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Valve's first in-house virtual reality hardware should be dropping at your door soon, if you were one of the lucky ones to order it quickly in the first batch. Additionally, Gabe Newell and others held speeches at a little launch party.

You can see the video of the speeches below:

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It's quite hard to hear what co-founder Gabe Newell actually says, as he addresses both Valve employees and visitors, since he decided not to use a microphone. I've listened and done my best to quote him and yes, there was a Half-Life 3 joke included:

The history at Valve, we had a lot of significant milestones. We had Half-Life our first single-player game, we had Source that was our first engine, we had Counter-Strike our first multiplayer game, then we had Steam and Workshop and Mac and Linux support just on and on. Index is another of those critical milestones for our company. Which represents a tremendous amount of hard work and creativity on your parts.

This represents a significant breakthrough in the field, visual fidelity and all that implies in terms of optical design, panel design, industrial design that's a real breakthrough. Knuckles, is hugely important not only for how it's going to help ourselves and our game partners make their games better but how it enables entirely new kinds of games.

Milestones aren't really the end of anything, they're really the beginning. So Half-Life led to Half-Life 2, Source led to Source 2, the experiments we did with Team Fortress 2 were what enabled us to build Dota. Artifact is the reason we're able to do Underlords, so maybe someday the number 2 will lead us to that shiny integer glowing on a mountain someplace, we'll just have to see.

We're gonna all look back at some point and realise the consequences of what we've built with your creativity and your hard work, for us and for all of our customers.

*Gabe Newell then addresses the "Green Tag people" (visitors)*

Shipping a product isn't the end, it's really the beginning. So in the case of the Index there's going to be some obvious next steps. It's simple for us to broaden our distribution from outside US, EU and other countries. There's obvious ways for us to lower the cost, there's obvious ways to the product lighter and improve the ergonomics, but then we get to speculative issues. We are looking at several methods of doing untethered Index, we have a lot of ideas for kind of revolutionary things to do with display optical technology, there's lots of opportunities to continue to improve, the volumes your tracked in, those are going to be pretty fundamental opportunities.

What they're going to enable is the best part of this, when you're going to start seeing new VR games from Valve and from our other partners and that's where you guys come in. See it's very hard for us to develop a product to work at Valve without customers, and we have to guess what's important and what trade offs we should make and will this be valuable to you. We can sort of run a simulation in our head but it's so much better when we actually have real customers we can engage with. We';re really entering the best time as creators, we're reaching a time when you guys are involved, you not only telling us how to deal with Index you're teaching us how to make Index better and that's awesome, such an exciting time for all of us.

If you're looking to buy one now, you're in for a wait as the store page on Steam is currently noting shipping by September 30th for some bundles, with the headset by itself not having a date.

This is going to be a very interesting time for PC gaming, quite exciting really especially if Valve are going to be putting out some VR games. However, I do hope they remember all those who cannot afford the hardware or prefer not to use it. I guess that all depends on how many people pick it up of course but considering it sold out early-on during the pre-orders, it's looking like it will do rather well.

I've emailed Valve again today to see if we're getting a unit, we were initially told we were but additional emails since have gone unanswered—I'm hoping the emails just got buried.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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kuhpunkt Jun 28, 2019
Got my controllers yesterday. Still have a hard time getting used to using my hands naturally :D
Sil_el_mot Jun 28, 2019
Got my index today. after disabling reprojection it works great. now i have to wait till proton will pass battle-eye to play onward all day long :D
had no problems with the vive,
had a lot of problems with the vive pro,
i am sooooooo glad i can play now on linux again with the valve index.
anth Jun 28, 2019
QuoteArtifact is the reason we're able to do Underlords
When we found out that Underlords on smartphones was using Source 2 rather than some other engine I thought that there wouldn't have been enough time for that port unless they'd started working on it for Artifact.
hardpenguin Jun 28, 2019
Quoting: anth
QuoteArtifact is the reason we're able to do Underlords
When we found out that Underlords on smartphones was using Source 2 rather than some other engine I thought that there wouldn't have been enough time for that port unless they'd started working on it for Artifact.
Yeah, the plan was for the Artifact to be available on mobile from the very beginning. They also said in some interview they had an internal port of Dota 2 for tablets as an experiment, I think it was running on Android.
Nanobang Jun 28, 2019
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Maybe the Index will (eventually) become inexpensive enough that I'll be able to pick one up. Can these things, VR headsets, be used like for games with normal controllers?

I love the thought of the audio/video immersion brought on with VR headsets. Surround sound and vid, yeah. Can one play non-VR only games with these like normal, but with surround sound and vid? That's enticing.

All the rest of it leaves me a bit tepid. I'm not so "yippee" about at the thought of standing up, waggling my arms to play video games. I do a lot of fairly physical---some might say strenuous---labour, and video games are an ass-decidedly-planted-in-couch time of relaxation for me.

Also, Liam, thank you for taking the time and effort to transcribe Gaben's speech. Transcription, especially of less than stellar audio, is very not-at-all fun under the best of circumstances. Your going the extra mile for we readers is very, very appreciated! :)


Last edited by Nanobang on 28 June 2019 at 12:38 pm UTC
Liam Dawe Jun 28, 2019
Quoting: NanobangAlso, Liam, thank you for taking the time and effort to transcribe Gaben's speech. Transcription, especially of less than stellar audio, is very not-at-all fun under the best of circumstances. Your going the extra mile for we readers is very, very appreciated! :)
Thanks for the kind words, turning it up enough to hear it properly was quite painful on the ears with all the banging and background noise. I thought people would appreciate it though :)
Arten Jun 28, 2019
Quoting: liamdawe
Quoting: NanobangAlso, Liam, thank you for taking the time and effort to transcribe Gaben's speech. Transcription, especially of less than stellar audio, is very not-at-all fun under the best of circumstances. Your going the extra mile for we readers is very, very appreciated! :)
Thanks for the kind words, turning it up enough to hear it properly was quite painful on the ears with all the banging and background noise. I thought people would appreciate it though :)

I also thank you for the transcript. English isn't my first language, witch must by obvious from my grammar and without transcription i can have problem with understanding.
Zelox Jun 28, 2019
Im not so excited for VR sadly. I need better hardware, a headset and a decent game. The only game that comes to mind is elite dangerous. But i dont want to spend that kind of money for a game. If its a cheaper price to enter, or if a headset could stream game from your steam library, I might be intressted.

But im happy VR is still developing big time, this will make everything cheaper, in the long run.
At the moment Im more excited for the flag ship title valve is going to release with index.

And btw, I might be old fashion. But cant Gaben dress up when he apperences on events and sutch? It gives a very lazy impression.

And I still love lord gaben so dont get me wrong, but pr, communication and public apperances isnt really valves thing I guess :P


Last edited by Zelox on 28 June 2019 at 1:29 pm UTC
Eike Jun 28, 2019
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Quoting: ZeloxAnd btw, I might be old fashion. But cant Gaben dress up when he apperences on events and sutch? It gives a very lazy impression.

And I still love lord gaben so dont get me wrong, but pr, communication and public apperances isnt really valves thing I guess :P

It's unbelievable how you can be that unprofessional and that successful at the same time! :D

But then, maybe it's our luck that they're not the usual business type of guys...!
slaapliedje Jun 28, 2019
The Index seems much lighter than both the Original Vive (I had pre-ordered mine) and the Vive Pro. Yet at the same time it seems that all the tech in the link box is in the headset itself.

Most importantly it works in Linux, where I never had the Vive Pro working.

It also prompts right away if I wanted to change it to 120hz. Very nice!
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