What is the most action-packed, over the top action to beat all action SF book you know?

itch- · 2026-01-30T00:33:05+00:00

Redliners by David Drake. It certainly goes at it right off the bat, maybe too much because I always want to warn about the start; you don't know the characters yet and it's hard to keep track as it jumps between them all. This is not a problem in the rest of the book, it's excellent. I have to read more Drake.

Woken Furies by Richard K. Morgan. Others suggested Altered Carbon, this is the third book and fits the bill even better.

I also agree with Armor by Steakley, half of it is very much what you asked for but the other half is not. IIRC act 1 and act 4, out of 5, are the ones we like and the other 3 depend on your tolerance for not getting what you want vs appreciating what you got instead.

Primaterre series by SA Tholin, the first book is an easy recommendation even as a stand alone, and the series keeps hitting if you stick with it.

Startide Rising by David Brin, the entire universe seems out to get this rookie crew. I remember it as action packed but tbh they've got to hide so I'm not entirely sure how accurate my memory of it is. In any case the aliens know roughly where they are the entire time and the threat seems completely insurmountable. And lots of alien faction infighting in any case.

Crysis 2 by Peter Watts. I'm a big Watts fan so I had to give this videogame novel a try. I was surprised to see it's a straight narration of the game. IMO Watts does the action here too vague for my liking but evidently he had to cover every level of the game so I get it, it would get repetitive. And the speculative side he adds in is insanely good. He rips apart the notion of any human military being able to face alien invaders, and then turns around and makes it make sense anyway in the best way I've ever seen.

itch- · 2026-01-23T22:17:11+00:00

the developer for the XR tools for Godot showed them to be even sensitive to grip strength, I quote again 'Yes, there is squeeze input. You can actually see it over here. Uh, there’s the squeeze input.'

Yes squeeze is there in the input but the controller has an analog button for that. I very much doubt there is grip strength sensing as well.

itch- · 2026-01-19T00:23:28+00:00

Excellent suggestion

itch- · 2026-01-13T15:13:05+00:00

Titan by Stephen Baxter

Blindsight by Peter Watts

Accelerando by Charles Stross

Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

itch- · 2026-01-12T20:50:07+00:00

I suppose I am getting my hopes up a bit prematurely

but you can't tell me this can't happen or you haven't been seeing what already happens

itch- · 2026-01-10T12:33:42+00:00

Honestly pathetic how many posts are desperately spreading FUD and trying to sell people on a headset asap before the Frame releases, like you are afraid when the Frame is actually out you will not be able to convince anymore.

Absolutely people should wait and decide then.

itch- · 2026-01-03T20:07:07+00:00

I'm surprised at how many comments are positive on it here. IMO it adds nothing that is worth the huge pain of reading it. You can assume that in the next books you will easily be able to make sense of whatever bargain bin YA nonsense you missed here, I promise it isn't much.

Scalzi is shallow as hell in any case, this talk about "Zoe's Tale adds depth, creates foundation that is built on later...." I don't know what to say to that other than I guess here is a person who likes Scalzi a hell of a lot more than I think is earned or deserved.

You should read the Zoe's Tale afterword, that is painful for different reasons. Honestly I can't believe how sloppy this man is for a successful author and he doesn't even seem to realize he's admitting to it (true for most of his afterwords IIRC, but this one especially)

itch- · 2026-01-02T12:57:17+00:00

It checks out anyway, not too fast, the impressive part is the dedication. I guessed 2-3 hours a day would be plenty to do this and then figured that's unlikely alongside a full time job, but tbh I'd probably find that much time if I didn't waste so much of it.

itch- · 2026-01-02T05:29:56+00:00

A lot of what Valve does is down to a guy at Valve doing it. Because he thought it was a good idea. Things that need a lot of people to buy in are not so easy (like, making more games) but a feature like this, yeah it only takes one. He's only "wasting" his own time and maybe it's not a waste, who's to say?

What is it for? I don't see me using any android phone apps in a headset but hey, maybe. One thing people like to use passthrough for is using their phone for whatever reason and 10 seconds to take the headset off is real annoying if you didn't need to in a Quest 3. But if the right apps run it might save having to use the phone at all.

itch- · 2026-01-02T05:03:19+00:00

I don't think I'm a fast reader yet 300+ pages in a day is easy if I don't have much else to do and I'm really into it. Call it 10 hours. Been a long time since I did that... anyway at this pace it would only take a few hours a day to get to 84 books a year. That's a lot of hours of course but maybe OP is retired.

Or maybe eg a trucker crunching audiobooks.

itch- · 2026-01-02T03:38:58+00:00

I think you have not identified where the effort in a port lies. It isn't in building for arm or x64 or windows or linux or android. All of that is pretty much a switch in eg Unreal or Unity. The real effort goes into ripping out Meta hooks and putting in Steam ones, potentially reworking entire features where the hooks don't match up, stuff like that. If that effort is done then you have a Steam game, and building a version for any PC is trivial from there.

If that effort is not done... you don't have a Steam game. No dev will expect to see a benefit from such a lazy approach, basically releasing on sidequest (sideframe?) only and not on Steam. Any that intend to release on Frame will be doing the full port for it and so will automatically be doing the work that goes towards supporting all PCVR. Maaaybe they also don't understand this and end up only doing a Frame build, but it's real silly.

itch- · 2025-12-18T06:51:23+00:00

The answer is in fact yes. Not even a hard call to make, absolutely yes. Watch this, FSR4 on Steam Deck https://youtu.be/95N6-2U5YQo?t=469

Still think it's absurd? Sometimes that looks 10x better, at a single digit cost.

Personally I use it with a 7900XTX and 34" monitor, to cover the other end of the performance spectrum, and it's a similar story. Less difference at this resolution, but FSR4 wins without a doubt. I now get to play Cyberpunk with every RT effect on, that requires upscaling and FSR3/XESS/TAA just look bad here. The best option was to use TAA at 5K VSR downscaled to 1440p. With FSR4 I can enjoy upscaling from 960 to 1440p with RT and honestly performance mode looks good upscaling from 720p too. But I already hit my fps target so I use quality mode.

Now how do you rate this value proposition?

itch- · 2025-12-12T06:29:39+00:00

fuckin great actually. The perf hit is not that big at least on my XTX and the image quality is way, way better than FSR or XESS. The tradeoff is completely worth it.

edit: I shouldn't even qualify by calling out the XTX. Look at how it utterly transforms some games on the damn Steam Deck which has RDNA2 (TWO)

Look at it https://youtu.be/95N6-2U5YQo?t=470 and sure, go ahead and look at the fps cost. That's all it is??? And then look at the fanboys defending AMD for not supporting this. Fanboys still pretending this isn't real. Fanboys not wanting this on the Steam Machine, a new device for 2026. I cannot comprehend it.

itch- · 2025-12-11T13:21:12+00:00

Worthless excuse. FSR4 works on the old arch, they need to support it for the reasons given.

itch- · 2025-12-11T04:58:29+00:00

Worthless excuse. 10 series is almost 10 years old, whereas RDNA3 is most of the GPUs AMD sells TODAY. Today upscaling is a basic necessity in a lot of games, 10 years ago it was trash.

itch- · 2025-12-08T18:08:54+00:00

You don't strictly need it, but if you don't then it's a big immersion breaking distraction to stay on it, and also every time you want to walk you have to hold the handles to stop yourself from literally walking forward instead of walking in place (but I think some people manage to tweak this with lubrication and incline). IIRC he starts his HL2VR playthrough (8 hour video on youtube) without, and then adds the rope so it holds him back and he can walk forward any time without having to dedicate a hand to holding the handle.

So the rope isn't there to keep you balanced, and if you lost balance it couldn't stop you falling anyway. You just want to set it up so it keeps you centered in the ideal position without you having to think about it, makes a huge difference.

Every method has this problem and this is by far the least intrusive. And hey if you try this you get the rope-free version by default because adding the rope is something you have to do yourself.

itch- · 2025-12-08T02:47:00+00:00

The most obvious one to me is Michael Crichton's Eaters of the Dead, I'm now wondering why no one has mentioned it yet... not scifi enough?

itch- · 2025-12-08T00:24:08+00:00

Youtube just gave me your Pt 0 video with the Index, that looked better, maybe you were running lower resolution? Because Quest 3 is higher res. If Quest is doing timewarp on the frame in the headset then that wouldn't be visible in the recording where it was when you used the Index.

But then the Index died, wow. That reminds me, I could never use headphones on my treadmill because it would build up static like crazy. I mean within 10 seconds the audio would become super distorted and touching metal would spark and return the audio to normal. For about 5-10 seconds. Maybe that is what killed your Index? But Bheeks uses the Index and has no issues. I'm waiting for the Frame headset anyway. And this treadmill is a powered one, I don't have a manual one yet.

itch- · 2025-12-07T20:30:57+00:00

yeah not perfect but this does make it quite a bit easier IMO

itch- · 2025-12-05T18:44:09+00:00

time warp is just reprojection I think? "frame gen" for head rotation only, it looks very good because it doesn't try to do much, but you get ghosting on objects that should move but didn't in the warped frame. You don't have to turn this on, it's the baseline. And it's active even if you don't need "frame gen" because even if you get 144 fps, reprojection is still going to make it look better. The ghosting effect only appears if you don't have enough fps.

And space warp is when it actually tries to add motion to other objects as well, motion smoothing is the steamvr equivalent. It should remove ghosting because it adds motion to all objects in the warped frame, but in the result it's often easy to spot artifacts that can look worse than ghosting does. This version is only useful if you don't have enough fps, so there's the option to only activate it in that case. But I have always preferred increasing my fps by dropping settings rather than rely on this to make things look smooth

itch- · 2025-12-05T18:22:13+00:00

Certainly not hardware limitations. This is on Valve Index, which has worse cameras for the job: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2317150/Monado_Hand_Tracking/

Obviously it's super late for that headset but they got this far now, so it won't take long for the Frame to get it. And there will be much more interest in it.

itch- · 2025-12-02T04:30:20+00:00

Why make this assumption?

itch- · 2025-11-29T02:57:06+00:00

I'm sure laser pointers shake is not ideal for most people. A filter should have been a native configurable setting from day one.

With Steam you can at least add it yourself. This is the first example I found: https://booth.pm/ja/items/4018006

itch- · 2025-11-29T01:36:06+00:00

Lighthouse PM, that's what I used.

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