Quoting: F.Ultrayou have to agree to send it to Valve once it pops up and I have a hard time seeing anyone performing either of your points as thinking "yeah lets have Valve receive some telemetry".

You seriously think 99% of people care about their data being used?


You start Steam.
The popup about the survey comes up.
You click through it half-blind like you click through most popups of that style.
Done.

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Quoting: gradyvuckovicIt's because, in my opinion, the experience for Non-English speaking users on Linux isn't particularly great.

That's definitely an issue that will never get resolved unless someone took a humongous amount of cash into their hands and just made it happen.

Even when restricting it to Latin alphabet languages, you can get distros themselves with pretty good language support in some languages (German for sure, probably French, not sure about Spanish) - but as you said, as soon as you leave the confines of the distro interface, it's English or bust.
There is no "Microsoft help"-equivalent that would offer support for basically every question in basically every language - yes, I know those pages are crap, but at least they exist.
Or an automatically translated StackOverflow (and likes) that would be search-indexed for helping non-English speakers.

In my own experience, support is especially terrible for Chinese.
For a while I tried learning it and the hoops I had to jump through just to get keyboard support for Pinyin was absolutely crazy. Meanwhile on Windows, you can just go to languages, install Simplified/Traditional Chinese and you're done.

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My own participation got messed up by a bug triggered by whatever Steam uses to do a hardware survey - that bug causes a complete amdgpu reset (probably not on all GPUs, but at least a few).

I am unsure how common that bug is, but if a percentage of Linux users are affected, it could lead to some skewing as well.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/9267

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Quoting: scaineAnyone who's tried (good) VR and didn't feel sick wants more of it, but the cost is still sky high.

Nah. Plenty people tried at this point and it's just not something they care a lot about.

You could give it away for free and it still wouldn't become the next big thing (though obviously it would grow a lot).
Unless you somehow remove the need to have a big "thing" on your head, remove the need for extra space, remove the awkward movement solutions and bunch of other things that simply won't ever get resolved unless we enter Star Trek holodeck technology era and that aren't even really related to the quality of games, it will always remain limited (in how attractive it is to people).

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Quoting: GroganNow I just have to figure out how not to suck at flying a ship.

For me, I was completely unable to fly with keyboard + mouse (in any flight game, btw, I just can't).
But even a controller (like XBoxOne controller) makes it very comfortable for me.
Or a hotas for a bit more immersion, but that's IMO optional.

Since X4 is a lot more than just the "fly spaceship" part, controller + keyboard might be the best variant to me, as you'll need a lot of keys to do all the things you can do in the game - more keys than any controller and most hotas have.

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Quoting: Mountain Man

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: TrainDocI'm begging y'all to not play the game like this. I understand the point of this mod but the game is entirely built around VR amd stripping such a core concite of the game out reduces what makes it so good. The total immersion in the environment and manipulation of items directly cannot just be removed without the game becoming a shell of it's former self.

Many people don't have the money for VR. That simple, man.

It's not the cost that's keeping people away but lack of interest. VR is running into the same brick wall as 3D television: people simply don't care.

Exactly this.
If you can afford a PC that could run Alyx, you could affort a VR headset. Nobody needs a Valve Index to get into VR.
Hell, if you can throw the 60$ at the game, you could just not do that for a few months, save it up and afford a VR headset later.
It's still very much in the region of money people tend to throw at hobbies.

The "I don't have the money" in most cases really means "I don't care enough to save up the money", which is fair enough, of course - not blaming anyone.
People who really don't have the money aren't gonna spend their time worrying about VR to begin with, and, well... they are not the target audience, either, obviously.

A much more valid point is lack of space IMO.
In many countries, living space is nowadays not only an expensive commodity, but simply a rare one.
And for VR, you definitely need some space. I'm living in a pretty average sized flat for the country (2 peepos, 70m²) - and we can barely fit the space for VR, have to move our couch around each time someone uses it or would risk just bumping into stuff.

Maybe we just have a lot of space-intensive stuff (definitely have a huge space need for musical and sewing hobbies), I'm not sure.

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Quoting: KlaasWolfenstein 3D is another example. It's lot easier if you can strafe and turn (with a mouse) at the same time instead of being stuck with the strafe modifier key.

Absolutely!

And once we had mouse aiming established, games became a lot more difficult because of it.
The player got "stronger" and the enemies had to follow suit or the games would have become too easy.
It would be a severe challenge to try and get through some later FPS without mouse aim - might be funny to try, though. Doom Eternal run?

Removing the VR from Alyx is the same thing - except I don't think the mod actually makes enemies more dangerous to balance the more powerful player, hence the game becomes a lot easier that way.

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Quoting: damarrinObviously, reloading a weapon is so much easier if you just press a button instead of ejecting the clip, taking another one and inserting it. If only soldiers on the battlefield could do that.

Just in case you were wondering: We are talking about video games here.
Otherwise, we can start talking about how it doesn't really hurt when you get shot in an FPS... or any of the other things in games that are not actually like in real life.

Specifically, we are talking about a first person shooter.
Putting something in VR doesn't change its genre. It just changes the camera and/or controls.

Reloading in a first person shooter has been around for.. eh... 30 years?
Yeah, it's the press of a button. Got that figured out a few decades ago.
Introducing additions to the process isn't even something VR-specific. You could easily do that with a keyboard as well - and now comes the kicker: Why do you think that isn't done? Some food for thought.

You can argue it is done for immersion. And I'd even agree.
But that comes at a cost, which I described.

Quoting: damarrinIf you want to just sit on the couch and press buttons go right ahead, don’t diss people who enjoy doing something else.

I don't sit on a couch while gaming. Usually.
And I also didn't diss anyone.
Are you maybe projecting something here?

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Quoting: Eikeit's a new level of gaming, comparable maybe to the change from pure text to images and from those to moving graphics.

Pffft.

At best, it's a new level of immersion. I'd only call it an improvement even there, but whatever.
But game mechanics themselves actually suffer because they have to accomodate the restrictions of human head & limb movement as well as the restriction of having to be in first person. Alyx itself is the best example - game's a walk in the park when you remove the need to fumble around with your hands and get superior mouse aim movement instead.
So much so that people keep saying about this mod "please only use it if you have to, it kinda ruins the game".

Like the Wii games of old, "difficulty" here mostly just comes from an input method that is inferior to what already exists in many ways. Of course, unlike Wiimote, there are definitely some advantages to VR controls and some concepts that are not possible outside of VR.

If a game makes you think "this would be so much easier if I was just using a mouse", you know something's fishy.

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Quoting: Mar2ckI love Half Life Alyx and I'm glad more people will get to experience it but I'm expecting people to play it like any old flatscreen game and then dismiss it as a mediocre shooter.

That's because gameplay-wise, VR offers practically nothing new.
The ability to use the camera and (up to) two hands independently of each other while in first person, yes.
Everything else is really just more clunky - just press ctrl vs having to physically duck, aim within milliseconds using the mouse vs seconds using your actual hand + head (please don't try to match mouse speed, you'll hurt yourself), etc. And nobody can tell me the "walking" in VR doesn't feel extremely weird - kind of makes you a camera with arms on rails / teleporter.

I get it, it's more immersive, no discussion here and I realize for some that's all they need - but immersion through graphics and controls is only going to last so long for most gamers.
That "whoa" passes and then? You are left with games that are limited by what your body can do physically, which is (except for the mentioned independence of your limbs from each other) actually less than what the abstraction through a keyboard or controller offers.
Which is why all VR games that are "made to run" VR-free end up feeling so lame and mediocre compared to other games in the same genre - cause that's what they are, as they have to be to accomodate the limitations of our wobbly, slow little bodies.

This might sound like I hate VR, I don't.
I actually appreciate it for the use it brings - I use it eg as a workout device that is vastly more enjoyable than doing "normal" workout.
And have you ever used it to digitally visit a house (some property companies offer that)? Pretty amazing.
And as a "story" device for games like Alyx. Can't beat the story immersion of VR.
But for gameplay? Nah, that honestly just feels like a step back, not forward.

tl;dr: If you want to experience Alyx, please use a VR device if you anyhow can. Even if it means not playing it at all until you can eventually afford that VR gear.
Or watch a playthrough of someone doing that - but careful, you might get dizzy because of the camera movement. At least that happens to me (and I don't get dizzy when actually using VR), not sure if that's a common phenomenon.

I feel bad, because I know a lot of people put so much effort into that conversion.
But playing the VR-free version is just going to make you feel bad about it, VR and non-VR games are just made differently and you'll lose so much while not gaining anything, really.

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