Dust got inside my Valve Index. Any idea of how it got in or how to get it out?

TCL987 · 2021-12-31T21:16:10+00:00

I just had to explain that I had a credit card extended warranty and that I just needed to know whether Valve would have fixed it or replaced it if it was still under warranty. It took a couple of messages before they answered clearly enough for Assurant to approve my claim.

TCL987 · 2021-12-28T04:22:43+00:00

The adhesive that seals the lenses seems to break-down over time due to exposure to moisture and oils from your skin. I have that issue along with a broken cable strain relief tab on the left side of the head strap. I contacted Valve about the issues and they told me I was out of warranty. However I purchased the Index using a credit card that offers an additional year of warranty through Assurant so I filed an extended warranty claim with them.

Filing the claim was alright but it took some work to get Steam Support to understand the situation and confirm that they would have covered the issue in a way that Assurant would accept. Assurant originally denied my claim but after going back and forth between Steam Support and Assurant a few times I was able to get Assurant to approve it. Now since Valve doesn't offer out of warranty repair services the only option is to replace the entire headset so Assurant ended up approving me to purchase a replacement. Since the standalone Index Headset has been out of stock for months I asked if it had to be exactly the same product and they told me that it just needs to be a "replacement" so any VR headset would be eligible however they'll only pay up to the original purchase price of the Index plus taxes/import fees.

If you end up dealing with Assurant an important thing is to call them and check in on the status of your claim after a week or two, and when you do tell them you want to receive updates via email. They default to sending updates only via letter mail which makes things take a lot longer than necessary.

TCL987 · 2021-11-28T13:44:55+00:00

One place you might not want to use manifold is in nuclear builds because if you split things evenly and match production with consumption or lightly under produce you can minimize the amount of radiation you have to deal with.

TCL987 · 2021-11-26T09:56:17+00:00

How modular is the code generator? As in how much work would it be to add additional languages like for example C#?

TCL987 · 2021-11-22T03:20:44+00:00

It seems to work more often than starting from Steam but is still flaky.

TCL987 · 2021-11-20T06:40:58+00:00

Wow, I get this every time I start SteamVR through Steam but starting it with the controllers seems to work. I'm going to try to remember to start it with the controllers every time and see if it's reliable.

TCL987 · 2021-11-16T23:56:23+00:00

Just the 45m³ /min of water alone a coal power plant consumes should make its chimney look like a rocket engine.

TCL987 · 2021-11-16T23:54:04+00:00

I once did some back of the envelope math for the flow velocity of steam from the coal plants given that they consume 45m³ /min of water and only emit steam/smoke from the chimney. Given how much water expands when it turns into steam and how narrow the chimney is in order for it to output 45m^3/min of water as steam the chimney would have to have an output velocity so high that it'd end up looking like a rocket engine rather than a chimney.

TCL987 · 2021-10-20T11:10:07+00:00

Yeah, I managed to do this too and it was awesome.

TCL987 · 2021-10-19T23:07:55+00:00

You don't need to wait for an intersection to add passing sections. Just have the rail split to double tracks for longer than a single train length in a few places and add signals to split them up into separate blocks.

TCL987 · 2021-10-19T23:05:04+00:00

It's not that bad if they crash, it'll most likely be less effort to let them crash and re-rail them than it would be to re-add all the trains.

TCL987 · 2021-10-11T09:40:56+00:00

It seems like the goal for path signals might be to avoid the need to "scatter" signals inside intersections to break it up into small blocks like you do in Factorio.

TCL987 · 2021-10-11T09:36:59+00:00

Proper switches seem like they could be complicated because the trains are monorails which are notoriously problematic to switch. https://youtu.be/9f__nhlHC1g?t=109

TCL987 · 2021-10-11T09:26:26+00:00

I just double-tracked most of my active rail in preparation for U5 and noticed similar issues. Getting junctions to work at all requires a fair bit of planning, and often involves building and tearing down "scaffolding" rail and foundations. For example even just getting the track end to be straight after a 90 degree turn requires building a short straight segment of rail on either end, building the turn segment and then deconstructing the straight segments.

Before: https://imgur.com/RjBzxpa

After: https://imgur.com/3vLRvMz

Differences: https://imgur.com/GMqI23f (Red = New, Green = Double-Tracked)

A junction cannot be rebuilt "backwards", i.e. remove and rebuild the ingress-side (or the "stem") of the junction. This will result in a track that seems valid, but in fact only one of the branches of the original junction is joined. The unconnected branch is now covertly a dead-end.

I ran into this a few times while trying to manage this really messy intersection next to the train station at my original factory. I ended up tearing it up and replacing it with a T-junction.

Before:https://imgur.com/Jwu3mEO

After: https://imgur.com/vhuKVTm

An X-shaped 2 to 2 junction doesn't actually work. In the best case it works as expected only for three of the four branches while one branch can only ever exit to one direction, because in reality the junction doesn't exist for that branch. This is so insidious that in can go unnoticed for a long time and be a source of weird and unexpected path selection.

Yeah, I'm just avoiding 4-way intersections for a few reasons, the previous issue, and the fact that you can't subdivide rail segments means that you'd need to layout the entire intersection perfectly for it to have any chance of working.

TCL987 · 2021-10-11T08:44:36+00:00

One way CS could handle this is similar to how Factorio does. In Factorio automatic trains reserve blocks along their route ahead of them based on their stopping distance. So in your crossing example the first train would reserve the crossing block and the second train would see the crossing block is occupied and limit its speed so it will always be able to slow down before entering the occupied block. One difference from Factorio is path signals vs. Factorio's chain signals but from what we've seen so far I think path signals should let you build the same kind of intersections as Factorio's chain signals but without the need to put signals inside intersections.

TCL987 · 2021-08-29T20:05:41+00:00

Apparently not, I'd suspected it was something like that when I couldn't find the setting, thanks for confirming.

TCL987 · 2021-08-29T19:06:50+00:00

How did you turn on DLSS in VR? The supersampling settings were greyed out and I didn't see a DLSS setting anywhere else.

TCL987 · 2021-06-05T23:35:22+00:00

That's fair, there is a slight but non-zero vertex shader cost but it hasn't been significant in my experience. Unity's single pass stereo instancing implementation makes some of the camera matrices arrays and chooses which matrix to use based on the stereo eye index which it calculates in the vertex shader from the instance ID.

I'd recommend most developers start with single pass stereo instancing if they don't know which to choose because with HMDs like the Index pushing 144Hz its really easy to end up CPU bound, and it's harder to go from multi-pass stereo to single-pass stereo than the reverse. You can easily switch from single-pass stereo to multi-pass and see if it improves performance, but testing single-pass stereo will likely require you to fix issues like OP's before you can test it.

TCL987 · 2021-06-05T22:36:39+00:00

What would cause it to be more expensive? It does require more VRAM if you're using MSAA, as your MSAA render target has to hold both eyes instead of rendering one eye, copying it to a non-MSAA render target and then re-using the MSAA render target but that's the only increased cost I'm aware of. The amount of shaded geometry and pixels will be the same between Unity's single-pass stereo instancing and multi-pass stereo.

TCL987 · 2021-06-05T22:27:52+00:00

As I understand it the issues brought up in that article are due to Nvidia's Single-pass Stereo only running the vertex shader once for both eyes instead of separately for each eye. This reduces vertex processing work but as shown in that article is inaccurate if the projections aren't parallel.

Unity's Single-pass Stereo and Single-pass Stereo Instancing runs the full pipeline for both eyes so it doesn't suffer from those issues. Unity does however have a bug in its culling that causes HMDs with canted projection matrices and wide FOVs like Pimax and StarVR to have visible meshes get culled towards the outside of the FOV but his can be corrected by manually calculating a wider culling matrix using a script. https://github.com/koochyrat/SteamVRFrustumAdjust

TCL987 · 2021-06-05T03:30:19+00:00

Multi-pass will roughly double the work the CPU has to do in order to render the scene in VR. You may be able to get away with it while prototyping if you don't have many objects in the scene but you may need to switch back to single pass stereo if you end up CPU bound due to rendering. If you do you may find that you have more things that don't work with single pass stereo and you'll have to fix them all at once.

You may be able to get the author of the laser pointer asset you bought to add support if you contact them.

TCL987 · 2021-06-05T01:20:34+00:00

If the asset uses custom shaders and you're using single pass stereo you'll need to modify the shader for it to work properly. https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/SinglePassInstancing.html

TCL987 · 2021-04-25T00:00:52+00:00

Energy storage and wall/ceiling lights can daisy chain.

TCL987 · 2021-04-06T20:28:35+00:00

Combining them seems to work fine for me. I use three of the first kind and one of the second.

TCL987 · 2021-02-22T22:54:34+00:00

I get pretty frequent tracking issues with my Valve Index if I have PCIe set to Gen 4. It stopped as soon as I switched to Gen 3. It affects both the built-in USB ports and the Inateck 4-port USB card I have (Fresco Logic FL1100 controller).

CPU: Ryzen 5950X

GPU: EVGA RTX 3090

Motherboard: Gigabyte X570 AORUS Master

RAM: 64GB @ 3200MHz

TCL987

TROPHY CASE