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Vivat GabeN! ❤️
The main intrigue for me has been removed: Valve has ported Half-Life: Alyx to ARM. Now you can play it directly on Steam Frame, offline, without a gaming computer.
Vivat GabeN! ❤️
The main intrigue for me has been removed: Valve has ported Half-Life: Alyx to ARM. Now you can play it directly on Steam Frame, offline, without a gaming computer.
But if you think that now a bunch of developers with games of the same level are rushing to make ports... Then I beg you. There are still much more reasons “why not” than we would like.
Why not No. 1 - Valve has its own Source 2
Your own game, your own engine, your own hardware. You can modify the entire bundle for a specific task. And even in this situation, Valve needed a year of work on the Vulkan and SteamVR drivers. Alyx itself also seriously updated the engine. 16 GB of memory also helped: the game content was saved unchanged. In general, even for the authors themselves this turned out to be a decent amount of work.
Why not No. 2 - eye tracking is not yet available everywhere
It is the combination of eye tracking and foveal, also known as foveal, rendering that Valve calls the key to the success of the port. Wherever you look, there is a high-resolution picture. Resources can be saved at the edge.
But Quest 2, Quest 3 and Quest 3S do not have eye tracking. There is foveal rendering with a fixed area of high quality, but these helmets are not able to move it following the eyes.
And here the question is the size of the market. If, without eye tracking, a heavy port does not achieve the required performance, mass-produced Quests fall out of its potential installation base. And there are so many autonomous helmets with eye tracking that the entire installation base can be included in the credits.
I wouldn’t have counted on a large installation base for Frame alone at the start. It turns out that you need to invest in an expensive port, but a large market in which these investments can be recouped is not yet visible.
Why not No. 3 - the rest have different engines under the hood
Valve - Source 2 is doing a hell of a job optimizing for eSports, where you need high FPS, minimal latency and the ability to play on a wide variety of hardware. During the transition of Dota 2 to Source 2, the company specifically emphasized the improvement in performance even on older laptops. And in the published Dota 2 minimums, the GeForce 8600, a video card from 2007, is still listed. Almost twenty year old iron, for a moment 😱
Most developers use Unity and Unreal - universal engines with tons of capabilities for beautiful 3D games. But a beautiful PC VR game still needs to fit into the capabilities of a mobile chip. And I wouldn’t expect that everything will turn out the same way as Alyx on Valve’s native engine.
To be fair, Valve says that most of the driver and SteamVR improvements will benefit other games as well. This is good news, but I don’t expect a massive flow of graphical games for offline mode just yet.
At the same time, the device itself is very good. I wonder how all this will live in the Valve ecosystem 🧸