January 2016 - Page 7 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Virtual Reality

January 7, 2016 by Belghast

Next Big Thing

It feels like for the majority of my life, “Consumer Virtual Reality” has been roughly five years away…. or at least that is what the pundits are consistently saying. Granted I have been hearing this for the last three decades of my life. The 90s were really the era of this being the big thing, thanks to the popularity of movies like Lawnmower Man and the weekly reminder of just how amazing the Holodeck could be on Star Trek the Next Generation. The problem has been however that what we are actually capable of delivering, versus what we are expecting… has been a pretty huge gulf to cross. The first time I touched anything I would consider virtual reality, were the extremely expensive Virtuality arcade machines from the roughly 1991. You can see a screenshot of the type of graphics it delivered above. Sure it felt cool to be wandering around a fully immersive 3D world, but the amount of disconnect between your actions and the half dozen polygons that represented your hand… was pretty massive. The funny thing about this game is that apparently it was built on the Amiga 3000 as a hardware platform, which I guess only serves to show you just how advanced that system really was.

I guess for me Virtual Reality has been this failed promise for so long that I have doubted that it would actually really arrive. I threw in a few other examples in the collage above like Sega Holosseum from 1991 that chose to go down the smoke and mirrors route of creating the approximation of holograms, rather than trying to wrap you in a virtual landscape. In many ways it worked better, and playing the game felt like the 3D Chessboard from Star Wars. Then we had the famous Nintendo false step of the Virtual Boy from 1995, that came with the least ergonomic way of playing the game. I think the suggested method was to sit it on a kitchen counter or something…. and lean over to use it. However for MOST of the people I knew that had one they would end up laying on the couch and letting the console rest on their face. There were a bunch of negative effects of seeing the equivalent of gameboy quality graphics in red and black…. and the few times I used it I wound up with a nasty headache. Around 2003 I remember a good friend of mine having 3D glasses that hooked to the PC and provided 1024×768 screens for each eye, but this ended up working the hell out of the video card… and the framerates suffered. So basically… there have been a lot of technologies that have arrived telling me that Virtual Reality is here…. only to not really be the case.

Arrived at a Cost

It was roughly around this time last year that I got to play with the Oculus Rift for the first time. At Pax South I was scheduled to do a media demo of Elite Dangerous, and the marketing guy asked if I had ever used a Rift, and upon hearing that I had not shuttled me towards one of the two machines that had them. Granted there were around ten machines in total in the booth, and only two of them were hooked up and capable of using the Rift which immediately made me a bit suspicious. Firstly… I suck horribly at space shooters…. and they loaded up a dog fighting scenario for me to play where I was put up against a computer ship. The demo ended when either I killed the ship… or it killed me. Needless to say my demo probably took twice the amount of time needed as the other players, but it was really somewhat amazing the first moment when I realized that while chasing this ship…. I could look up through the top of the canopy to trace its movement. There was still the strange uncanny valley as I watched a set of hands move in the cockpit that were not my own. The computer was furiously trying to guess what my hand movements might look like based on the controls I was pressing on the real world HOTAS setup. After I destroyed the ship I asked the Marketing folks some questions, one of which was what sort of hardware they were running this demo on. Not surprisingly they had it running on an Nvidia Titan X which is still currently a roughly $1200 video card…. so I started to temper my expectations.

Yesterday the prices were released for the first generation of the Oculus Rift released for public consumer consumption. Granted at this point there have been several development kit models available for those daring enough to brave the potential issues of dealing with beta hardware. I guess in my mind the price point that seemed reasonable was around $300, because that is what the Samsung Gear unit retails for… and what the supposed price point of the Sony PS4 VR unit will be. I was not insanely shocked however when the pre-order price ended up at roughly double that amount $599. If that $600 price tag were a turn key solution that you simply plugged into the HDMI out on your existing PC, then I guess in truth that would probably be well worth it. However for the bulk of us… we are likely running hardware that is significantly less snazzy than their requirements. The minimum requirements listed are a Nvidia GTX 970 which is essentially a $350 video card. However I would not expect full performance in games like Elite Dangerous on anything lower end than a 980 ti… which pushes you into the roughly $650-700 price range on a video card. So before you have touched the rest of your computer set up at all… you are out $1300 in just the Rift and a high end video card. As much as I love this pipe dream, it is simply too expensive of one for me to even indulge the thought of.

Reality Sets In

The problem I have is that I have a $200 video card, not a $600 video card… and it is unlikely short of winning the lottery that I will ever be able to bring myself to spend that sort of money. I am sure as time goes on, people will get better at writing VR game experiences, and additionally the cost of the hardware itself will come down by the time it reaches the third or fourth generation of the Rift. For the time being, Nvidia gave some numbers that said rendering a game for a VR headset requires roughly seven times the amount of resources. So essentially I have ruled out the Oculus Rift as something I will ever be able to afford. I know my friend Scopique has been playing with some android VR options that supposedly allow you to create ghetto VR for the PC, and I am anxious to see how well these work out for him. Personally I think my first likely footsteps into this is in the form of the Playstation VR, and I linked in a video above to show off that unit and a few of the games. I already have the necessary hardware, namely in the form of a Playstation 4, and if the headset itself ends up being around $300 or even a little more… that becomes within the realm of possibility. Given that I managed to get my PS4 for only $200, that would make the total outlay for the system in the $500-600 price range which seems reasonable.

Essentially I am going to be happy as hell for anyone who manages to pony up the money to get a Oculus Rift. I’ve been watching another friend Qelric do videos every now and then showing off her beta hardware. I hope she can somehow end up getting one of the production units, so I can continue to live vicariously through her experiences. The problem is… that pricetag… is pretty damned steep regardless. The other big problem I have with the Rift so far is that I am not really seeing the killer apps other than Elite Dangerous. Most of the games she has played with feel more like “tech demos” rather than fully fleshed out rich gaming experiences that would sell a unit. RIGS on the other hand on the PSVR seems like exactly the sort of fun multiplayer hardware pushing experience that will get someone to add a headset to their Christmas list. I think the Oculus Rift right now is a true “enthusiast” experience, but isn’t quite “consumer virtual reality” just yet, and it is going to take manufacturers building games for the platform to finally make it worth the purchase price. In the time between however… I am going to continue being interesting in every bit of news I can find. From what I am hearing the units are apparently sold out through May 2016 delivery, so it seems like plenty of folks are willing to plunk down for purchase, and I am anxious to see the sort of experiences especially the youtubers and streamers showcase using the magic box.

Imposters and Shaman

January 6, 2016 by Belghast

Still Adjusting

The last couple of nights, by the time I got home from work I was so irrationally tired. I am sure it is largely just me trying to get adjusted to waking up at 5 in the morning again, but whatever the case it is annoying as hell. Last night I was so out of it, that I didn’t even cook a “real” dinner but instead simply made a peanut butter sandwich and then proceeded to sit on the couch fighting desperately not to fall asleep. By the time my wife got home around 7ish I had managed to get a second wind and started actually functioning, or at least a mental state closer to functional. I am hoping by the time I hit the weekend, I will have worked out all of the differences in sleep patterns and next week will be easier. What does not really help is the fact that upon coming back Monday it has been crisis central at work. We’ve dealt with a project that is threatening to go off the rails, a virus scare, and processing some crucial year end/beginning of year things. I guess that is always the case after coming back from Christmas break. Folks stop really functioning around Thanksgiving and all of that work gets pushed until we all get back that Monday after New Years. I have a friend that is smart in that he tends to take his vacation after the first instead of connecting the dots between Christmas and New Years like most of us do. That means he misses most of this insanity.

The only real positive is it feels like everyone else out there is struggling with 2016, so at least we can share the misery together. Making matters worse is that my boss is fairly sick, and I am now paranoid that I am coming down with it. The thing is… I would happily go to bed tonight around 8pm if I thought I would actually be able to sleep all the way through the night. My fear is that I would go to sleep, and then wake up at midnight completely unable to get back to sleep. There is just too much stuff to do right now so I feel like I cannot afford to get sick. There are projects that have to be completed, and others that need to get started. I am dealing with some of the most extreme impostor syndrome I have in a very long time, because I feel like I should be able to juggle all of this madness better. Its kinda shit walking around for days paranoid that someone is going to find out that you are a fraud, and that you really don’t know anything… all the while you are very clearly doing complex things that negate the notion that you are a fraud. Brains are dumb. If I could figure out how to negate the effects of this… and also the weird panic freak outs that I have been having life would be awesome. The other solution that I would love to fix is the fact that regardless of how tired I seem to be sitting on the couch, the moment I put head to pillow I am either wide awake or deluged by a panic attack.

Pushing Alts

Once I finished Draenor Pathfinder, I was hit with this feeling of… “Hey! You should finish some more alts!”. As a result I started in pushing up my Draenei Paladin Exeter, and as of last night I managed to hit level 100. I am honestly shocked at just how fast leveling goes when you can fly. Now one would think that maybe this would tip me to the other side of the “flying in draenor” discussion, but not really. When I leveled three characters to 100 without flight, the experience felt more “earned” if that makes sense. The time spent felt like I was actually living in those zones, rather than just flitting from point to point dropping off this or that item. Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful now for the ability to level faster… because three characters was about the right amount of time that I wish to spend in these zones. The other characters, I just want to push as fast as humanly possible. Ultimately I started doing this Alliance side again because I needed a break from the Old World Horde leveling path. After rapidly pushing a druid to 40 over Christmas break, it felt “too soon” when I returned to working on my Orc Warlock. In theory at some point soon I might just end up transferring that druid to The Scryers so that I can play it with the regular crew of people that I play horde with. It seems silly to transfer a sub 60 character, but I really don’t want to push a new character through those zones that quickly. I need to do some more research into the horde potential zones, because in just following the adventure guide it seems to always direct me to the same places. Mostly I want to sort out how to get down the Grom’gol path and into Stranglethorn Vale.

In the meantime while on this break from Horde, I think I am going to work on my Dwarven Shaman. I have an army of still to be leveled to 100 post 90 characters… and this one is sitting at 91. I think in theory I can probably wrap him up quickly and make some movement over the weekend. Mostly what tipped him over the edge was a discussion with some friends that indirectly influenced me. Tam was talking about specs that became “better” than others… and mentioned some period of time when Enhancement was the bees knees. Which made me think about how Enhancement is the only Shaman spec I can really play… which made me remember how much I actually liked playing it. So as a result I think I am going to push the dorf for a bit and see how close I get to 100 before getting that urge to play Horde again. Largely I think it would be kinda awesome if I was able to push all of my characters to 100 before Legion…. but given how many horde characters are not even 20 yet… that is going to be a very tall order. In the meantime I am trying to do whatever feels the best, and trying to sort out how to stop feeling so damned tired all the time. Today is better than yesterday… and that was better than Monday…. so I feel like it is a gradual thing. With time I will get back used to this 5 am crap… and will continue onward being a super responsible adult type person.

Ultra Combo

January 5, 2016 by Belghast

Waiting on One

KillerInstinct

For awhile now I have been watching the Xbox One console, wondering if I should try and get one. There are a lot of cool features, not the least of which is the fact that you can stream from your console to a windows PC. There are many nights that I would prefer to sit my butt on the sofa downstairs, but would far rather be playing my PS4 that is hooked up in my office so that I can stream over OBS with it. The truth is… other than my recent foray into Destiny, my Xbox 360 has set pretty much unused for most of the time I have owned it. To make matters worse, I technically have two of them, thinking my first unit was kaput and picking up a second one cheaply… only to realize later that it was simply the power supply. The fact that I just didn’t seem to enjoy playing games on the Xbox 360 really soured my consideration when it came to looking at the Xbox One. This combined with the really poor marketing message at launch, and the fact a good number of my friends were already on team PlayStation ended up pushing me in that direction. When I finally picked up a PS3 late in the game, I experienced somewhat of a renaissance of console gaming… and the more bought into the suite of consoles I got the more rewarded I was. Playing games remotely through a PS Vita is kinda awesome… even though I honestly don’t do it that much.

The justification thus far that I have given myself for not buying into the Xbox One was the fact that most of the console “exclusives” seemed to eventually come out for the PC. Whereas on the other side of the equation, none of the PS4 console exclusives seemed to make it out on the PC or Xbox One for that matter. That said there were always a few games that I considered might be worth picking up a console for, but as it stands… there seems to be only one of those that is truly “console exclusive”. Over the Christmas break it was announced that Rise of the Tomb Raider pc would be hitting in January or at least “Early 2016”. At the announcement of this game I thought it was all too specific that they kept saying the same verbiage of “Exclusive for Holiday 2015”. So this knocked one game off the list of “worth purchasing a console for” and yesterday knocked another one off. Since it was announced I have been pumped about the modern incarnation of Killer Instinct. I thought it was a pipe dream that the game would be coming to the PC, but during the last round of conventions when they talked about Gears of War getting a PC release…. I thought maybe just maybe that the game might jump off console. It seems that Windows is putting all of their eggs in the “Exclusive for Windows 10” basket as well, and I guess in the grand scheme of things I am perfectly fine with this. The problem being… that once again it erodes at any reason for me to shell out money for an Xbox One. Right now the only game that seems firmly landlocked on the console is Halo… and considering the lack of ease I have had getting into those games during my recent attempt at playing them on the 360 tells me that I will be just fine without it.

Yup Ecco

Aquaria 2016-01-04 19-19-53-86

Last night I started work on the January AggroChat Game of the Month, because I wanted to give it enough time to hopefully beat it by the end of the month. This time around Ashgar chose the older Indie game Aquaria, which actually released back in 2007. I remember this game being in one of the very first Humble Bundles that I ever purchased, and it has sat in my steam library waiting there unplayed. When Ash described it on the podcast last weekend, my initial thought was that it sounded quite a bit like Ecco the Dolphin. I mean the game has the similarity that you are a character swimming around an entirely aquatic world, and also shares some metroidvania tendencies, which at the time I felt Ecco did as well. What I did not realize is just how much the experience would feel exactly like my memories of Ecco. The weird thing about Ecco is that I was fond of the game, but at the same time anytime I attempted to play it I felt nothing but sheer confusion. I never knew what I was supposed to do and when exactly I was supposed to do it… and for the most part that is precisely how I am feeling about Aquaria.

The game is gorgeous, and the characters move around the world nicely… even though the main character has a bit of a paper doll thing going on in the way her limbs attach to her body. The control scheme on the other hand is deeply confused. It supports a controller, and for the most part moving around screen feels so much better with an analog stick. However when it comes to inputting song sequences… the controller is almost impossible for this task. The first song ends up alternating between left and right twice… so that one is completely doable… however there is one later used to unlock a gate that involves moving your joystick to a sequence of the minor axis which feels completely impossible to pull off smoothly. So as a result I found myself shifting back and forth between controller and keyboard and mouse giving me an extremely frustrating gameplay experience. I feel like this is a game where I am going to have to either look at some maps or follow a guide to get “started” because I think maybe once I understand what the hell is going on… that I will like it. Even last night Ash talked about having trouble getting started, which tells me that maybe this game is far too esoteric for my tastes.

Sleep and Nagrand

January 4, 2016 by Belghast

Struggle Is Real

It is Monday morning after my week and some change holiday break, and I have to tell you… the struggle to exist in the world is real. I am hoping through that yesterday I ultimately went through the worst. As I said yesterday morning, we set an alarm in an attempt to force ourselves to shift vaguely in the direction of a schedule. As a result I pretty much sleep walked through yesterday, and found myself generally staring in the direction of things rather than actually participating. This was doubly awkward since we were having our last “christmas” event of the year with my mom-in-law coming over. I tried desperately to keep up with the conversation, ultimately failing. The small wonder however was the fact that she brought her laptop for me to look at because it wasn’t working. Sure enough the first time it attempted to boot, it hung after login. However on the second shutdown and restart everything went normally, and as a result I busied myself staring at its screen for the remainder of her visit. I did the normal gamut of fiddling… checking her antivirus to make sure it was up to date, and patching as much as I could with windows update. A computer requires significantly less interaction than a human being, and that was ultimately what I was banking on.

The ultimate problem is… that she has no internet connection. What I mean by that is that she does not pay for internet at her house, but instead piggy backs off the wifi of her grand neice. This is perfectly find mind you, it is not like she was war driving one day and hijacked a wifi signal. The problem being that there is roughly a half football field of distance between her house and the nieces house, and our RV pad is smack dab in the middle. It was my hope that either we would put in wifi at our RV eventually, or set up a network of signal boosters to piggyback the signal across. The problem is since she doesn’t really know how technology works, it is hard to explain why her internet connection sometimes works fine and other times not at all. Basically it shouldn’t be working at all, and it is by sheer dumb luck that you can pick up a wifi signal from that sort of distance. The problem also being that she cannot differentiate between telling us something is wrong with her laptop and the software itself and her internet connection. This is the truth with most of our family, they know that facebook isn’t working but are of little to no help to actually diagnose over the phone as to why that is the case.

Paladins Everywhere

Wow-64 2016-01-04 06-25-06-22

The problem with a big goal is once I accomplish it, I end up floundering for a bit trying to find something else to focus my attention on. In the past many of the times when I have left a game it was because I completed some big item that I was grinding my ass off to achieve…. and lost interest after finally getting it. I know it is in my nature to feel let down after finally getting something, and I am trying really hard to not let Draenor Pathfinder be that way as well. Since I finally can fly around, I have been focusing for a bit on trying to push up some of my post 90 characters on Argent Dawn and my highest of those is Exeter my original Alliance Paladin. Over the course of the weekend I took him from 94 to 98 and am now starting Nagrand, where I hope to finish up. I like finishing in Nagrand because gear wise I end up in a fair better position than if I grind the hell out of Spires of Arak. After the initial leveling in Draenor I have followed the pattern of swapping zones every time the game prompted me that the next one was available. So in my case that would be 94 for Talador, 96 for Spires of Arak and 98 for Nagrand. Doing this ends up with me in a mishmash of gear, and a bunch of abandoned quests, but seems to also be the fastest possible way to churn through the content.

Master-of-None-Poster-629x360

Ultimately my goal is not to experience the quest content, because I have already done that several other times. The goal is to level as fast as possible, and I guess in theory I could simply just do the dungeon queue as a tank and be done with it. That is absolutely an option I will consider, but yesterday I absolutely was not competent enough to be responsible for the lives of anyone other than myself… and at times even that part was questionable. I died an awful lot yesterday, and spent probably as much time running back to my corpse as I did actively questing. The problem being that while every fiber in my being told me that I really just wanted to go to sleep, I knew that would only prolong the horribleness and make my first day back at work sheer hell. So I continued trying to busy my mind. While attempting to level the paladin we searched Netflix for something anywhere near as compelling as Making a Murderer, only to strike out multiple times. In the evening we ended up watching a documentary called Dear Zachary which was extremely good.. and moving… but I would not suggest watching unless you are really ready to cry. We ended up closing the evening out watching the Netflix comedy series Master of None because seriously… after that documentary we both needed a laugh. We ended up shutting down around 10 and making it to bed…. only to sit there and talk for awhile as neither of us seemed to be sleepy anymore.

I hate my brain so much at times, because through out the day all it did was complain about how tired it was… and begged me to go to sleep… and now that I am finally read for it to shut down it is acting like a spoiled toddler crossing its arms and holding its breath. I wish so much that I had a normal relationship with sleep… that it was just one of those things that happened naturally for me. My entire life it has been a struggle to actually have a normal sleep schedule. Every fiber of my being is wired to be awaken during the night… because I feel far more alive after the sun goes down than at any other part in my existence. The sun and I really do not get along, and I think in theory I could be happy working night shift. The problem being I work the sort of job that happens during the day time, and I have tried for years to become the kind of person that functions during the day. There are all manner of tricks that I play upon myself and an absolutely silly amount of caffeine and energy drinks that I use to force myself to remain viable and cognizant during the hours I am supposed to be. But my brain is a brat and refuses to function like a normal human being, and I get so tired of playing the game where I am laying comfortably in bed… and every neuron is firing wildly trying to keep me from achieving a restful nights sleep. Fuck you brain… you are an asshole. But hopefully I got enough sleep to be mostly functional on this first day back from break.