Quoting: numasanQuestion to you who are on the fence or don't care about VR. Have you tried it? I'm not talking about using a phone, but true VR with positional tracking. It really is a transformative experience, that reminds me of the early days of accelerated 3D graphics (GL-Quake) in difference. The moment when you forget that you have a helmet on and where you are is certainly unique. It is still a very young field, and personally I need a break after 20-40 min. "inside", but the potential is huge, and true immersive VR is something I think everyone should try atleast once. If you're still not sold on it after that, fair enough, but my personal experience is that everyone who tried it, even the sceptical ones, were truly impressed.

That said, my Oculus DK2 has been sitting in the box since the company backed out of Linux support, as I won't install Windows on my PC even for VR, and Oculus has lost me as a customer. The Vive is the better experience currently of the two anyway, and the one I'd want to invest in, especially now. Not that I can afford it (and a new PC) right now, but I still believe in VR as a medium, and a next-gen helmet hopefully comming out next year I'd definitely save up for.

Well, for my part, I more or less follow a "wait and see approach". I do not have unlimited funds, and this hardware is expensive; plus, we're among the first generations of hardware, no real hand tracking, and such. If I had a lot of money, why not? But I am afraid I would underuse it anyway (I do not play that much anymore).
Now, give me a full VR system like we have in Science Fiction (SAO, Matrix, etc), and I am sold, regardless of the price ;)

Plus, games are still getting the hang of the new input methods (sadly, movement is the worst part for now). This is beta hardware and beta software. It will probably get better in a few years :)

Edit: To properly answer the question, I only tried A google cardboard, and a microsoft HoloLens, so my experience with them is not exactly stellar, even though I almost backed up the oculus rift kickstarter, though I didn't, because of the not very explicit Linux support (I can't remember exactly).

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Hopefully this is the beginning of a long streak of articles highlighting the new features in both camps. Tools like these are useful for everyone. Thanks Andres Rodriguez, thanks Valve!

Edit: the license file mentions GPLv3, while at least some headers mention GPLv2+, do you know which is right?

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Quoting: MohandevirYep. It feels like corruption of some sort. If you try to restart the game immediately after a crash it will crash again, everytime, in the first minutes of the "relaunch". After a reboot, the crash doesn't occur for quite a while... Until another "corruption".

Actually, this sounds a bit like a RAM issue. I would do a memtest if I were you, just in case :)

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Hopefully nVidia users will be able to use Wayland soon too :)

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Quoting: cRaZy-bisCuiTallow_glsl_extension_directive_midshader=true LD_PRELOAD="divos-hack.so" ./runner.sh %command%

I didn't try, but I think that ./runner.sh is redundant here (or could prevent the game from being launched, actually).

I also generally avoid changing the game's files, in case they get updated by Steam, so I would advise against modifying runner.sh :)

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Quoting: Vuko2000when available open surce softwear for this controler?

You should check out sc controller, linked in the article.

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Well, one need to define open source in this case.

Indeed, "open sourcing the steam controller" could mean any of:
* Open sourcing the hardware design (already done, although I don't remember the license)
* Open sourcing the electrical design (if you want to see cheap clones pop-up everywhere, and steam controllers with lasers, or other surprising HW features, or compatible wireless tech elsewhere)
* Open sourcing the device firmware (If you want to see user-contributed fixes and new functionalities, and increase the number of bricked controllers. It could also allow to create alternative products that behave like a steam controller, or are compatible)
* Open sourcing the device drivers (Already more or less done, AFAIK, not that interesting, but very important to have it working everywhere)
* Open sourcing the API between the game and controller (Make it easy to work with in SDL, and it will take over the world; do this if you want maximum compatibility with other implementations of the API, libraries, or other controllers; this is similar to "OpenVR", A.K.A "SteamVR", IIRC)
* Open sourcing the configuration software (this probably comes with the aforementioned API's implementation; do this if you want to have a universal configuration software, as in supports every controller out there)
And debatable one:
* Open sourcing the on-screen keyboard (not necessary, but could be useful anyway).

So, my guess here is that either (or both) the API or the configuration software are being asked for, for obvious reasons. Just the API would already be a great win, but it would be explosive with the software as well.

Either way, I am all for it. The more the better.

Edit: Well, that also seems to be the dev's opinion:

QuoteTherefore, those of us who have an interest in an open controller ecosystem need to work hard to convince Valve that it's worth the effort to Open Source as much of this as possible.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: soulsourceIs this a fix for a driver issue, or a workaround for broken game-code?

It looks like a generic fix, though perhaps not on a common code path. With Mesa being feature complete, I suspect we'll start seeing more of this type of thing in future.

Good work Marek!

Yup, now that mesa is 90% here, only the other 90% are missing :D

Marek deserves some cookies, that's true.

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Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: M@yeulCEven Steam puts a .steam folder in my home folder...

I see. Then it's already a mess, and doing it for the client can help with moving client data to proper place, but it can also mess up games which check if $XDG_DATA_HOME isn't set, and use $HOME/.local/share when it's not. For those you'll get: $HOME/.local/share/.local/share in result.

I completely agree, but why wouldn't it be set? It is set on my system, and if you change $HOME to point to the XDG_DATA_HOME location, it would be a shame not to ensure that the other variable is set on the system ;)

Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: M@yeulCBut yeah, the ideal wold be for Valve to enforce this behaviour.

It's really up to individual games to follow the spec. Valve should fix their own client though.

That's a point I do not agree on. In my opinion, Valve has a spec they enforce on games, just like their target platforms have a spec. Games with missing executables Should not be distributed; and I think it should be the same for these folders. Automated testing should ensure both.
That said, sandboxing might be a solution in the long run.

Edit: or a collection of game profiles to Taylor the environment variables to the game, but I am too lazy to compile such a list.

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Quoting: soulsourceIs this a fix for a driver issue, or a workaround for broken game-code?

Looks like a pretty generic fix to me (ie, not game-specific). I am not qualified enough to really understand the problem, though :)

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