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EVIL

Senior Concept Artist
Verified
Oct 27, 2017
2,782
I'll be very bummed if Half Life 3 isn't in VR. Feels like this game is just the tip of the iceberg for AAA VR game development. If they just walk away from it now that will sad.
Yep, I personally want to see them go all out and raise the bar even further on VR.
 

Deleted member 1839

User requested account closure
Banned
Oct 25, 2017
11,625
Besides Lone Echo 2 the only other big VR game that's really coming this year is Medal of Honor and both of those games are Oculus exclusives.

I do look forward to Medal of Honor though since we don't have bigger budget multiplayer VR yet.
 

TheRed

Member
Oct 31, 2017
2,658
Also, Project Cars 2 and Asseto Corsa both support VR, if you're into racing sims, I'd argue it's the coolest way to play those games
I agree. My very best experience and most hours in VR is from these personally. So good but that is dependent on having a racing wheel. Sometimes I really think I've driven certain cars before I catch myself that no that was in VR not real life.
 

Crocodilelogic

Attempted to circumvent ban with an alt account
Banned
Oct 29, 2017
728
Am I the only one that's not a fan of some of these gun mods like the laser sight for the shotgun is kind of annoyingly large and intrusive.

I got use to the sight on the pistol but I wish we could remove the mods if we want. They seem designed to hand hold players new to vr who can't aim well.
 
Oct 25, 2017
4,798
It's going to be important for people to realize that HL:A literally represents the absolute best VR can offer right now across any platform or space. Like, if you got a VR *just* for Alyx, that's awesome, but now you need to make a controlled descent through a library that has a bunch of fucking awesome games, but nothing that will give you that same quality of experience you just got with HL:A. I'm sure people could make a list, but I'd consider:

1) Boneworks
2) The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners
3) The Room VR
4) SuperHot VR
5) Beat Saber

In almost exactly that order, too. Each one of these games, especially Boneworks, will show you how VR has been one big experiment to reach HL:A, and how HL:A will almost certainly be the start of a new ladder of quality and refinement moving forward. I think it's an *incredible* time to be joining VR now, but people do need to realize that the current backlog of experiences is going to be all over the place in terms of quality, and how they solve various problems in VR.
 

FancyPants

Banned
Nov 1, 2017
707
Finished Alyx, loved it! Bought a VR set for it.

I'm trying other VR titles i've missed, moss, Robo recall, Lone echo, Super hot, job simulator, ARTIKA, ect.

All quite after about 10 to 30 min, not interesting at all. Any other recommendations? My i'm looking in the wrong places. I'm beginning to regret my VR purchase because of the lack of interesting titles.

Edit: Couldn't play Boneworks, made me nauseous as hell.

Robinson The Journey might be up your alley
 

Zomba13

#1 Waluigi Fan! Current Status: Crying
Member
Oct 25, 2017
8,902
So is Alyx just a huge system hog? I played through the whole game on a mix of Low/Medium on an i7-6700, GTX 980ti, 16 gigs ram.

I just set up my new PC, an i9-9900KF, 2070 Super, with 16gigs ram and it defaulted to High rather than Ultra.

On my 2080 TI and i9 9900K pc it defaulted to high and gave me the "settings are too high" thing every time I started after putting it on Ultra but it played with no issues for me at 120hz in my Index.

I think the game is just being conservative with its estimated settings because it doesn't want to default to settings that'll cause frame dips and ruin someone VR experience.
 

erikNORML

Member
Oct 30, 2017
1,709
Or Lone Echo? Both those games are awesome.

Not liking lone echo should be a bannable offense.

I think moss, lone echo, budget cuts, walking dead, West world and alyx are the best single player narrative games on vr at the moment. Honestly don't think west world gets enough credit, if you like the show it's great
 

Arulan

Member
Oct 25, 2017
1,571
I finished Half-Life: Alyx. It took me 30 hours according to Steam.

It was incredible. The first two Half-Life games are my favorite examples of the genre, and after 15 years they still managed to pull it off again, while continuing to push boundaries.

I love the feel of the weapons, and the physicality of the upgrades. The UI/UX design is just perfect for VR. The grabbity gloves is such a smart mechanic for VR. While room-scale movement and interactions is amazing, you don't always want to reach down to pick something up, get on your toes to reach a crate up top, or get on your knees. Being able to fling something towards you and catch it is a very smart solution to keep the experience flowing.

Personally I like to use teleportation with room-scale movement, despite not getting sick at all from continuous movement, and the attention to detail here is great. Enemies are aware of your movement throughout the teleport. The end of the teleport is accompanied with contextualized audio effects (clothing sounds, a thump when you land on metal, etc.) that really aid in mentally filling in the gaps of the (abstracted) movement you just performed.

I'm not going to spoil anything, but there are several really good chapters that I'm looking forward to revisiting.

That ending!

I can't wait to play it again.
 

Mindfreak191

Member
Dec 2, 2017
4,764
So we have play times ranging from 7 to 30 hours. Pretty funny.
I think a normal playthrough with a bunch of exploring comes out to 10-11h top, all these other times posted seem to be from people that literally stand in one room for a couple of hours "in awe" or being stuck on a puzzle (which honestly are pretty straight forward), I've been watching a lot of playthroughs after I finished the game and it's pretty surprising how some people get stuck at some obvious spots....then again I was stuck in a room for 10 minutes because I couldn't bend my mind over the fact that I can just break the window in the room to proceed lol. There is definitely not more than 11h of story/gameplay and side content in it.
 

chrominance

Sky Van Gogh
Member
Oct 25, 2017
13,575
There's a new performance tips page on the Steam support site, which includes the helpful tip of using the Windows Task Manager to find out what applications are using all your GPU memory.

That said, something feels very wrong:

6jmAbcA.png


If I did the math right, Firefox is using 1.49 TERABYTES of GPU memory? I guess this explains why my most recent session basically didn't have textures (couldn't even tell how many rounds my guns had for a while), but huh?
 

spineduke

Moderator
Oct 25, 2017
8,745
There's a new performance tips page on the Steam support site, which includes the helpful tip of using the Windows Task Manager to find out what applications are using all your GPU memory.

That said, something feels very wrong:

6jmAbcA.png


If I did the math right, Firefox is using 1.49 TERABYTES of GPU memory? I guess this explains why my most recent session basically didn't have textures (couldn't even tell how many rounds my guns had for a while), but huh?

no, i think that's 1.6 gb of gpu memory
 

low-G

Member
Oct 25, 2017
8,144
There's a new performance tips page on the Steam support site, which includes the helpful tip of using the Windows Task Manager to find out what applications are using all your GPU memory.

That said, something feels very wrong:

6jmAbcA.png


If I did the math right, Firefox is using 1.49 TERABYTES of GPU memory? I guess this explains why my most recent session basically didn't have textures (couldn't even tell how many rounds my guns had for a while), but huh?

Your computer is far too high end.
 

chrominance

Sky Van Gogh
Member
Oct 25, 2017
13,575
no, i think that's 1.6 gb of gpu memory

But it says K, which I take to mean kilobytes? Unless it means kilobits, in which case yeah, I suppose that makes sense, but I think everything else in Task Manager uses K to mean kilobytes, so...?

In any case, Process Explorer seems to show different values entirely for dedicated GPU memory so who even knows.

Your computer is far too high end.

And yet Alyx defaults to low fidelity!
 

Tainted

Member
Oct 25, 2017
841
Australia
Lots of complaints on the Steam forums patch 1.2 is breaking save games and causing CTD...

Yep....my 2nd playthrough is on hold until they release fixes, I cannot play 1.2 longer than around 30mins before crashing (ie hlvr.exe has stopped responding).
I have seen some people suggesting updating steamvr to the beta branch which I haven't tried yet
 

shodgson8

Member
Aug 22, 2018
4,232
Despite backing up my saves, just in case, I have not had any issues on 1.2 tonight with crashes or anything. Played a little under an hour and a half going through Chapter 6, now on to 7.

I think a normal playthrough with a bunch of exploring comes out to 10-11h top, all these other times posted seem to be from people that literally stand in one room for a couple of hours "in awe" or being stuck on a puzzle (which honestly are pretty straight forward), I've been watching a lot of playthroughs after I finished the game and it's pretty surprising how some people get stuck at some obvious spots....then again I was stuck in a room for 10 minutes because I couldn't bend my mind over the fact that I can just break the window in the room to proceed lol. There is definitely not more than 11h of story/gameplay and side content in it.

Nearly 9 hours in now and just hitting chapter 7 as mentioned....I honestly don't feel like I have gotten stuck at any point in particular either. I think I must just play reasonably slow and look around a lot, open a lot of drawers etc. but I really can't imagine playing a game like this any other way.


I agree, Chapter 5 is really long. Amazing, but yeah...it felt like the game really started to kick in at that point.
 

Madjoki

Member
Oct 25, 2017
7,230
There's a new performance tips page on the Steam support site, which includes the helpful tip of using the Windows Task Manager to find out what applications are using all your GPU memory.

That said, something feels very wrong:

6jmAbcA.png


If I did the math right, Firefox is using 1.49 TERABYTES of GPU memory? I guess this explains why my most recent session basically didn't have textures (couldn't even tell how many rounds my guns had for a while), but huh?

rLdDmfC.png


Seems like Firefox maybe leaks GPU memory handles(?) for each video frame decoded.
Explains why closing Firefox dramatically helps with performance. (Interesting that other games aren't affected as much.)
Though obviously there isn't 6 TB of VRAM, so maybe Firefox requests but never uses it (so it's never actually allocated)?
 

Dmax3901

Member
Oct 25, 2017
7,865
Hopefully by the time whatever they're working on next comes out the Index will be available in Australia.
 

Deleted member 2652

user requested account closure
Banned
Oct 25, 2017
3,434
I'm borrowing my buddy's HTC Vive for this and find the setup process extremely frustrating.

Like why can't I reset my standing position without taking off the headset and going through the whole Room Setup again?

The wands also hit each other a lot with basic gun functions and using the button shortcuts feels like cheating.
 

Arulan

Member
Oct 25, 2017
1,571
The wands also hit each other a lot with basic gun functions and using the button shortcuts feels like cheating.

I'm not sure if this will help with the HTC Vive controllers, but you can reload your pistol two ways (excluding the button). One by pulling back to chamber, and the other by cuffing the front-top part and pulling that back.
 

JoeBoy101

Member
Oct 25, 2017
751
Just finished with 11 hours.

Wow. Simply wow.

Rarely have I seen a game simply amp up progressive throughout and then nail a finisher, and finishing level, like that. With the perfect post credits teaser.

Valve still has juice. And frankly, I like where they've taken the storyline. Out there without being impenetrable.

God I need Half Life 3. I wasn't suped for it before, but I am now. Bless you Alyx!
 

Stoze

Member
Oct 26, 2017
2,588
The wands also hit each other a lot with basic gun functions and using the button shortcuts feels like cheating.
I'm not sure if this will help with the HTC Vive controllers, but you can reload your pistol two ways (excluding the button). One by pulling back to chamber, and the other by cuffing the front-top part and pulling that back.
You can also whip the shotgun barrel down with force like a sawed-off to reload it, might seem kind of obvious but I saw streams where people would pull or push it back the top into place with their hands instead.

And I really wouldn't consider the button cheating, it's really only for chambering. You still have to manually put mags or shells in from your backpack.
 

Buttonbasher

Member
Dec 4, 2017
4,038
Just finished it myself. Game clock reads 16 hours, and I don't feel like I over-explored or anything. Still pretty shocked by people doing it in 7-9 hours.

Was bummed to be spoiled about one aspect of the ending, but was stunned and shouting in amazement over the final scene you see.

Absolutely incredible game. Cannot wait to see what they do next with the series!
 

Mindfreak191

Member
Dec 2, 2017
4,764
Despite backing up my saves, just in case, I have not had any issues on 1.2 tonight with crashes or anything. Played a little under an hour and a half going through Chapter 6, now on to 7.



Nearly 9 hours in now and just hitting chapter 7 as mentioned....I honestly don't feel like I have gotten stuck at any point in particular either. I think I must just play reasonably slow and look around a lot, open a lot of drawers etc. but I really can't imagine playing a game like this any other way.



I agree, Chapter 5 is really long. Amazing, but yeah...it felt like the game really started to kick in at that point.
I opened every single drawer in the game and I got 9.8h of playtime lol Yeah, chapter 5 is by far the longest chapter in the game.
 

Mindfreak191

Member
Dec 2, 2017
4,764
I'm borrowing my buddy's HTC Vive for this and find the setup process extremely frustrating.

Like why can't I reset my standing position without taking off the headset and going through the whole Room Setup again?

The wands also hit each other a lot with basic gun functions and using the button shortcuts feels like cheating.
There was a program that allows you to do it in VR but I literally forgot what it was called, it was basically a unity launcher that you start through the desktop interface in steamvrhome, if I remember it I'll let you know, but it would allow you to change everything regarding positioning without the need to run the setup again....