Fucking hell, MEGATON after MEGATON dropped by Oculus earlier this evening at the Oculus Connect 3 keynote.
Firstly Facebook and Social VR bollocks which would be really geeking me out if I gave a fuck about social network bollocks lol. Avatars with 1 billion different combinations (I still prefer the simplicity of Miis though myself but they did start a trend I guess). Had Zuckerberg taking a selfie with a selfie stick with some tart he phoned up and his dog sitting on his couch in his front room. Facial gestures for avatars etc. Wasn't paying that much attention to it all tbh because all of this social networking is a load of old bollocks to me personally.
Oculus are working on a Rift/Gear VR bastard child which will be a standalone unit (so you don't need a PC to power it) with positional tracking, still at the pre-pre Alpha stage though.
New $49 in-ear ear buds for the Rift, supposed to be dog's bollocks quality. Not too interested in those because my Georgie Porgie will chew the wires, the little bugger
So where are the MEGATONS, I hear you ask..? And why aren't they 'megatons' or even 'Megatons'. Well here they are:
1) Some of you may be aware that the Oculus SDK has something called Asynchronous TimeWarp (or ATW for short) which when the frames in a game start dropping it kicks in and duplicates the frame before it and calculates what the difference is movement would have been and 'timewarps' that frame so that it resembles what the next delayed frame would have looked like. This means that the display on the HMD doesn't judder and gameplay remains smooth and comfortable to play.
Now ATW only works in 2 dimensions (as far as I understood what they were saying) so if the game is rendering a 3D object that's moving in the Z access ie moving closer or further away from the player you'll still get a bit of judder because ATW can't compensate for those lost frames.
So Oculus have come up with Asynchronous SpaceWarp (ASW). ASW also works in the Z axis so you'll effectively get NO FRAMERATE DROPS AT ALL. Now from a developer's perspective that was the first MEGATON. But it gets better. The way that ATS works is that unlike ATW it doesn't kick in when the frames drop BUT WORKS ALL OF THE TIME. The framerate for all Rift games, experiences and apps is dropped from 90fps to 45fps and for alternate frames the frames are copied and calculated and SpaceWarped whether the game needs it or not. So those 45 frames per second plus those SpaceWarped 45 frames per second make a smooth 90fps.
2) So why is that a second MEGATON ffs, I hear you ask again. Because your PC is only processing 45fps so has less work to do. And that means that the minimum spec for Rift games can be lowered, you can even run these games on a laptop now!
3) And if that wasn't enough MEGATONNAGE Oculus have also done a deal with Epic that covers developers' royalty payments (if your game sells over $3000 per month you need to pay them a 5% royalty). If your game makes up to $5m Oculus will pay Epic the $250,000 royalty fees
The Touch controllers aren't being released until 6th December which is disappointing but I'm not going to be able to afford them until next year so I'm not too bothered about that.
I was feeling quite deflated about the mainstream VR scene after Sony have fucked things up but Oculus pretty much halving the cost needed to spend on a Rift capable machine has buoyed my hopes about that. Most gamers now won't be needing to buy a new machine or even upgrade their current one to enjoy PCVR. The new minimum specs are now:
GeForce GX 960
Intel i3 6100 (or AMD FX4350)
Absolutely fantastic news!
