[quote=rea987]

Quoting: HalifaxYeah, Portal is a natural candidate for VR but Valve needs to address movement issues and motion sickness problems. Motion sickness might be overcomed by increasing FOV and FPS but lacking movement is a significant problem which cannot be solved without investing tons of money.

Knowing that there are plenty of single player mods for HL series, I do not bother with HL2 sequel too much... :-) My only wishes regarding HL3 are GNU/Linux support and being able to play it without VR. I cannot care less about having VR... B-)

I bought the HTC Vive and have played The Lab and several other VR Steam games. There is a new teleport paradigm being used by many VR games to solve the locomotion problem. You literally stand and move around in your "holodeck" room (with the chaperone system superimposing the real life wall boundaries when you get too close), and then use one of the hand controllers to point to a spot in the VR world to teleport immediately. It causes much less motion sickness than standard FPS WASD locamotion in VR while you yourself are not moving in real life.

IOW: Valve has indeed already invested tons of money into solving this problem - there's many other things valve has engineered into the whole Vive system for comfort, too.

After getting used to it, I go back to real life and am kind of bummed I can't simply teleport around instantly to any place nearby I can see :-)

I know you don't think you care for VR, but I personally think that's a bit of bunk when people say that :-) They are really saying Gen 1 VR is still non-compelling - that I'll agree to, for sure! I'm an early adopter/enthusiast who just spent a lot of money on early hardware and tech that will look comically primitive in the future - just like gaming on old VGA displays looks to us now.

VR still has a long way to go before it gets to more realistic virtual reality. Right now, it's still too low res and like you are looking out of a diver's mask.

The VR Robot Repair demo is good, and quite compelling - Gladys makes a cameo at the end.

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Quoting: rea987

Quoting: HalifaxAnd then Valve went back to the herculean task of shoveling mountains of money into the bank from their F2P/B2P MMOs, and forgot about a HL2:Ep2 sequel.

You mean MOBAs? Well, I do not mind Valve is making money from various products; besides Half-Life series have been abandoned with Portal and L4D series long ago. I expect a new HL game when Valve considers Source 2 Engine mature enough and VR technology viable after some more L4D, TF and CS releases.

I mistyped after a few drinks, Valve's big three multiplayer games, including the MOBA DOTA2.

I believe Valve makes more from those three MP games than they do their storefront cut of sales:
http://www.pcgamer.com/market-data-firm-claims-valve-made-730-million-last-year/ [External Link]
But both numbers are very large and important to Valve.

I don't know how much money HL:Ep2 made, but it probably wasn't an ongoing continuous stream of .7 billion, year after year. :-) Valve is just highly distracted from their own original franchise that got them here, by succeeding too well in other areas - not a bad thing for them though.

VR Portal is definitely a game Valve is thinking about making, and probably already devoting a lot of internal development time to. The Labs, Robot Repair is basically a pretty compelling official teaser from Valve themselves it's coming.

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Quoting: rea987Half-Life 2: Episode Two; a great expansion from Valve, as expected. Way better than Episode One.

Very true. And then Valve went back to the herculean task of shoveling mountains of money into the bank from their F2P/B2P MMOs, and forgot about a HL2:Ep2 sequel. I wish the Russian/Asian kids weren't so into whatever-the-f*** the name is of those Valve MMO chart toppers it is on Steamcharts :-P

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Unfortunately, since I've been in a AAA gaming mood lately, DooM and Fallout 4 on Windows 10 - and the magic of DSR on a 1080p monitor (2715x1527 virtual resolution down-sampled to 1920x1080 hardware pixels).

But make no mistake, I'm not happy about having to go to Windows to enjoy this kind of stuff! And I refuse to ever use the Win10 desktop for anything but game installation or maintenance. And any time I'm web surfing (like now) or in the mood for other games besides AAA windows-only games, I'm in Linux.

It's kind of a pain having two mice and keyboards around for switching PCs from a AAA windows-only game to everything else, but it's far easier to deal with than loading up the bloated and virus/malware risky Win 10 DE itself! :-)

The Linux purist could say: bad on me for supporting Windows only titles at all. And I would say true, bad on me. But the realist in me acknowledges now that Steam Machines have failed, and me getting older (49).... It may *well be past my lifetime* before Linux gaming gets to the level of truly hard-core developer and video card maker support it currently has on Windows.

But I can still dream it will! The Win10 DE is so crappy compared to KDE and G3 :-)

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Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: HalifaxTales of Maj'Eyal
http://store.steampowered.com/app/259680/ [External Link]

I only post this because, if you are going to make a game that is similar, you should ask yourself one main question: "am I better than / unique from" ToM'E?

If the answer is "yes", then rock on with your bad self.

Since when was TOME a monster catching and breeding roguelike?

Since I mistakenly thought it was? Best answer I got X-)

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Tales of Maj'Eyal
http://store.steampowered.com/app/259680/ [External Link]

I only post this because, if you are going to make a game that is similar, you should ask yourself one main question: "am I better than / unique from" ToM'E?

If the answer is "yes", then rock on with your bad self.

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Quoting: hardpenguinI'll throw an old joke: Ubuntu is an ancient african word, meaning 'I can't configure Debian.'

Hahah... F***ing love it. The reason the Ubuntu bar chart is so much larger than Debian's is there's a lot of n3wbs who haven't figured this out yet X-P

EDIT:
Which was totally me for a long time. But, Debian is better if you're willing to put up with more config shenanigans up-front. The reward? Getting away from the fairly bad Unity DE Start Menu, mainly! What in the hell was Canonical thinking with Unity and the Unity Start Menu? What an egregious PoS Start Menu compared to other more standard Linux DE's.

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Every once in a while I have to dual boot Windows due to buying the HTC Vive, and I have to admit, the new Hard Reset Redux is a damn good FPS experience. It's sad not more devs, or more titles, have Linux support (Shadow Warrior is a great Linux port - so the dev can do it).

I hate going back to the Windows desktop environment now, after being enlightened about all the creature comforts/options/functionality and niceties (privacy/autonomy/security/etc) Linux DE's and distros have to offer.

It's a sad fact most people are creatures of habit, and just accept the shit desktop they get with Windows 10 due to never knowing anything better.

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Quoting: Cheeseness

Quoting: wojtek88@Cheeseness great answer, thanks. Wish You many great ports.

I don't have any plans to pursue porting. If people I have interest in working with approach me, then I'll do what I can to help them out (like I did with DotT), but in general, porting isn't where I see my future :)

Quoting: HalifaxChasecam 2 was my claim to fame back then. I made several mods, but Chasecam 2 got me 100's of emails per week from fans all over the world. I'm 99% sure, after watching it and recognizing all the boundary condition handlers I wrote, this is my mod in action:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyxV5RvFZLY [External Link]

Boundary conditions, boundary conditions, boundary conditions. My sole mission with the mod was making 3rd person view work for the whole Quake game no matter what situation you were in. Back then, it was all new and mind blowing :-)

That's great! Keep a handle on it and maybe think about writing about what you accomplished. That kind of stuff fades over time and ends up being lost if nobody chronicles it.

My first publicly released thing was a HL1 mod. In hindsight, I guess there's not a lot that's noteworthy about it, but doing stuff and making stuff at the time was super empowering. I hope to someday have time to return to it and re-release it with a few bugfixes and Linux support - I owe a lot to that game ^_^

Quoting: HalifaxEDIT:
To be clear, I'm not that good of a programmer - sometimes I can get on a roll. But I knew I would get eaten alive by smarter programmers if I tried to make it in the game industry. But I'm envious of you guys that are good enough to make it :-)

Hey, you know, I think this goes for all of us. Everybody assumes that other people are better/smarter/more capable than they are, but from what I've experienced and read, it just isn't like that (there are lots of other people that've written cool stuff about "impostor syndrome" - don't let it disempower you!).

I don't think my skill had anything to do with me landing the DotT port, and I don't think it really had much to do with the game running and being received as well as it has been. I just had high visibility and enthusiasm at the right time, plus a little reputation from helping out others who needed it :)

LOL, I just bought DotT Remastered due to reading this post. I want to check out your port work and enjoy a classic game I never played originally! :-)

I'm not really a bad programmer. I was getting offers from a few gaming companies to come on board as a game programmer back in the 90's. But instead went with my dad to get into CGI and web programming on Linux C Apache driven servers back in the day, then branched off from there into GIS programming and then absolutely dominated a few private companies where my code became integral to those company's web presence.

"Imposter syndrome" is right. There was a period of about 12 years where I was absolutely sure smarter coders would come along at anytime and replace the web interfaces I'd made for a company's web site I'd put the most work into/my biggest contract, but that never happened.... I was sure it would, but it didn't.

And then the company decided to hire me on instead of keeping me as a consultant/freelance developer. They gave me a team of about 15 database and code engineers, and I was the one that finally replaced my old user interface (and all the backend) with a way better modernized solution. But I didn't write it, I just ran the meetings :-)

Quoting: CheesenessI hope to someday have time to return to it and re-release it with a few bugfixes and Linux support - I owe a lot to that game ^_^

I think you should, or write a new Indie game inspired by your mod that's all your own... That's the real empowering thing Notch Persson and Valve have given us, and now validated by the number of other Indies who've made it: the re-animated belief that a one-man indie team can make a game that competes for sales with the big AAA titles that cost as much as a Hollywood movie to make, now.

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Quoting: ColomboHalifax: Typical...
http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3p061u [External Link]

Was it TL:DR? I was primarily posting that to say I don't think it's a good idea to stay vegan over time to someone else openly advocating it in every post, based on my own experience trying it out. I'm am not here to advocate long-term veganism - I actually think it might be a little dangerous to remain a vegan for long periods of time, after my own experiences.

But, it is healthy to do as a several day flush on a regular basis - and I've found some good Vegan restaurants in my town, so in that regard: meme guilty.

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