Half-Life: Alyx
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@HardwareGeek no, eels are in the previous game.
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Does anyone else have the distinct impression that VR is a thing that we'll look back on 20 years from now much the same way as we look at CDROMs today? As a quaint tech that was interesting for a few years but ultimately turned out to be nothing more than a stepping-stone along the way to something much better?
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Half-Life: Alyx:
Does anyone else have the distinct impression that VR is a thing that we'll look back on 20 years from now much the same way as we look at CDROMs today? As a quaint tech that was interesting for a few years but ultimately turned out to be nothing more than a stepping-stone along the way to something much better?
You mean, what I've been saying about 3D movies for ...checks when Avatar came out... the last ten years?
Not exactly, though, I've just been complaining that I hate it. That's all.
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"VR is like tuberculosis. They tried it in the 70s, they tried it in the 90s, they're pushing it now. It flares up about once per generation, and you just zap it with antibiotics and get on with your life."
-- Dara O'Briain (about 3D instead of VR; same difference)
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@Mason_Wheeler bruh CDs ruled the world for 20 years. VR will always remain a gimmick, much like 3D movies, and I don't think it'll ever find any other use than niche games. The launch of next generation consoles (PS5/Scarlett) is basically its last chance to become mainstream, and it needs at least 3-4 more games like HL:A, fast.
And it won't be a stepping stone for anything either, because VR is a dead end - once it's achieved, there's nothing more to it.
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@Gąska said in Half-Life: Alyx:
VR is a dead end
Dunno, brain rwx access using electrodes? It already works for certain medical one-offs. Expensive and difficult surgeries there, yes, but I see no reason it couldn't be commodified. I mean, you know people will buy St.Elon's neurashit regardless of any particular success.
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@Mason_Wheeler But CD-ROMs were a massive success for as long as they could have been? Of course technologies like optical media get obsoleted sooner or later. But VR is not a specific technology, it's more like a class of devices.
3D TV would be a better comparison.
Or tablet computers.
https://img-cdn.hipertextual.com/files/2013/04/Bill-Gates-Tablet-PC1.jpg
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@Gąska said in Half-Life: Alyx:
And it won't be a stepping stone for anything either, because VR is a dead end - once it's achieved, there's nothing more to it.
I think VR/AR has a future in specialized uses (surgery, product design, etc) that will outlast its impact in gaming and entertainment.
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@hungrier AR is quite different from VR for several reasons, and I actually think it could have many different professional uses. But not in medicine - a plain 2D screen with mouse cam or equivalent control scheme will always be 1000x easier to control. Everyone who ever shot a pellet gun (or any other kind of projectile weapon) knows muscles are VERY bad at precise movement.
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@Gąska said in Half-Life: Alyx:
Everyone who ever shot a pellet gun (or any other kind of projectile weapon) knows muscles are VERY bad at precise movement.
This sounds like it could be a debate for another topic, but in my experience it's the opposite. I can hit an arbitrary point on (e.g.) a screen faster and more easily with my finger or a stylus than with a mouse pointer.
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@hungrier zoom out the forum to 50%. How good are your fingers now?
Motion interfaces win at speed and intuition (which makes them perfect for games), but lose at high precision movement (which makes them bad for most professional tasks). Usually it doesn't matter if you cut out the tumor in 5 or 20 seconds, but it does matter a lot if you do it 1mm left of target.
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@Gąska said in Half-Life: Alyx:
@hungrier zoom out the forum to 50%. How good are your fingers now?
Still pretty much the same. Maybe I'm some kind of finger savant but I can instantly hit a precise point bang-on by physically touching it. Try this experiment: Move your mouse cursor to the bottom left of the screen, then
a) touch the center of the search magnifying glass in the top menu with your finger, or a pencil or toothpick or something for more precision
b) move your mouse and hit the same spot dead-center
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@hungrier if I move my mouse at half my normal speed, I can do that no problem. It would be even slower and even more precise with keyboard mouse-keys.
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@Gąska Well yeah, of course you can do it if you go slow and carefully. That's the whole point. Did you have to be slow and careful to poke the icon on your screen with your finger, or did you hit it instantly without even having to think about it?
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@hungrier let me repeat.
Motion interfaces win at speed and intuition (which makes them perfect for games), but lose at high precision movement (which makes them bad for most professional tasks). Usually it doesn't matter if you cut out the tumor in 5 or 20 seconds, but it does matter a lot if you do it 1mm left of target.
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@Gąska I still don't see any evidence of this supposed loss of precision. When you're filling out a form on paper, do you sometimes write your last name in the date field because you missed it with your hand?
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@hungrier we're talking about VR in surgery, not form filling.
Although VR would be pretty useless for form filling, too.
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@Gąska I was thinking more of AR in surgery. A surgeon, using a scalpel or other surgical tools on a patient right there in the operating room, but with some display that shows whatever (patient's heart rate, highlight over the tumour to cut out, etc)
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@hungrier that would be pretty useless. Surgeon is never alone in the operating room, and monitoring vital signs is someone else's job. And even today, when very high precision is required, surgeries are done with robots.
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@Gąska Ok, but in other cases where you wouldn't need a robot to precisely CNC your patient's innards, you could free up the robot for some other patient by doing the surgery manually. And you could free up some staff as well. Instead of having a nurse reading vital signs, another one handing tools to the surgeon, and a third one giving him a BJ, you could just have the last two.
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@hungrier well, you could just move a couple displays around and have much the same effect. And the discussion started with using full VR for showing things that the surgeon cannot normally see at all, so the robot is kinda a necessity in this scenario. But yes, some AR glasses/microscope display to show the cutting lines would be pretty awesome.
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@Gąska said in Half-Life: Alyx:
the discussion started with using full VR for showing things that the surgeon cannot normally see at all
I thought it started with me giving surgery as one example of somewhere VR/AR (more focused on the AR side) would be useful. Somehow we got on the topic of precision of muscle movement which wasn't my main point anyway.
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@Gąska said in Half-Life: Alyx:
some AR glasses/microscope display to show the cutting lines would be pretty awesome.
At least it might avoid cases of amputating the wrong leg and similar errors.
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@hungrier OK, maybe. Sorry for confusion.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Half-Life: Alyx:
Does anyone else have the distinct impression that VR is a thing that we'll look back on 20 years from now much the same way as we look at CDROMs today? As a quaint tech that was interesting for a few years but ultimately turned out to be nothing more than a stepping-stone along the way to something much better?
Possibly but I'm looking forward to the bit in the middle where it's less expensive and has a wider range of games available. There are some cool VR games.
If it was a bit cheaper I'd buy a VR headset and deal with the logistics of my gaming PC being on a different floor to the only room in my house big enough for a VR setup.
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........ uhh....... what went wrong there?
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@Vixen No idea, for me it shows "9 days later".
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@loopback0 said in Half-Life: Alyx:
@Mason_Wheeler said in Half-Life: Alyx:
Does anyone else have the distinct impression that VR is a thing that we'll look back on 20 years from now much the same way as we look at CDROMs today? As a quaint tech that was interesting for a few years but ultimately turned out to be nothing more than a stepping-stone along the way to something much better?Possibly but I'm looking forward to the bit in the middle where it's less expensive and has a wider range of games available. There are some cool VR games.
If it was a bit cheaper I'd buy a VR headset and deal with the logistics of my gaming PC being on a different floor to the only room in my house big enough for a VR setup.I like my VR kit, I just lack any interesting games that I haven't already played to death. I'm looking forward to lamda alyx. I hope it'll be a full game.
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In other news today, "Firewatch" keeps being the game that I confuse for a popular FPS whenever I first read it before remembering that it is in fact some walking simulator.
Firewatch developer’s next game “on hold” after Valve acquisition
Campo Santo devs now working on Half-Life: Alyx and other projects instead.
TLDR: Instead of whatever boring follow up they were going to do, they're going to
impedework on this VR game.
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@hungrier said in Half-Life: Alyx:
In other news today, "Firewatch" keeps being the game that I confuse for a popular FPS whenever I first read it before remembering that it is in fact some walking simulator.
Firewatch developer’s next game “on hold” after Valve acquisition
Campo Santo devs now working on Half-Life: Alyx and other projects instead.
TLDR: Instead of whatever boring follow up they were going to do, they're going to
impedework on this VR game.Said followup is this game.
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@powerlord said in Half-Life: Alyx:
@hungrier said in Half-Life: Alyx:
In other news today, "Firewatch" keeps being the game that I confuse for a popular FPS whenever I first read it before remembering that it is in fact some walking simulator.
Firewatch developer’s next game “on hold” after Valve acquisition
Campo Santo devs now working on Half-Life: Alyx and other projects instead.
TLDR: Instead of whatever boring follow up they were going to do, they're going to
impedework on this VR game.Said followup is this game.
Utilize an authentic 35mm film camera to document the world and story around you
I will never understand why people fill nostalgic about crappy old tech.
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@Gąska Why are you being critical of nostalgia? Isn't that Doug Walker's job?
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@loopback0 said in Half-Life: Alyx:
@Mason_Wheeler said in Half-Life: Alyx:
Does anyone else have the distinct impression that VR is a thing that we'll look back on 20 years from now much the same way as we look at CDROMs today? As a quaint tech that was interesting for a few years but ultimately turned out to be nothing more than a stepping-stone along the way to something much better?Possibly but I'm looking forward to the bit in the middle where it's less expensive and has a wider range of games available. There are some cool VR games.
If it was a bit cheaper I'd buy a VR headset and deal with the logistics of my gaming PC being on a different floor to the only room in my house big enough for a VR setup.Oculus Quest is totally standalone, no PC required.
It's great for
pornroomscale gaming.
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@error sadly, HL:A won't be ported to ARM.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTLotwKpLgk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFjtVmka54E
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Ah, the "fun" of VR:
[...] I've taken on headcrabs and Combine troopers and all the rest, all this as I have puzzled and rewired and upgraded - while simultaneously bodging around my own PC set up by my desk. House cats and scarves dumped on the backs of chairs startled me when I brushed against them at the wrong moments - generally moments involving headcrabs. My daughter, moving a doll's house behind me one afternoon, almost finished me off in a boss fight when we bumped together. "When you're behind me, tell me you're behind me!" I said. Five minutes later, when I was deep in the horror of the underground somewhere, she obliged, having snuck up close before announcing, "I'M BEHIND YOU, DADDY."
From Eurogamer (article seems to contain spoilers of first few scenes? I can't play the game ATM so no idea how far in that is):
Half-Life: Alyx review - a legend returns in elegant form
The Strider is the greatest of all Half-Life's creations, if you ask me. Sure, you could argue that it's just another s…
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@JBert Tyler McVicker (the VNN guy) said to avoid reading reviews, because a few of them contain endgame spoilers.
Also, I watched the beginning of the game (because I don't have VR myself :sadpanda:), and 5 seconds in there's a very nasty spoiler of HL2E2 ending (which I haven't finished yet!
How about a spoiler warning, Gaben, you old prick!)(This is especially annoying since this is PREQUEL! No need to bring the audience up to speed about anything!)
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@Gąska I thought Alyx preceded HL2E2. Or was it like a flash forward moment?
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@Gąska said in Half-Life: Alyx:
there's a very nasty spoiler of HL2E2 ending (which I haven't finished yet!
Ehr, due to a lack of time or only a potato-powered PC at hand? Because by now you should be able to run it on most hardware, no?
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@Zecc said in Half-Life: Alyx:
@Gąska I thought Alyx preceded HL2E2. Or was it like a flash forward moment?
See edit.
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@JBert said in Half-Life: Alyx:
@Gąska said in Half-Life: Alyx:
there's a very nasty spoiler of HL2E2 ending (which I haven't finished yet!
Ehr, due to a lack of time or only a potato-powered PC at hand? Because by now you should be able to run it on most hardware, no?
Due to not really being a fan of the horror genre. I loved HL2, hated E1, liked the beginning of E2 but then there's this mine(?) section and I've kinda lost interest. I plan on watching full playthrough on YouTube, skipping non-plot-related moments. But I've got other things to do, and it's not a high priority item until I get to play HL:A myself.
I hope that VR will get much cheaper by the end of the year.
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On a positive note, at least now when time comes to play/watch the rest of it, you're already prepared for disappointment.
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@Mason_Wheeler I suppose POV-flying model aircraft has benefitted from the glasses. You could technically also apply that to full-scale aircraft as an extension of fly-by-wire.
Or mechas. It's hard to pilot a mecha without un-obstructed stereo vision, with a turn-able head-part. But now it's possible to use them for applications that require said stereo vision. Like, say, construction.Or maybe someone finally solves the walking problem, and then we can have actual virtual reality. That hopping in the HL:A gameplay videos ... is not a replacement.
Say... did anyone make a VR game about mecha-piloting yet?
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TankTreadMecha
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BTW:
@Gąska said in Half-Life: Alyx:
The launch of next generation consoles (PS5/
ScarlettXbox Series X (XSX)) is basically its last chance to become mainstream, and it needs at least 3-4 more games like HL:A, fast.Looks like we're getting them after all! First was Boneworks, now we have HL:A, soon there will be Medal of Honor, The Walking Dead, Sniper Elite, and a bunch of VR-original franchises (Lone Echo 2 seems to be the most anticipated of those.)
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@Gąska said in Half-Life: Alyx:
Also, I watched the beginning of the game (because I don't have VR myself :sadpanda:), and 5 seconds in there's a very nasty spoiler of HL2E2 ending (which I haven't finished yet! How about a spoiler warning, Gaben, you old prick!)
It's 13 years old. The spoiler period has expired, especially for a new game in the franchise.
(This is especially annoying since this is PREQUEL! No need to bring the audience up to speed about anything!)
You're assuming the whole thing is set before Half-Life 2, and that there aren't any time-jump shenanigans.
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@Vixen Maybe you're secretly residing on NGTS-10b?
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@Gąska said in Half-Life: Alyx:
@JBert said in Half-Life: Alyx:
@Gąska said in Half-Life: Alyx:
there's a very nasty spoiler of HL2E2 ending (which I haven't finished yet!
Ehr, due to a lack of time or only a potato-powered PC at hand? Because by now you should be able to run it on most hardware, no?
Due to not really being a fan of the horror genre.
Me neither, and thus I never got around to finishing either Half-Life and their expansions. (I'd also gotten pretty burnt out on FPSes by the time Half-Life came out, though I did get into Unreal Tournament.)
Robot-assisted surgery - Wikipedia
