Joewintergreen

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Posts posted by Joewintergreen

  1. Posted

    1. Is there a store-front in VR?

    At any time at all you can press the home button on the controller and bring up the Steam Overlay, which is on like a big TV in front of you in VR. It's a slightly-different-for-VR version of Steam Big Picture. So you can go to the Steam Store and it'll default to filtering by VR compatible (and you can further specify HTC Vive only or Oculus only, or turn off everything and just see all games on Steam). 

     

    2. Is there some sort of media browser through which you can browse 360 photos or 3d models?

    Nope, though it would be trivial to make one so presumably there will be one soon. You can always load up Youtube in the overlay though and watch 'em on that big screen

     

    3. Can you do the thing where you can edit an Unreal project in VR yet?

    Not in the current version of UE4 but I'm sure I could if I compiled the latest code from Github.

     

    4. What's an example of a piece of software that has impressed you?

     

    Most of it has blown me the heck away but let's see.... TheBlu, the under-the-sea demo you might have heard of, is nuts, and you see a whale in it and the whale feels legitimately intimidatingly huge. The Aperture Robot Repair demo is really amazing but I don't wanna say too much because spoilers. Space Pirate Trainer VR is an awesome dual-pistols room scale shooter where you can pull a shield from behind your back and you have to shoot robots and dodge/block their bullets, and it's a real workout because you end up ducking and lunging and feeling like a total badass. And the music is good so you end up dancing the whole time. Tilt Brush is crazy good too. Ninja Trainer which is just VR Fruit Ninja is extremely tiring in a good way. And Fantastic Contraption had me doing lunges and big reaches and all kinds of crazy cool stuff in order to build my little car thing, it was actually incredible and a legit workout.

     

    5. Are Google Tilt Brush results exportable? If so, what formats?

    Not that I've seen but I wouldn't be surprised if they did it... there's more you can make than just geo though so maybe not? I'm pretty sure you can send other tilt-brush users your designs at least.

     

     

    6. Have you played any driving games? Are you experiencing any motion sickness? 

    I haven't played any driving games yet - only done room scale stand-up-walk-around stuff, no sitting stuff - but neither me nor my girlfriend has had any motion sickness at all whatsoever. It's amazing. I also had the DK2 and DK1, and had some ill effects with both of those - I know how to manage them and had my "vr legs" but it was still a consideration. Here you can just be confident you won't have any ill effects at all. Made me realise how little I used the Rift out of fear of that, even though I'm better with it than most people.

  5. Posted

    Argh, Oni is one of my favourite games ever. Every time I'm reminded of it I feel legitimately frustrated that nobody (to my knowledge) has attempted to replicate the formula since then. Not even on Kickstarter!! I would throw so many dollars at that (alright, not that many dollars).

     

    Small criticism on the video, which is otherwise great - you trail off a bit towards the end of your sentences, meaning it gets quieter and then spikes back up when you begin the next sentence. Made it a bit difficult to follow in parts.

    This is a total problem I have. I find it incredibly hard to make my voice not do that - that video is me actively trying to do just that! Albeit with a very sore throat.

     

    I have wanted to make an Oni-like for years, and am actually getting to the point where I'd be fairly confident attempting something like it. Maybe after my current main project.

     

    Thanks for the enthuse, guys!

     

    Also, I guess as long as I'm plugging my shit, I moved my blog to Tumblr and it's a pretty good place to look at my recent shit, which is a lot to do with making levels for Unreal using Valve's Hammer editor. joewintergreendev.tumblr.com

  6. Posted

    On a total whim during having the flu in the middle of a super hot night, I was compelled to do a video about Oni, my favourite Bungie game, in part to spread the word about the absolutely fascinating fact that it was released in 2001 and its mod scene didn't kick off until 2009. More than a little nostalgia lies before you

     

  9. Posted

    Yeah, Vive doesn't require space if you're happy to use it sitting down. I suspect it'll be a lot better even for sitting experiences than the Oculus though - the way it does tracking means you don't have to worry about getting your head outside the camera's viewcone and messing everything up (potentially extremely disorienting)

  10. Posted

    Defective controller might be the thing, mine doesn't have that.

     

    But yeah, in that case it's Telltale using the controller wrong - some games switch UI and behavior (and even lock the other input device up) based on mouse movement rather than just presses, which was actually never a good idea imo. Hopefully a lot of those games patch that, it's a pretty minor thing to fix. 

  11. Posted

    Oh boy, you guys are using it wrong. You have to set the right touchpad to act as a mouse if the game doesn't have it enabled by default (a lot of devs are slacking off setting up their configs). The controller is amazing when it's set up right - I played through Liberty Island in Deus Ex using it. Deus Ex 1! All tranqing dudes almost as well as on a mouse. It's the best controller I've ever used.

     

    To set it up, you have to launch games in Big Picture mode and press the Steam button while ingame, and go "configure controller". Most games you can just pick the "gamepad with mouse" template (might be called "gamepad with high precision aiming" or something now). 


    The analog-stick-emulation mode for the right touchpad is definitely pretty shit. I really hope games defaulting to it doesn't sour people on the controller generally.

  12. Posted

    Please, go on. Valve community drama is always so esoteric and interesting and weird and I love it.

    I'm not directly involved so my scoops aren't especially hot, but I think it's what I think of as the kind of typical Mod Team Leader Bullshit I thought had died out long ago, but in a new context where it's able to cost people money. I think some do-nothing jerks appointed themselves as Project Leads (which is a very back-in-the-day-mod-community thing) and got to be Valve's only contact point for the update/its contributors, they mismanaged a bunch of crap and then they decided on a new revenue split where they get most of the money, and nobody else is in a position to do anything about it. 

     

    Hearing about this, plus dealing with a bad client recently who seemed straight out of a 2005 mod community, has somewhat diluted my nostalgia for my modding days.

  14. Posted

    The hl3.txt stuff contains stuff that's from HL2 but also clearly-new stuff.

    It is also probably recent for it to find its way into a Dota 2 update that it wasn't already in before.


    Not much solid info in the file, but here's all you can kinda deduce

    -it has stuff for procedurally spawning groups of NPCs based on stuff like whether the player is nearby or not, what's visible to player, etc
    -it has "quest citizens" who have different behaviors from other citizens. If a quest citizen is a "quest member" it's "neutral to combine" and doesn't take damage. My first thought is "neutral to combine" means this citizen won't open fire on combine on sight but might still do so if attacked by combine, which is probably a useful thing for a lot of types of quests? This is supposition (though I do have knowledge of HL's relationship systems, etc etc).
    -quest citizen has "beckon player when player is close enough" functionality but I'm not sure if this is just inherited from npc_citizen and was present in hl2/episodic
    -"prop_zipline" exists so that's a level-placeable zipline of some sort, which doesn't really tell anyone anything
    -there are a number of quest-specific info entities and vars. Of particular interest is "height of marker beam", "radius of bottom disc", "trace up to place top of beam", etc. Sounds like vertical-beam quest markers in an open-ish world map.
    -"Combine Pulse Ceiling Turret"? Were those a thing in earlier games?
    -there's an npc_hunter_invincible which is interesting. I'd have thought you could just make a hunter invincible rather than making a new class called invincible hunter. So that's a thing
    -generic pickup has a "prevents respawning" var and a "associated playercounter name" var which are both marked as "HL3 only". The respawning thing only really makes sense to me in the context of an open world game

    JUST SPECULATIN'.



    edit: some of this stuff could also have slipped in there from other projects/games, or it could be references to shit from years ago

     

     

    Yes, I was going to bring that junk up, but opted not to.

     

    The, uh, "up to 93%" stuff on TF2 items is bunk, though. Major bunk.

     

    ...Though I've seen some screencapped conversations that seem to suggest that's the fault of the butt-faced people who organized that community update, and less so the fault of Valve themselves. It's all hearsay to me, though, so I don't really want to take sides. 

     

    Regardless, I still think Valve takes maybe too much money on that stuff. But then they did MAKE THE GAME, so I don't knooooow.

     

    They for sure take way too much money off Compendium sales for The International...

    It's not bunk at all. They take 93% of key sales, with the remaining 7% split between whoever potentially had an item in a crate, which can be as many as like 10-20 people. Keys are the only way to get new items now since they aren't being put on the store anymore.

     

    There is a whole separate dispute about the butt-faced people who organised the current community update, but yeah, separate issue.

  24. Posted

    I guess this is probably the right place to put this. I have done a couple of videos which are blowing up my twitter at the moment about how:

     

    -I Reckon The Geometry Tools In Modern Level Editors Are Bad

    -I Reckon The Tendency Toward Modular Mesh Based Level Design Has Been Greatly Detrimental To Level Design In Games Over The Last Decade Or So

     

    respectively.