Already own Valve Index? You'll get Half-Life: Alyx free, plus extra content.

Well, that's pleasant! :D

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Finally saw some screens in PNG format. Didn't help much. I thought the screenshots of Shadow of the Tomb Raider were especially disappointing. Since I've been playing that recently, I know what to expect if everything is on full settings. But detail seems low. Even scaling the 4k screenshots down to 1080p didn't make it better. It still looks bland and washed out. I think the main problem is that the compression removes all the texture from the textures. This reduces a 4k picture to something with less fidelity than a 1080p screenshot. I suppose it could acceptable in a couch/tv setup, but on a PC with a monitor it's just bad. And it seems like the whole 4k thing red herring since none of the detail that you would expect from it survives the transmission (if rendered at all).

So for now it looks like the only people that will probably be happy with it are casual console gamers that don't want to get rid of their dedicated device. But with a very good internet connection without data cap of course. And can connect their chromecast to an ethernet cable because apparently wifi causes bad lag spikes (not too surprising).

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Nice. This does look like fun for multiplayer.

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Quoting: KetilI believe the extra latency added by e.g. obs would be predictable enough that we can compensate when analysing the results. At least within in error of about 2 ms. If I record obs with obs including a clock [External Link] with microseconds, I see that the difference between the first and the second clock is about 32-34 milliseconds with a frame rendering time at around 7.5 ms at 30 FPS shown in obs stats. This shows that the previous clock is exactly one frame behind the current frame, and the timestamps match up when I step through the video.

From the few measurements that I read about, latency is estimated between 100-200 ms. So that amount of accuracy is much better than what is needed.

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That was quick.

Nice game. Less fancy that others, but also much cheaper. Haven't gone too much into depth with it yet, so I don't know how hard it will get. One major thing is that they finally added numerical values for the top 1% and 10% so that judging the quality of your solution is much less of a guess.

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I've been reading a few reports on Stadia. Games apparently run at medium settings. The 4k/60 is apparently not achieved by most games. So far I've only seen reported that SotTR is rendered at 4k, but it then drops to 30 fps. The general consensus is that the visual quality is disappointing compared to an Xbox X and doesn't come close to PC. Haven't seen anything about lag yet.

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Quoting: Mountain ManI suppose Valve thinks that Half-Life VR could be the "killer app" that will finally get a critical mass of gamers to buy into the tech, but I have my doubts.

I doubt it. I think Valve wants to be a major player in VR when/if it gets more mainstream. To do that, you need to actually know what you're doing. And the best way to do that is to actually make something. Even if it's not an immediate commercial success, it's the best lesson in VR game development they could learn. And of course they used HL because it will at least generate a lot of interest. But they're not burning themselves by continuing the main franchise and keep it relatively safe by doing working on a spin-off.

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Quoting: pbI tested it on a few broken achievements (not unlocking in-game despite fulfilling the requirements) and it didn't work for any of them. It might work for cheating (unlocking achievements that work correctly) but doesn't work where it's really needed, not for me at least.

Like the 7 days Evil Knievel achievement not unlocking even though I've broken plenty of legs.

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While Half-Life might be nearly 21 years old, for Linux gamers it's not all that old considering Steam only came to Linux back in 2013. I can imagine plenty of our readers playing the Half-Life series long before that though, ...

Actually, according to my achievements, I played through all the Half-Life games in the first quarter of 2017. That's even more recent than I thought it was.

I won't wait that long with this one though! :D

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Quoting: Hal_KadoLol, next September? This will be the first time I've put 500+ hours into a game that hasn't officially launched :D

Nice time. I'm "just" approaching 100 hours. I still feel like I need to do some heavy learning. :D

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