Luthair

Sure, that just means they don't have something specific lined up. I don't think the free month is due to it being sprung on him (he said on his garage stream its been known for a month), with half the crew their output will be quite a bit lower.

Senior staff are a lot more expensive than junior staff. Severance is a common private equity move to try to change the financials to make the entity more attractive for another buyer.

@ludovicoheard said:

Just because they didn't publicly announce their departure doesn't mean it wasn't planned internally. Consider a couple of the GameSpot After Dark crew also left recently, I wouldn't be surprised if RV was looking at making a leaner company and offered severance packages; when that happens it gives people runway if they want to move onto something new.

I remember when Vinny announced they were looking for someone with a description, then at the end threw in something like "and they have to be super cool".

Then somehow they manage to find someone with a background in improv who fixes her motorcycle in the streets of New York :)

The black friday prices on the Samsung Oddyssey+ headset tipped me over into buying VR. That said, i'm not sure I will buy Alyx, aside from the original Half-Life the wonky FoV in every Valve first person game has made me feel real sick real fast (read, 10 minutes in the game and I need to go lay down for an hour), combining this with VR seems like a terrible idea.

The poll is lacking a negative option.

The moment they started showing in-game footage I was skeptical, the TGS footage killed my interest and the experience of GB crew playing buried it.

To me this reminds me of the No Man's Sky hype, it was pretty clear what the game was but people walked into it like lambs to the slaughter.

You can begin to emulate this with lens effects, zooming the viewport in/out and slightly warping the image (e.g. trapazoids). Recall that we aren't trying to get this perfect, we're trying to trick the brain to until the rendered image catches up. Sure, you won't be able to do this for someone whipping themselves around like a madman, but for typical users, typical games, and normal latency it might be enough.

This was my initial thought also, but I realized there is a relatively trivial technical solution - just render and transmit a video with a higher resolution larger than the viewport, the headset can immediately move the viewport within the larger area as the user's head starts to move. At that point the only limitation is hardware, they could render the entire sphere around the user and completely eliminate it latency, though obviously bandwidth and resource consumption would be prohibitive.

As a non-game developer it took me about 30-seconds to come up with the idea after originally hearing the VR reference and panning it, so I assume it isn't a novel one to people in the industry.

Supposedly the Chromecast API allows querying the device whether it can play a stream - https://developers.google.com/cast/docs/media#media-container-formats

The same page also lists the supported profiles, resolutions and framerates supported for the devices. Mine are gen2, I would hazard gen1 and gen2 represent the majority of the market.

Are the Chromecast issues ever going to be fixed? Its essentially been unusable for most or all of this year.

I would hazard that the videos are being encoded with a profile or bitrate which isn't compatible.