I really wonder what Valve will do when it comes to their HMD and all VR games on Steam. Does every developer/publisher have to integrate support for both the VALVE HMD and the Knuckles (I assume they won't ship it with the VIVE Wands as that is a HTC product)? Cause that will just might make some devs/pubs to never support the Valve HMD. Or will Valve automatically update the SteamVR API to automatically support every VR game in the store?
So many questions.
I also hope that Valves HMD will have much more FOV than the Rift and VIVE and even better, be wireless out of the box.
- The SteamVR API should automatically make it so a Valve HMD just worked without any developer work being needed.
- Knuckles is interesting in that the new SteamVR 2.0(2) API is really neat. Obviously a developer has to build their game with this incorporated (so old games would need a major update), but it's basically the Steam Controller API for VR.
I'm working on something in Unity right now and you basically just create action poses. You define an action pose (say "fist"), and then it just gets mapped to the various controllers. With Vive it'd be trigger is depressed X amount... with Knuckles your hands are in a fist... etc. Right now everything is kind of automatic for Vive, Oculus, and Knuckles. They're mentioned they're working with MS to try and get WMR controllers included.
The great thing about this, is if you, the user, didn't want to press the trigger to make a fist, you could just remap "fist" to be "touch top of touchpad". IE just like Steam controller works. Completely customizable. Including changing the pose orientation on a hand model (if you found it was off for your taste... adjust how it's offset), etc.
- One of the guys who was fired (via resume info) was working on a high resolution HMD that allowed for both tethered and untethered connections. He was also working on improving compression algorithms for wireless transmission. So there's a decent chance, if this thing ever gets released, it'll at least have the option to be wireless.
135 FOV and wireless would be nirvana for me:)
And as I said, Valve absolutely should improve their game in regards of offensive content and troll games.
The problem is, even if Valve delisted all the shovelware from the Steam it still wouldn't help majority of the indie devs, because we have too much quality content. It's not enough to be good anymore, your game must be exceptional.
The giant elephant in the room that's just ignored. There's absolutely no fixing a saturated market. Nintendo is benefiting for three reason: it was a new platform with little library, a lot of Nintendo gamers are flat out weird and they only own Nintendo platforms (so game released on 100 platforms, but never Nintendo, are new to them), and it's the one place you can play these in portable form. I think this third is the most important. If Switch was a console only, or if cheap portables existed (that played Steam games), the sales would be depressed like every other platform. That's it's hook and why indie games have some life on that platform.
