Well, I’m hoping OSVR goes to market at $400 and the RX480 reviews pan out.
I’ve read some reviews on the OSVR, it has a major problem at the moment* due to the lenses: to get the HMD so cheap, they’ve used a type of lens that, while drastically getting rid of chromatic aberration and the “screen-door effect” (neither of these things were existent/noticeable in my Vive demo today btw), makes the picture blurry.
RX 480 has had a number of leaked benchmarks which seem to be putting at equiv. performance with the GTX 980 for a third of the price (earlier benches were comparing it to the GTX 970, however since then the alpha drivers have been updated and it runs a lot faster now).
One thing to note is that with new GPU architectures it takes quite some time before AMD makes fully optimized drivers, so over the next 1-2 years you can expect the RX 480 performance to increase noticeably.
EDIT: *I am very disappointed with this issue, I was seriously considering investing in the OSVR. That said, it also lacks roomscale and after today I can’t not do roomscale.
The Vive is just insane. I cannot really put into words just how much my mind was blown by it, except that the only thing that has gotten close to it in terms of experience was mushrooms, and it’s been a few years since I had any of those.
Mushrooms, however, grow out of the ground everywhere and are completely free*
Cas 
- They will, of course, do your head in eventually.
Hey princec, weren’t you highly anti-VR earlier in this thread?
Oh, I still am. It’s amazing but I don’t think it’s of general interest to general consumers yet because it’s inconvenient, massively expensive, and gimmicky. When it comes with every Playstation shipped by default it’ll get some traction.
Cas
I have to agree with prince.
I honestly don’t want VR to come out in the current kid generation either. I do not like the generation :point:
Speaking about VR, we released our first VR game on the Vive recently: Out of Ammo: http://store.steampowered.com/app/451840/
It’s been pretty well received.
I agree with the previously expressed idea that the PSVR may well be a major impact - it’s cheaper and the Sony VR lineup looks pretty high quality.
I’ve heard a lot about this game recently. Looks awesome!
What were the coolest things about developing in VR?
Hardest challenges?
What engine/other tech did you guys use?
Going to thread another conversation here to make another convo.
Anyone have been seeing the 3D videos on facebook and youtube?
I think those are really neat.
Yesterday I was mused and mesmerized by some techno and the simpsons break dancing all around me. I watched it on my ipad and turned around to look at it. :point:
So how would describe, for example, an iPad?
Or… (at the time of their inception) a television?
They’re much cooler to look at in VR :point:
Probably cooler with cardboard thing. I don’t think they are made for ipads and I have a shattered phone (first time having a shattered screen qq).
… the “cardboard thing” is VR.
I didn’t say it wasn’t ._.
The real question is, will we ever get the NerveGear? :
http://i1.wp.com/www.geek-envy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/nerve-gear.png
LOL @bugfox.net still living in the 90s and not understanding how the WWW works.
Cas
Full disclosure: I wrote none of Out of Ammo personally. I did work on some very very early experimental setup work with the Vive VR but I don’t even think any of that stuff is in OoA.
It uses Unreal Engine 4, written completely using Blueprints.
IMO the hardest challenges are that many things just don’t work in VR - player motion chief of all. There are also a tonne of technical restrictions: you have to get 90fps to avoid noticeable dropped frames/stuttering as you turn your head. Also since just doing VR takes so much work, there’s not a lot of the nice features we have in modern games that you can use - post processing is prohibitive. Which I think is why most VR games don’t look all that flash - it’s really only seeing them in VR that makes them come to life.
We tried a bunch of experiments with different game concepts before we settled on Out of Ammo - lots of things we thought might work proved to be less fun that we’d imagined. It’s kinda like being in a technical wild west - you just don’t know what’s going to be successful and what will not.
Very interesting!
Thanks for the reply.
Off-topic: How much game development experience did you have before working at Rocketwerkz and how did you get the job?
I had work at another start up in Dunedin called Clocktower Games, who renamed themselves Aero. They had a series of games called Casebook1 & 2. There were more planned, but in the way of start-ups, we ran out of cash (we outsourced some work to a third party who were so incompetent and so slow that they drained all our cash). I also worked at a company called Virtual Spectator who were doing OpenGL based 3D visualisation for sports events (in my case, the World Rally Champs). And I also did some educational games (Java applets) in a contract for the NZ department of education.
I had personally given up on ever working in games again. Honestly, Clocktower closing down was a real body blow for me and I had decided to just let it go (I have a family and a mortgage!) However, when I discovered that Dean Hall was opening up a studio in Dunedin I figured that I would hate myself if I didn’t apply. Luckily for me, Dean was looking for someone with a bit of software engineering experience to help add I guess an “old head” while he was busy working in London. So, how I got the job: I sent them an email, CV and just talked about how games were my passion. I feel very lucky. This is still hard work, but if I compare hard work to make a web site for wankers vs hard work to make games with cool people, it’s a no brainer, right? =)
I’d love to do more gamedev in Java, I just don’t want to have to make all the middlewear you can get off the shelf for C++ or C# (that said, I hate Unity!)
Just tried the Microsoft HoloLens. AMA.
What was it like.