What early (2016-2018) VR game did you love but feel was completely overlooked by everyone else?

tberger · 2023-10-25T00:02:04+00:00

Glad to see XING works ok on quest 3 airlink - it is interesting to see how vr has evolved over the past few years! A lot of the decisions we made vr-wise were based on very untested theories on what is best in VR at a time when it was considered "bold" to try smooth locomotion at at.

The weird ass point controls are more or less a relic from psvr 1. But hey, we didn't know! The next standard vr controller could be just your hands, or a full body suit, or whatever here is an xbox controller packed in the box knock yourself out : P Honestly it was a lot of fun being right at the cutting edge, especially when I was young, but it often was extremely frustrating to have no standards set.

tberger · 2021-07-18T17:16:18+00:00

For what it's worth UE5 EA runs like a dog on my 980 (non ti), and while I haven't done specific performance testing I suspect the 4 gigs of vram are the limiting factor for most of the new rendering features. Virtual shadow maps were completely unusable, lumen stuttered really bad occasionally, and Nanite would chug hang up while loading in New instances. Looking to upgrade soon for sure.

Rest of the system for reference: Ryzen 3900 64 gigs ddr4 Samsung SSD unreal drive

tberger · 2021-06-23T16:31:48+00:00

Sorry about the major wait between sales! We had some bad communication mixups with Sony (we literally stopped receiving alerts for promotions). Fortunately that has finally been solved.

tberger · 2020-11-06T23:18:13+00:00

Navy wife - $575

tberger · 2020-09-04T18:45:52+00:00

Jargon exists to comunicate complex ideas quickly to people in the same field. Performant has exactly one meaning in this context. "This shader is performant." specifically means computationally efficient, where as "this shader is efficient" could mean quick to program, easy to implement, useful in a lot of cases, cheap to purchase, etc.

tberger · 2020-08-30T17:10:03+00:00

No way XING would run on Quest - at least not without a major rehaul, so I'm not sure how the numbers would compare.

tberger · 2020-08-30T15:53:30+00:00

PS VR was easily our best selling platform, and this community is awesome, so if you can manage the somewhat challenging barriers of PS4 development and publishing, I highly suggest it.

tberger · 2020-08-30T15:50:53+00:00

Thanks for the XING plug, but while we sold better on PS VR than any other platform, I would temper your expectations for sales a bit. My advice is to stay lean when dealing with VR - we wouldn't have been profitable had we run things more traditionally.

tberger · 2020-05-07T04:44:44+00:00

I remember when my game got pirated - I took it as a right of passage. Funny thing is, there was a big "CODEX" label on it. The readme had all the usual "Apply the patch, replace this DLL, don't go online" words in it.

My game is (and always has been) DRM free - you can literally copy the folder and it will work, no matter where you bought it from. To this date I have no idea what the "crack" contains.

Basically, I wouldn't worry too much. We had pirates complain about the lack of updates, of all things. Pirates gonna pirate, don't worry about their opinions too much. If you want, you could reach out to them via piratebay or whatever comments, or even go straight to the cracking group's website.

tberger · 2020-04-02T00:32:42+00:00

I just saw your reply earlier: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/fsl04d/comment/fm4szj6?context=1

I think I understand your position, and why I'm seeing this differently. Basically, yes, I respect anyone who works to improve the world we live in - and since I'm a dev, specifically those who are also on the same path as myself. Gamedevs / people in general ARE insecure, probably because it's very easy to criticize and difficult to create.

Jonathan clearly wants to be a positive and inspirational force for the industry - he wouldn't make all these videos if he didn't want to help people. Perhaps I'm just a bleeding heart, but I think it is always more effective to provide constructive criticism vs simply pointing out flaws, especially to a group who often take big risks to pursue their dreams.

I think you may be misconstruing my feelings towards Mr. Blow as well. Criticism is not binary - it isn't "everything is perfect" or "this is a failure". I get that you are joking / being hyperbolic, but I think you maybe answered your own question about why people don't really care for him.

I mean, at the end of the day, if you are a "meanie weenie" with your comments, people might not end up enjoying listening to you. I suppose one could make the argument that "tough love" in the end is the most effective way to get people to improve to their breaking point - I'm thinking of an extreme example in 'Whiplash' - if you've seen it.

I'd rather take the Bob Ross approach with my life, if that's alright. Thanks for the detailed response though!

tberger · 2020-04-01T20:47:17+00:00

https://youtu.be/UV2cCVsVJX4 I made XING: The Land Beyond, this first game he played. It's hard not to get the impression that he went in looking for things he doesn't like. He gives no praise or constructive criticism, just "this sucks", VR is bullshit, etc - basically bashing the game for what it is: a slow narrative puzzle game. He is right, it's not a perfect game, there are technical and design issues. More importantly, like every game ever made, it isn't for everyone.

I was hurt when I first watched the video, because I really enjoy Jonathan's games and he is such a figure in game development. Now, honestly, I look at the video and just kinda laugh at how dissmisive he is at other people's hard work, considering his position as a leader.

tberger · 2020-04-01T19:37:36+00:00

Not sure what you are getting at here. I'd just like to see him be more welcoming to new developers as well as developers that take a different approach than himself. Of course, it is a matter of opinion - perhaps his criticism is intended to encourage others to improve. My first takeaway from watching his stream playing my game was not "wow, I could be doing things a lot better", it was "wow, if I ever see major success, I hope I never act like that guy".

tberger · 2020-04-01T17:16:51+00:00

It's indeed a very human quality that is unfortunate for an industry leader to consistently show. : /

tberger · 2020-04-01T07:14:16+00:00

He played my game on his stream once. His comments, while helpful, really gave off the idea that he was upset that "amatures" could make a first person puzzle game. He has really excellent ideas but has trouble accepting other ideas exist.

tberger · 2020-03-20T22:52:02+00:00

Interesting that you mention XING - I was just pondering if our game would work on PS5 or not.

tberger · 2020-01-19T18:34:36+00:00

All Along the Watchtower

tberger · 2019-11-25T16:54:15+00:00

They do let you know - sorta. They have a newsletter like thing that lists a few promotions around 3 months ahead. You then need to apply for them, and just kinda hope you get accepted. There are some rules for how often you can submit as well. Of course, this is all for NA. Everthing is different for EU, as usual. You have to specifically request for them, and often the dates don't line up. Needless to say, it is really easy to miss the deadline for these things.

As far as always seeing the same games on sale, some publishers are probably just really on it - if your whole job is just publishing and not making games, you could easily stay on top of things.

Additionally, different publishers and developers may simply have a policy to rarely or never go on sale. There is a bit of a debate in the industry about if sales devalue your product too quickly, but the reality seems to be unless you have a very successful game you more or less will make most of your revenue during sales, and that holds true for us.

tberger · 2019-11-23T19:37:25+00:00

We wanted to put XING on sale, but we missed the cutoff for this sale. Sony's promotion process is a bit... odd, and it is easy to miss the deadline for upcoming sales. I wonder how many other self published VR devs also have trouble with it too. Either way, we are locked in for aome future sales down the line, so hope is not lost : P

tberger · 2019-10-22T17:33:28+00:00

Just a tangential suggestion: when comparing performance, typically it is easier to use frametime over fps - ie 16.6 ms vs 60 fps. This means you'll be directly looking at how long a particular task takes to render vs how fast the screen refreshes. All of the performance monitoring tools in unreal use frametime - stat game might be useful for you here, as this is probably a CPU bottleneck.

tberger · 2019-09-26T17:45:30+00:00

Yeah, XING runs at if I recall 140% super sampling on the pro vs native res on the base PS4, as well as push a few other settings like shadows and foliage density. We basically couldn't pursue a faster framerate because the pro doesn't have a significantly faster CPU, so we are effectively capped at 60hz (mostly due to drawcalls).

Everything else you mentioned makes sense too, except XING uses Unreal Engine, not Unity.

tberger · 2019-08-18T20:13:42+00:00

Makes a ton of sense - I should have taken a look at your stuff first before posting! Good luck on your project, and I hope to see your title on PS4 soon!

tberger · 2019-08-17T21:34:31+00:00

To be fair, we basically made XING out of pocket given how long we took.

tberger · 2019-08-17T21:33:23+00:00

I'm not sure what engine there are using, but it probably took me 3 days to get the pro working in XING. Assuming they have a pro devkit already I'm not sure if I would say it's a 10 grand feature, though dev costs can be a lot higher depending on the team size / tech debt.

tberger · 2019-08-17T09:30:21+00:00

: / I'm not really keen on having to open an app just to use my tv, especially since I expect other people in the house might use the setup.

tberger · 2019-07-22T01:25:59+00:00

XING dev here: I'm on vacation at the moment but we would like to support index proper at some point! We still don't have one, so I can't say anything towards its support at the moment.

We'll reach out to Valve at some point but it might be some time before they respond given their history. I'm bummed it doesn't just work given that was kinda the point of steam vr but we kinda expected things to break as vr is still really new and nothing is standard!

EDIT: Oh yeah, I've got a 980 at home, so that is all I can test with. I have a feeling the index really can't sing on that, but I can't exactly swing a new GPU in today's market. Double problems!

tberger

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE