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The Valve and Steam Platform Discussion Thread

Metro

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Clearly they're waiting so they can make HL3 a VR experience!
 

pakoito

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Long story short they just announced:
  • A streaming box ($50)
  • The pad ($45)
  • Steam Machines
  • VR
  • Some kind of room-wide motion detector
  • Source Engine 2 powered by GLNext (a.k.a. Vulkan)
The lot available by fall this year.
 

Drax

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2382681-8581301704-7F6ni.gif
 

pakoito

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so does this trump the unreal engine giveaway yesterday
There's an ongoing discussion at several levels about price tags, C++ vs C# and who has the largest feature set but at the end of the day everyone is going to stick to their guns. Anyone who's entry level will go with whatever rubs them better.
 

Bruticis

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The ice-skating source engine is complete shit, garbage. No one cares about VR that's sane, garbage. No PC gamer would even touch a steambox, garbage. The controller looks like shit and there's zero reason to use any kind of controller apart from Xbox 360/One should you need one for some sick reason, garbage. Steam Link is stupid and pointless, garbage. TLDR: Wake me when Gaben buys GOG, gases all the employees and puts the missing games on Steam with a double layer of DRM just to piss off eurotards.
 

Dexter

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They can sell you a big block of clear plastic for you to duck behind when the enemies shoot. Sure, you could just jump behind your couch, but you want to be a PRO GAMER, don't you?
Already been done over a year ago:


Also, can't wait till some of the unbelievers actually get to try some of those finished VR devices for themselves. Seeing is usually believing.

I'm with pippin here ,can't see how VR will be any good especially for PC genres like strategy or RPGs.Even in games like Elder Scrolls I find it better to look in 3th person.Fuck immersion give me more stats.



It's definitely possible, remains to be seen what they make out of it or if they do at all, not like there are many worthwhile RTS games nowadays regardless. One of the most exciting things is that this will reset a lot of preconceptions regarding game design and will hopefully lead lots of people to experiment again. Some people will use it for shitty walking sims, but there's already been a lot of interesting stuff out there.
 

A horse of course

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This is also an issue for Microsoft on the hardware front, as many of the Steam Machines will aim for a $500 price point, designed to compete with the Sony PS4 and Microsoft Xbox One.

:nocountryforshitposters:
 

BlackAdderBG

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It's definitely possible, remains to be seen what they make out of it or if they do at all, not like there are many worthwhile RTS games nowadays regardless. One of the most exciting things is that this will reset a lot of preconceptions regarding game design and will hopefully lead lots of people to experiment again. Some people will use it for shitty walking sims, but there's already been a lot of interesting stuff out there.


First ,I'm very skeptical that VR will somehow make more devs develop RTS instead of OMG SKYRIM!!!Second the two videos you gave are not strategy games and looks stupid as fuck to move around and wave hands to play .If this shit had any hope to be good, Wii should had been flooded with strategy games by now...oh wait, no,nobody will actually play that.
The problem I see is, first you need to have good game that will convince people that it's better to play with VR than M+K,and then market it like the second coming.Yeah it's great tech and probably mind-blowing experience,but it's useless for that type of games,as it is right now looks more like Kinect 2
 

Dexter

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First ,I'm very skeptical that VR will somehow make more devs develop RTS instead of OMG SKYRIM!!!
Won't decrease the chances of that happening much further than they are now, then?

Second the two videos you gave are not strategy games and looks stupid as fuck to move around and wave hands to play.
No VR sets (aside from Samsung GearVR I guess so far) are officially out on the market, the videos were off some student developing with a prototype 1+ years ago showing possible potential.

The problem I see is, first you need to have good game that will convince people that it's better to play with VR than M+K
I bet they have plenty planned for the launch and for kit that is only in the prototype stage for now there are already plenty of games and various "experiences" out or announced: http://store.steampowered.com/search/?category2=31 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_Oculus_Rift_support

What they need to do is actually put people in one of these things as a demonstration and they'll be plenty convinced, it's not whether something is "better with VR than M+K" because the two aren't exclusive, it's how much better some experiences or games are in VR instead of in front of a monitor or TV and there are plenty of reasons why this should be exciting. It's always amazing to see how many people don't believe a new technology will stick around like the Internet or mobile phones or tablets even after major companies like Samsung (GearVR), Facebook (buying Oculus), Valve (partnering with HTC to release their own called Vive), SONY (with their Project Morpheus), Microsoft (somewhat, but they are going for AR with Hololens) AMD (just announced Liquid VR) and possibly soon NVIDIA have sunk high millions/billions into it. This stuff is here to stay this time around, the potential is just too big to not exploit it. Even if I find it unlikely that it'll "replace" the good old PC which some publications are going to undoubtedly start speculating soon and it remains to be seen if it'll be a mainstay in many households like a PC or tablet, all of this will look a lot different 1-2 years from now when consumer products and accompanying games and other products are actually on the market and their marketing has geared into overdrive. Valve probably has something big planned for their release too.
C4AH8U6.jpg


I'm also somewhat interested in Valve's "Steam Link" in-house Streaming box, since it'd be a cheap solution to just hook up to a TV in another room or while working out while using the power of a gaming PC without having to buy expensive hardware or lug the PC around.
 
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BlackAdderBG

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We'll see ,looks like big bubble to me.

P.S. Not to spam with my shitposting,every videos you post make me more and more inclined to believe all VR gaming will flop hard.Maybe there will be some Wii Sports type hit equivalent ,but man does all of this looks terrible.
 
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Dexter

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Did this guy just (mistakenly) announce Portal 3 or is he trolling?


http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/04/htc-and-valve-have-cracked-the-vr-code/
http://www.cnet.com/news/watch-out-oculus-htc-vives-vr-experience-is-astonishing/
http://www.engadget.com/2015/03/04/htc-vive-hands-on/

While we're at it, this VR TBS game was apparently just announced:

We are happy to present Skyworld, a groundbreaking Steam VR TBS coming to HTC Vive in 2015!

Manage your economy, build and lead royal armies and rule mad dragons to restore your father’s empire to its former glory. It’s up to you to conquer and reunite all Skyworlds in this turn-based strategy game that brings back the beloved gameplay from TBS classics in a groundbreaking VR experience.

B_RlxTbVEAAYB3l.jpg:large
 
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Dexter

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http://www.engadget.com/2015/03/04/valve-vr-input/


Among the handful of announcement Valve made at this year's Game Developers Conference was a subtle and hugely important one: Lighthouse. What in the world is Lighthouse? It's the "base stations" referenced in Valve's VR headset announcement, and it's even more important than the incredibly impressive headset. Valve president Gabe Newell compares it to USB and expects it to fundamentally change how people interact with virtual reality. "Now that we've got tracking, then you can do input," Newell said in an interview with Engadget this morning. "It's a tracking technology that allows you to track and arbitrary number of points, room scale, at sub-millimeter accuracy 100 times a second."

What that means for me and you is that Lighthouse puts your body into the virtual world with stunning precision. I tested it and can confirm: holy shit, yes, this really works. Want to reach out and touch something in VR? Lighthouse is how you'll do it.

Newell explained Valve's philosophy behind creating Lighthouse as such:
"The first prototype of our hardware has all these retro-reflective dots. That's great for one person who's sitting. If you actually want to have ten people in a room moving around, you need something like Lighthouse. So Lighthouse gives you that precision; it's not specific to the head-mounted display. We also use it for controllers, but you could use it for anything: you could put it on your tablets or your phones. It's tracking -- it happens that VR likes to use tracking and it's critically dependent on it."

Lighthouse currently relies on reflective sensors (32 on the prototype I used) to track movement in Valve and HTC's VR headset, Vive. There are two motion controllers as well that look and feel similar to an ice cream cone (sugar cone, not waffle/cake cones, you monster). The controllers also have sensors, and they show up in VR as visualizations in front of your eyes, as if you were looking down at them in your hands in real life.

DSC00530.jpg


I cannot stress enough here how 1:1 that feeling was. Lighthouse tracked the controllers and my head movement to an incredible degree. When I got to close to the walls of the demo room, a virtual grid popped in VR -- this is a measure of Lighthouse's capability. It suddenly made a lot of sense to me why Newell was so bullish on Lighthouse being an industry-changing technology.

Oh, and Valve's giving it away for free. This is part of the "USB" vision.

"So we're gonna just give that away. What we want is for that to be like USB. It's not some special secret sauce. It's like everybody in the PC community will benefit if there's this useful technology out there. So if you want to build it into your mice, or build it into your monitors, or your TVs, anybody can do it."

If that isn't clear enough, think of Lighthouse like this: by having the tech out there, input solutions are infinite. As long as tracking is there, anything could be "brought into" VR, like how USB ports enable you to plug (virtually) anything into your computer. As Newell put it, "If it's just another part of the PC gaming platform, then lots of people will come up with lots of interesting things."

This is especially impactful when it comes to VR: gamepads are immersion breaking, and VR is all about "presence." If you're inside a world, you want to touch and interact with that world naturally. Lighthouse is the only solution I've seen that comes anywhere near to solving the issue of input in virtual reality.
 
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Dexter

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This site apparently also said this: http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/04/htc-and-valve-have-cracked-the-vr-code/
The entire rig ran off of a stock but powerful gaming PC that pumped out the various demos including an undersea adventure complete with whale, a cooking test that looked like a Nintendo game, and a sneak preview of a new Portal game that was so immersive that you get chills when a massive GlaDOS unfurls like a malevolent umbrella.

No official Announcement or anything so far, I'm inclined to believe that these people might be dumbfucks and mistook a VR Demo for an Announcement or Preview of a new Portal, or maybe that was the intention, I don't know.
 

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