keep the value.sayHello() syntax, you can, which would still allow you to build fluent interfaces or whatnot, with the bonus point of being UFCS!
kroltan
·6 jaar geleden·discuss
You calm down, we haven't even brought in WebAssembly yet!