– Ready Player One and how LL could improve SL –

So i just watched Ready Player one and it was a pretty fun movie, Its about this huge virtual reality MMO game like SL mixed with SAO and this generic main protagonist looking dude and his wacky friends trying to solve puzzles and get 3 keys to unlock some shit and win the ownership of the game world itself. While the evil EA corporation is throwing money into focus groups trying to solve the puzzle themselves to gain control of the game and shit it up with their loot boxes and micro transactions.
I dont get why nerds hate this movie so much because this movie is like every nerd’s wet dream, like i understand there were some really cringy geek out moments that felt really forced like that part where they were talking about golden eye on nintendo64. But its still a very enjoyable and surprisingly solid movie.
What kinda disappointed was that there were a bunch of big missed opportunity moments, like they could have made the main chick turn out to be a dude IRL, you know just like girl avatars are in real videogames. I think they kinda sort of wanted to do that but it would have offended all the good god loving christian folks in american and their dumb sensibilities, because in american folklore, the hero has to get the girl and all that cheesy shit and if there is no girl to get or the hero gets the guy, you will have a bunch of pissed off old people going all HURR MUH FAMILY VALUES HAVE BEEN SHATTERED BY THIS MOVIE!!!, so instead *spoilers* they made that big cyborg dude turn out to be an ugly fat chick IRL because that wont offend anyone.*spoilers*
As for the main girl, when she said “you wont like me irl, im ugly” i expected her to be, i dunno, at least chubby or something, but no she looks just as hot irl as her avatar, its really lame how safe they are trying to play even in places where they dont need to, no one would have minded her actually turning out not looking like a supermodel IRL.
Now for avatars themselves, it didnt lack variety in that department, there were all kinds of avatars, robots, elfs, orcs, pizza wizards and even fucking furriers, but not a single anime girl anywhere, have they not heard about VR chat? You can literally be anything you want in that game, but anime is off the table, so fuck you. Which is even more strange considering they had a gundam and the bike from akira and all that anime stuff in it.
Another missed opportunity is by nintendo itself for not licensing their characters to the movie, there was no iconic nintendo characters like mario with his blue and red overalls, red hat and mustache or metroid in his yellow armor with big round shoulders and green arm cannon or zelda with his pointy ears and green hat and sword or a single pokemen reference. Nintendo, if you want to still be relevant in the future, you should jump on opportunities like this nerd wankfest of a movie, you are a huge part of nerd culture and you have probably shaped the history of gaming more than anything else they showed in it, yet other than that cringy goldeneye reference, its like you never even existed, they could at least made the main hero wear the powerglove or something, but well i guess its true what they say, genesis does what nintendont. It was also strange to not see any storm troopers or darth vaders, although they did throw in a shit ton of verbal references to star trek like the millennium falcon and captain spock’s famous phrase “may the force be with you”  so i guess thats ok.

Its kind of ironic how all thsoe copyrighted characters in the movie mirror all the copyright infringment and game model rips on second life.
Oh yeah there were also some inconsistency with the time line by like 20 years, when JD Halliday played atari as a kid, we already had playstations by then.

Anyway, this movie is like second life and sword art online had a baby, It was a very fun and filled with fun pop corn munching action and, pop cullture references and tracer’s ass. I recomend seeing it, just dont watch it in 3D cuz it just makes it as hard to watch and recognize all the characters as a crappy low quality cam rip on the web

– Mesh bakes, reduced sim costs and my idea for SL –

Now speaking of swords art online and second life having a baby, you probably already heard the news but Linden labs are rolling out a bunch of new changes to SL. One of them is a new mesh feature that will allow loading LL avatar textures onto mesh objects, this is a big thing because now you will no longer need deal with tons of confusing applier systems just to load your skins or clothing layers onto your normie mesh bodies, you will be able to wear your LL skins, tattoos, alphas, on your mesh bodies straight from your inventory. How exactly it will work i do not yet know but if you are wondering if im going to implement that into any of my stuff, the answer is very yes!.

Another somewhat great news is that they are lowering the sim costs on mainalnd and moving the grid into a cloud based network, witch i think is a step in to the right direction that they should have taken ages ago. I say somehwat because lets face it, the 10% cost reduction is meaningless when sims still cost hundreads of dollars a month, no ones going to flock to mainland because its still way out of reach financially for most normal people, especially when you compare it to the monthly cost of running a game server witch is 40$. But i do hope that moving to the cloud will help them cut the costs enough for them to be able to lower the sim prices even more.

But if was LL, heres what i would have done in the first place:
Instead of throwing all my money and resources into dead end projects like desura, patterns and sansar, i would instead direct those resources into making SL a streamlined MMO game platform. Redo systems like character movement, vehicle system, combat, IK, pathfinding and AI, make it all work like in a real videogame.
Next step would be redoing the sim software to allow sim scalability so that you wouldnt be confined to 250×250 cube ion the middle of the sea, and price land based on scale.
Lets say a small island sized as 1/4 of our current sim sizes would cost you 15$ or whatever subscription fee premium users pay in MMO games.
Bigger plot of land for commercial purposes like shopping malls or small indie game projects would go from 40$ to 100$
And than we would have huge plots of land for big game companies to create their own MMO titles with a huge open worlds the size of games like skyrim or farcry, building their MMO experiences on top of the infrastructure provided by LL, it would go from 300$ to 1000$ or even more if the game is as massive as WOW.

So yeah that’s all.

– The THC Vive –

So not too long ago i tried picking up VR again to see whats new in the land of pretend VR and how far things have progressed in the VR waifu department, but the oculus rift DK2 still had god awful windows 10 support and i couldnt get it to work right, so i said fuck it and got myself the HTC vive.

If you havent seen my oculus rift review, you can catch up with it here https://utilizator404.wordpress.com/2014/08/21/the-oculus-rift-dk2-review/ and a follow up here https://utilizator404.wordpress.com/2014/08/27/another-look-at-the-dorculus-drift-donkeykong2/

In this article im going to be comparing the 2 side by side and see how much this stuff has progressed over the years, So lets get into it.

– Seting it up –

Setting this thing up was even more complicated than the oculus, for whatever retarded reason, the thing is still not wireless and theres even more cables than on the oculus. There are no instructions on how to set it up, there is only health warnings, sensor placement guide and a list of the box contents. It took me some time figuring out what to plug where, the sensors have USB ports on them but the provided USB cables are only few centimeters long, ironically enough, the sensors themselves are wireless and the USB ports are only there for firmware updates, but that isnt mentioned anywhere. Also the thing needs not one but 3 fucking power bricks, one for each sensor and one for the headset.
The drivers for it are just as terrible as the ones for the oculus, the thing did not want to work no matter what i did, i was starting to think my vive was broken or something till i remembered that oculus used to be very anal about having multiple monitors, so i tried disconnecting all my monitors, plug the vive in and sure enough, the fucking thing worked… than i could plug all my monitors back in after everything was set up. And even than theres always something, either sound not working right or one of the components not being detected, all kinds of random errors and having to restart Steam VR program multiple times for it to work right. Get your shit together HTC, this is a consumer product, not a fucking development kit.

– The Screen –

Looking back at the oculus and comparing it with the vive, i feel like the example image i made of the oculs screen doesnt do it justice.

This is a more accurate depiction of what you see, only put your face very close to your monitor to get the full oculus screen experience!

While the screen on the vive is an improvement over the oculus, it is still no where near what i would consider a consumers version.

Theres still those huge eye straining gaps between the pixels, making all the fine detail impossible to make out, smaller texts are hard or borderline impossible to read. Theres various virtual desktop applications as well as native virtual desktop support in steam VR, all utterly pointless without being able to read the texts and not strain your eyes, getting a headache after 10 minutes, why dont they just use 4k displays is beyond me.

– Comfort –

Comfort is a thing all the VR fanboys love sweeping under the rug. While the vive is not abrasive like the oculus, and most importantly, has no vomit inducing judder problem, nothing else has really changed here, it is still heavy, unpleasant, hot and itchy plastic box strapped to your face. The weight of it on the front of your head gives you a weird light dizzy headache feeling after taking it off, the screen is going in and out of focus as the box bounces up and down on your head no matter how hard you tighten the straps, straining your eyes. And than theres the constant struggle not to step on the cable, being mindful of how many times you turned left or right so the cables wont get twisted, why they released it like that without making it wireless is beyond me as well.

– Content –

As the whole VR craze died down, so did the promise of future content, and all that remains is a desolate waste heap of shitty halfass tech demos with price tags of real games.
With a few exceptions, one of them being Valve’s LAB tech demo, it includes many highly polished and impressive mini games that make full use of the vive’s capabilities in creative and engaging ways, and its pretty much all you need to play to have a good idea of what VR gaming could be like if anyone made games for it, and best part is that its free! It actually made my cynical mind blown for a moment.

Other kinds of content worth checking out are creative applications and virtual tour type of things such as art museums, google earth, drawing grafitti, playing drums, i think its a far better use of this technology than gaming.

– Gameplay –

One thing the vive has over the oculus is how streamlined it is playing in room scale, combined with its intuitive controllers. This way of playing games solves the ultimate problem of VR, nausea. You move around the room with your own 2 feet and you get places outside the bounds of your room by pointing and clicking to teleport to that location, it is very smooth and doesnt cause any motion sickness. I think ultimately this makes VR a viable option.

I noticed theres a lot of misinformation going around about vive being only for those with the luxury of having a big empty room and room-scale being the only way you can play it. But this is not true, technically the vive is no different from the oculus and they are both cross compatible, the vive just has a longer cord. You can play games that were made for sitting in front of a desk, even if you dont have a big room, you still have the option to play all those sitting position games that were made for the oculus, and even the room scale ones by just sitting in your chair or your couch and using the controllers to teleport around the scene. Of course having a big room is ideal to make full use of the thing.

– The future of VR –

While its a fun gimmick for a while, i dont see any future for VR as it is now, in mainstream gaming, what i do see huge potential in is creative applications, such as, drawing, playing musical instruments, things you wanna try doing but unable to due to your real life circumstances (like wanting to play the drums but not owning a drum kit, or drawing graffiti). Its also a good way to see different places around the world like google earth VR. And most importantly, the porn, YES VR porn is the thing that blew my mind the most, porn movies recorded with stereoscopic 360 cameras, makes you feel like you are really there with a girl in front of you, it feels like theres really another living person in front of you, and it feels so personal. So if anything, VR definitely has a future there, and i think facebook is on to something with their purchase of the oculus rift and vrporn.com website.

– Final verdict –
For a consumer release, it is really inadequate and the insane asking price of 900$ is just inexcusable for the poor quality experience you are getting from it, The form factor, the weight, all these cables and terrible low DPI screen.
The early adopters will ignore all these elephants in their VR room and will try to sell it to you like its the second cumming of Christ. Unable to come to terms with their buyers remorse, they will convince themselves that they are having a blast with it and it wont just sit there collecting dust after a few months. They will tell you how this revolution is just around the corner, year after year, and if you bring up the VR hype of the 80s and 90S, they will say shit like “technology just wasnt there yet” but the truth is that the technology is still not there, we are still strapping screens to our faces and pretending we are inside virtual reality.

So yeah while VR, as it is now, will never be fit to do any real gaming, VR porn is best thing ever and its a revolutionary new way to fap and i think this is the real reason you should at least get the 80$ Samsung’s gear VR, or if you are really broke, get the google card board witch only costs you 5$ and offer you the same kind of porn viewing experience as these overpriced and over complicated dork helmets.

– RIP Skills Hak –

So as many of you who arent living under a rock, have already heard that Skills got perma banned again and looks like its for real this time. Here’s her blog post about it.

http://skills.tumblr.com/post/141699124267/byeeee

I find it kind of a pants on head retarded move by LL to ban someone who sinks so much money into their dieing game, someone who runs a place that they use to promote their dieing game, someone helps them fix their dieing game. GG linden lab.

Anyway, Skills was always surrounded by controversy, hated by many little dicked gingers, copybotters, safe hub memester trolls  and wanna be grieffer youtube stars, for basically nothing more than not bending over backwards to these people and taking it up the ass, But none of them took the time to get to know the real Skills Hak and her contribution to the game.
Skills is a great friend and we had some good times together, especially when we moved to cumboy canyon (later named poop cuz lindens dont like cum). Skills gave us a fantasy land of our own where we could all gather to circle jerk and let out creativity flow free, cumming up with hilarious sim build ideas, new creative ways to kill clueless memesters wandering the sim, create whatever we wanted. We had a blast with all those sim builds and none of that would have been possible without Skills. You say you want to be a mommy now, but you always were our mommy <3

This ban means those fun days are now over, we will miss it but life goes on, and maybe theres some more good times to be had ahead, who knows, but i feel too tired to invest any more of my time and effort into playing this game and building something, especially when it all can just be taken away from you like that whenever LL pleases.

– Jelly babies will take over SL soon (AKA how linden lab is planing to break second life) –

So theres a lot of talk about the upcoming patch that will break SL visually, so i think its time for me to rant about it too.

So we all know how laggy and unplayable SL can be, its probably one of the biggest problems with second life today.

LL is going to do what LL does best, implement a half assed fix for a symptom instead of fixing the cause of the problem, optimizing the viewer, fixing how it handles video memory, making the viewer use full capabilities of your videocard’s processing power(it uses CPU to calculate and only uses GPU to draw), And maybe even making a D3D version of the client for windows users.

Anyway, this “solution” that LL came up with will undermine the whole point of mesh avatars and i suspect this will make a lot of people just quit SL in the log run. It will Automatically derender any avatars exceeding whatever arbitrary render weight setting that you or LL chooses for you by default. You wont be able to wear your fancy mesh outfits, bodies and heads without being visually muted for everyone around you, you will have to go back to using the linden body and linden avatar body and its crappy body paint clothing layer. (It will tell you when you are muted though)

Current problem with render weight calculation is that it sums up everything, including the LOD for every object you wear(LODs that the game doesnt even use because of a rigged mesh LOD bug),  instead of what your video card has to actually draw on your screen. This calculation is horribly inaccurate, it doesnt tell you what actually makes you lag, and people just abuse the rigged mesh LOD bug to cheat the render weight count.
To calculate real render weight, the viewer would need to calculate it in real time and only the things your video card has to actually render, anything else added to that just undermines the whole calculation. You can look at a perfectly fine avatar low polygon avatar that for some reason has an absurd render wight and not lag looking at it, and you can look at an avatar that has an excessive amount of polygons but abuses the LOD bug that makes it have a low render weight, and it makes your viewer go 5 frames per second (People cheat render weight by using single triangles for all the LODs)

So here’s what i think should happen first before this feature is implemented.

1. The rigged mesh LOD bug has to be fixed, currently the game doesnt use LODs and displays the same high detail model on all distances, this, apart from texture memory issues, is what they should be focusing on if they really want to fix the lag.
2. The render weight calculation has to be done in real time and only count things that are being rendered, if this is not possible to do without rewriting the whole code, at least make the render weight calculation only count the high detail objects and not the LODs because its absurd, your wearing 1 object at the time, not all 4 different detail versions of it.

Btw one legit benefit of this jelly baby feature is that it would make graphics crashers impossible, instead of implementing this to the UI, they should instead just leave it in the debug settings menu but set it to a certain max amount by default so that it would still show everyone correctly but at the same time would automatically derender any graphics crashers.

 

– MAD MAX game review-

Since i was a little kid, i was really into mad max, and you can only imagine how much i jizzed my pants when i saw the new movie “fury road” and than they announced the game, witch was in the same style as the movie, it looked really good and promising and i couldn’t wait for it to come out.

And so, it finally came and i came as well, at least at my first few hours of play. It was everything i expected it to be and so much more, but as i continued playing, i started feeling a bit disappointed, there were no bikes, no big rigs, no epic huge car chases, and while the car stuff is really fun on its own, it just doesn’t really capture that epic mad max car chase spirit that you would come to expect from a thing titled “mad max”.

Furthermore, the whole game feels like it was made out of a demo of a much bigger game. Its like they only made a small handful of game assets and copypasted them all over the map, this is either some really small team that was working on it or they had a very limited budget or only worked on this game part time. Like for example, every single boss fight you fight the same exact boss, the same moves and tactics and even the same 3D model (although later on it gets 2 other 3D models to mix things up a bit but its still the same exact moves and everything), later on they introduce another boss that is different, but it also gets reused multiple times with a different 3D model, i think it gets used 3 times in total, the rest of the boss encounters are the same guy you had to fight from your very first boss encounter.
So all in all you got like, 5 enemy types that are reskinned for every faction, 1 playable vehicle type (no bikes, no big rigs, just regular cars) 2 boss types, 5 or 6 types of activities littered all over the map. While those things are awesome the first few times you do them, after some time it becomes repetitive joyless grind, especially shit like locating and disarming the minefields, and you have to do them all in order to unlock the car part you need.

While at its core the gameplay is solid and mostly fun, there’s a lot of things that are a not completely thought through by the people who made this game.
For example, the game has a jump feature, but nothing to jump on or over, there is no platforming and the jump isn’t high enough for it to be of any use for anything. Often times you end up not being able to jump over objects that are at your knee height, and there’s no climbing feature that could be combined with the jump to get on top of high objects, you can only climb things marked for climbing.
There’s also a knife, that you can only use once…. yeah like you stab someone and the knife magically disappears, having you scavenge for a new knife every time you kill a guy. There are upgrades that extend your ammo belt capacity and that also lets you have more knifes, so you end up walking around with a collection of knifes, why the fuck not just have one fucking knife that never disappears after a kill instead of having to carry 943759843 knifes in your inventory, this is the most bizarre game design choice i have seen in a while.
No matter how much you max out your car, its still week and slow as shit. You can have your engine maxed out but you will still have a hard time catching up to enemy cars and you will never be able to outrun them. You can add all the armor and spikes and turn your car into a barely moving tank, but they will still be able to knock your car’s health by more than half in just one side ram, it feels like everything you do to make your car formidable is futile, you might just steal one of their cars and drive that instead.
By default, the game has this really nice survival element to it, you have to scavenge for food, water, gasoline and ammo to survive in the wasteland, but than you get to upgrade your stronghold and this is where all this neat survival stuff gets thrown out the window. Once you get to one of your strongholds, it automatically refills your health, water, car, ammo belt. you no longer have to scavenge for anything when you are running low and finding stuff like water or gas cans no longer has that joy to it because you already have an unlimited amount of it, this is essentially like using a cheat code.
Speaking of stronghold upgrades, there’s this one upgrade called stockpile, it costs a lot and it literally does nothing, you waste all your money that could have been used to pimp out your ride, on a thing that has no function in the game.
And if we are speaking of wasting money, you cant just buy whatever upgrades you want for max and his car even if you already did the missions to unlock them, gotta waste money on all the crap ones before them first to be able to buy the ones you need.
You gotta grind a lot to get it, random scrap(money is called scrap in this game) that enemies drop or you find in looting locations only give you like +2 +5 scrap, and you need 4100 of it to get that fancy V8 carburetor for your car. You waste countless hours and hours chasing after cars and looting random villages, that you could have used to actually play and enjoy the game. It’s like one of those shitty “free” to play phone games where you have to pay micro transactions to get game coins to be able to progress faster, only this game has no micro transactions and you are stuck with the free to play part of it.
Than there’s also this thing where for whatever reason, to perform an action you have to hold down E (or whatever button you assign) instead of just pressing it once. I would understand it for actions that take time like breaking doors open, but why the fuck did they think its a good idea to make you hold E for every single action such as picking up an a weapon in the middle of combat, its so frustrating. and than there’s the ridiculously tiny distances you have to be from a thing to perform an action, you can be standing right on top of a weapon but nope you cant pick it up till you move one pixel closer, its also very frustrating in combat.
There’s many more smaller problems but i wont list them because this is already getting too tl;dr and i haven’t even got to the whats good about this game

The combat is good and very fun for the most part, i never got bored of it but even that has its problems.
The camera will often times position itself in ways that leave you blind to whats going on around you, getting lots of cheep shots from the enemies offscreen, attacks that you never see coming.
The game has sort of an element of sneaking up on the enemies, but it doesn’t really work because they always somehow get alerted before you are close enough to silently execute them, its like as if they have some 360 vision or something, i only managed to sneak attack once in my entire playthrough. And also things like you turning on your flashlight in the middle of a dark room when you are standing behind enemies, does not alert them, just goes to show how much thought they put in this too.
The car combat is pretty fun too, although the game has a problem with input delay that prevents me from fully enjoying the car part, and that is a real shame because mad max is all about the car chases and stuff.
Speaking of cars, the game has racing in it but suck as all the other things in this game, racing had little to no thought given to it, the enemy drivers will fail miserably to keep up with you and you will always end up driving alone with no one to rival you, but somehow you will barely have time to make it to the finish line.

There are some serious technical problems with the game as well, such as a strange and very noticeable input delay on everything, while its not really a big deal and wont hinder your gameplay experience on foot much, driving is another story and this is where it feels the most. It ruins the driving experience and makes some of the missions and cars borderline unplayable and undrivable.
Bugged missions, events that fail to trigger making you stuck and sometimes even having you redo the whole thing. But worst of all is the minefield bug that makes minefields disappear or impossible to interact, as if finding hidden minefields and than disarming them wasn’t enough of a chore as it was.
And than there’s the hilarious bugs that send max or his car flying and spinning through the air on slightest bump on things with an angle.

Now for the story of the game, dunno how to put this without spoiling anything so i will just say that the story was terrible for the most part, the writing was awful and if you don’t do the optional missions, the characters will still act like you did and be all strange and you are supposed to have this emotional connection to them that doesn’t exist and make you go “who the fuck is this guy even?” The story itself is really short and it artificially lengthens the game by forcing you to do all these repetitive “go here, do that” things that you already done a million times over to get your car parts or whatever, until it lets you progress further with the story.

So all in all, at first i was mind blown but than the game slowly turned into a joyless repetitive grind. The game is fun and its solid enough in general even with all the bugs and weird game design choices, but if you wanna get the most enjoyment out of this game, only do the main story missions and only do all the side quests if the main story missions forces you to do them.

– BUTA No GOTOKI SANZOKU NI TOROWARETE SHOJO O UBAWARERU KYONYUU HIMEKISHI & ONNA SENSHI ZETTAI CHINPO NANAKA NI MAKETARI SHINAI!! THE ANIMATION VOL.1 – Has japan gone too far? –

This is why i dont watch anime anymore.

– Nice troll LL, 10/10 well played –

Okay so, dunno if anyone seen the recent LL announcement, where they talk bout all the improvements they did to mesh and other stuff. It was like, WOW LL is no longer ignoring the important issues and is actually doing something to move this game forward, instead of pretending they are doing something, this is so amazing :O http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Featured-News/Check-Out-the-Latest-Improvements-to-Second-Life/ba-p/2895496

The thing in their announcement that got me excited the most was “We’re upgrading support for mesh import: an upcoming Viewer update will allow uploading models that have more than eight unique faces” This would open up so many new possibilities for mesh, it would let me optimize the shit out of the av2, kemono and M3, and remove all sorts of frustrating, dead end limitations on what can be done, it would make my work so much easier and let me focus on creation instead of figuring out ways around those limitations. I finally had my respect back for LL.

 

But then…..

 

The public beta notes came and “Using these new features, models with more than 8 unique faces can be imported. Gone are the days of importing complicated meshes in pieces with “some assembly required”. At import, these models are automatically split into pieces so that each satisfy the current face limits for a volume.”

This is fucking, pants on head retarded, this wont allow us to upload models with more than 8 faces, this will just automatically break them up into separate models, with you having no control over how its done, just like their lazy ass LOD and physics generation algorithms. And the part about “some assembly required” There was no assembly required! you could upload linksets of separate mesh objects in one go. You had full control on how your mesh in your 3D editor of choice and upload them as linksets, instead of giving it to a crappy algorithm that does it whatever random manner.  This new “feature” is just fucking stupid and meaningless and will only enable people who have no idea what the fuck they are doing, to hit up the game even more with their terrible, unoptimized wastes of polygons.

So yeah, well done LL, once again you did absolutely nothing and made us all think you are doing something to move the fucking game forward.

– Second Life 2.0 (for real this time) –

So i assume you all have probably heard about Second Life 2.0 by now. People often ask me what is my view on this, so imma give my 2 cents on this matter as well (and generate some copypasta for the next time someone asks :D).

Ok so SL 2.0, is it a good thing, is it bad, do we need a new sl? well I personally would wish that instead of spending all that time, money and effort on building a new game, they would concentrate it all on fixing this current one. On the other hand, this game is so fucked up beyond repair, that a fresh start might be the only way to fix it.

Theres some pants on head retarded rumours going around about how LL is going to pull the plug on SL after SL 2.0 is out. I wish people would stop listening to rumours and look for real information from real sources, like the linden labs blog that clearly states that they wont be killing or even phasing out SL any time soon or ever, if no one stops playing it.
Also shutting down the old SL would be a commercial suicide to LL, especially when SL2 is in its infancy. They need to have a safe harbor that they can return to in case shit doesnt go the way they planed it.

So ummm, LL hasn’t disclosed any specific information about how the game will work and what technology will it employ so its kinda early to say how eager i am to move to SL 2.0.

I would however be all for SL 2.0 if it had the following things in it:

Clothing and hair simulation.
IK targets (for stuff like holding guns right, no matter what shape you have, or your legs interacting with the surface you are walking on)
Custom bone structures (like ability to have finger bones or a tail or extra arms and all that stuff)
Morphs and joint morph targets (for adjusting the avatar’s shape and face, face expressions, hand positions, nice joint deformations and so on)(fuck fitted mesh)
A proper material editor maybe.
More useful script commands and no technical limitations like one particle system per script and so on.
A more informative compiler.
Special built in functionality in the client/server itself, for handling things like vehicles, weapons, sword combat, combat interactions with avatars(like punching someone would actually make the hit connect and move their avatar), scoring and other gameplay elements, to make games on SL perform like real games and not some disjointed laggy wtfisgoingon shit. Having this functionality built into the client/server instead of having to write complicated 54651531351 lines of script to do such seemingly simple tasks, that are impossible to do smoothly anyway because of all the fucking sim lag.
Proper key mapping in scripts, so you would be able to bind any keyboard key you want to a script without having to use gestures.
CUSTOMIZABLE CONTROLLS!
Creation tools that let you create meshes ingame.
User owned sims.
Bring back old sl features lost over time like water simulation, mirror surfaces destruction physics and rain.
A proper optimized client with a customizable UI and features.
Disallow third party clients.
A FUCKING LOG OUT BUTTON FOR FUCK SAKE!

But yeah, all of this is just wishful thinking, we would be lucky if even 1 or 2 things from this list would be implemented into the new game. And in general im a bit skeptical about SL 2.0, do you really expect someone as incompetent as LL, who takes 3 years to fix a bug, breaks 10 other things with their lazy fix and cant even do something as simple as adding a button to the UI. On top of that, a company that doesnt even understand its own product or its own userbase, ignores feedback, keeps fixing whats not broken, implementing shit that no one asked for, and keeps on making other pants on head retarded decisions, like shitting all over their front page and user dashboard with malware containing ADs, and keeps trying to take the game to directions that no one wants to go to.

And finally, remember this?how well did that work out?

Now there is a rumor that SL 2.0 is just a codename because secretly LL has been funding Philip linden who is working on his own project called high fidelity. But i do not see high fidelity as a proper replacement for SL because 1. Philip linden is a childish visionary that is still hyped up with early 90s concepts of virtual reality and doesn’t understand that no one really cares about that stupid shit anymore. 2. His project is all about live expressive interactions between players through their their avatars, using expensive motion capture and virtual reality equipment that no one in their right mind would consider buying. His game is all based on recreating that real life face to face communication (I dont think he ever heard about skype video calls) and is not really in tune with what the current SL is about. In fact, Philip left LL because SL wasnt in tune with how he envisioned SL to be when he created it. I just dont see how this would interest all the socially awkward shut ins that are playing SL. Also his game looks like ass in its current state.

– Another look at the Dorculus Drift DonkeyKong2 –

So i gave the rift another try, i looked into how users of the device cope with motion sickness and nausea, turns out some people slowly adapt to it over time, others never adapt and just have a barf bucket prepared, there are some who dont feel the motion sickness at all due to some pathology in their vestibular system. Theres also pills and Ginger supplements that you can take to minimize these effects. But most people just willingly sit there and torture themselves for up to 30 minutes a day till they either build up a tolerance or just simply get used to being nauseated as a part of their gameplay experience.

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FUCKING RETARDED

Anyway! I found this really nice game that doesnt make me sick after a minute of playing it, its called vanguard V, its about this mecha girl flying through space, blasting stuff and dodging the debris. This game takes an out of the box approach to gameplay using the oculus motion tracker and is a very good example on how to make games for the device that feel fresh, innovative and dont make you sick. It has really awesome music too, i wish the OST was on youtube or something.

In a stark contrast, i found a game that i literally cannot take more than 3 seconds off without removing the dork helmet and throwing it to the side in agony. It is called helix, it is the ultimate rolercoster ride simulator, it has lots of forward motion that instantly gets you nauseated.

So here’s what causes motion sickness and how to make games that dont make you wanna vomit.

The Oculus Rift motion sickness is mainly caused by unnatural motion that goes against what your vestibular system is saying, motion that you cannot feel with your body. Basically its camera position movement through space, like for example walking/driving/flying forward or looking around with a controller/mouse/keyboard instead of using the motion tracker and your own head. This type of motion is not cause by you and it cannot be detected by your vestibular system because your real body is stationary.

Games that dont cause motion sickness and nausea.

Games that only use real motion, such as you looking around by rotating your real head or moving it side to side, up and down, these kind of motions are felt by your body and your vestibular system and go hand in hand with what your eyes see, these motions do not cause dizziness or make you sick. Vanguard V is a very good example, you see your character in third person and, most of the movement in that game is natural and(done with your actual head), with the exception that you slowly fly forward, but you fly forward so slow that it doesnt effect you. Another perfect example is the desk demo from the oculus rift settings menu, you get zero dizzyness or motion sickness in that demo because in order to move through space, you have to physicaly stand up from your chair and walk around your physical room to move through space in the desk demo.
So basicaly, its games where you only rotate and move your head, real motions that go hand in hand with your vestibular system.

The most ideal use to the oculus rift system that i see would be if the helmet was made wireless and you were in a big room with motion trackers on the walls, in this room you would move around freely, moving yourself through the virtual space. Also one big boner killer to me was that i couldnt see my hands or my body in the desk demo, i couldnt try to poke through the house of cards with my finger and stuff like that, so it would be a huge plus if in addition to the VR helmet, you also had a motion capture suit on that was also constantly tracked by the motion trackers in the room, that way you would also see your body in game, making you even more immersed in the experience.

Now for games that you move through space unnaturally, maybe they could make a chair that moves and tilts and shakes in sync with the motions you are experiencing in the game, to fool your vestibular system into thinking that you are actually moving, i think this would eliminate the majority of the motion sickness.

 

The judder problem in DK2

So yeah, now that i found my game, i still cannot enjoy it because of a big judder problem with the DK2. I did some research and it turns out that this is mostly happening to games and demos made with the unity engine. There also seems to be different casuses and different solutions from person to person, some solve it by setting the rift to extend mode and running things direct to oculus and otehrs fix it by changing their primary monitor’s refresh rates and disconnecting all aditional monitors. The way i “solved” my problem was using clone display mode and disconnecting all my other monitors, just leaving my main monitor and the rift connected. But the problem now is that the rift needs my desktop to be in portrait mode and it looks like this, so basicaly every time i want to play a game i have to disconnect everything and do this to my display.

In its current state the dk2 is a broken piece of shit, only the desk demo and a handful of other demos that were not made using unity works right, i really hope that ts just an issue with the drivers that will be fixed with later updates and not the units themselves.

– The Oculus rift DK2 review –

So i got the overhyped dork helmet the other day and i feel like sharing my Oculus rift experience with you guys.

While it looks a lot better, its still a huge ugly plastic brick strapped to your head, it still has a bazillion wires that you have to connect and it still has hard abrasive parts pressing against your face(its like some sort of a face torture device) Now i understand that this is just an early wrok in progress but these things have to be addressed, the unit has to be made more compact, lightweight and comfortable to wear, it needs to not have a bunch of wires and be more simple and easy to set up and go, if they want this to really be a viable product that the average non sci-fi geek person would actually be interested in.

Aesthetics and comfort arent the only and arent the main problems with the Oculus right now though, The improvements they made over DK1 are just not enough. Mainly the screen, its still a cheep terrible low resolution rgb dot matrix LCD screen. While you can now sorta read texts in game menus and stuff, the slight increase in dot matrix resolution is not enough.

I mean, just fucking look at it, you might not notice this at your very first moments using it but the longer you use it the more it becomes painfully apparent.

The only real improvement so far is the ability to now track head position too, not just rotation. This gives you the full immersion and you can look around an object from sides an stuff, like in reality.

But enough about the terrible hardware, lets talk about the performance.

Now while my very first impressions of were HOLY FUCKING SHIT ABC YOU SHOULD SEE THIS, THIS IS SO REAL, HOLY SHIT MIND BLOWN when i looked around my virtual desk with my virtual pencil and my virtual plant and house of cards. But a few minutes after i have acclimated myself to it, and started noticing the terrible display resolution and blurred edges and my head started getting dizzy and some weird head tracking lag kicked. The edges of the screen are blurred and you have this weird color shift thing going on. Its impossible to read texts in menus that arent in the center, the black grid of gaps between the RGB dots starts to really strain your eyes and the more you move around, the more nauseated you get form all the motions. Theres also some issue where the head tracking stops being smooth and becomes all choppy, after a while you just wanna take it off and throw it somewhere and run to the bathroom to hug your toilet.

Overall while impressive at first, the whole Oculus rift experience is very unpleasant.
Its a cool toy for a few minutes but i do not see how anyone could seriously use this to play videogames, its impossible to understand whats going on the screen most of the time because of all the blur, color shift and low resolution, you cant aim and shoot at things that are at a distance because they are smaller than the size of the RGB dots, you cant read texts that arent in the center of your screen, such as game chats and small HUD texts, and it just makes you wanna vomit all over the place after just 10 minutes of playing.

Even if they give it a proper display, i think motion sickness will probably still remain the biggest issue with the device, its a real showstopper and you cant really fight basic human biology, your visual sense of motion has to be accompanied by the vestibular or your brain will freak out, meaning only those few lucky people who manage to cope with it or do not experience motion sickness, will be able to actually use it.

I do not see a very bright future for the Oculus rift, (now even more so since fagbook privatized it) It has been in development for so long and it still in its baby stages and it doesnt seem like its going anywhere fast. Im not really even sure if this is a real Development Kit or just a clever cash grab since, how are people supposed to actually develop anything for it when the development kit itself is in early stages of development and is subject to constant revisions.

Read more about why the Oculus rift future looks bleak here. http://annoyedadmin.wordpress.com/2014/03/25/oculus-and-the-rift-are-probably-dead/ Its a pretty good read.