It’s been a while

Posted on October 12, 2016 by Peder Erickson — No Comments ↓

Over the last couple of months I have had a bit of … fun. My new computer started restarting randomly more and more often until it suddenly wouldn’t start up, it turned out to be a failed BIOS chip on the motherboard, so I have been going through the RMA Process. Aside from that I haven’t seen anything too newsworthy. On this last Monday, the Oculus Touch controllers went on sale for $199, They should come in December. I hope that Oculus does better this time with their shipping estimates than they did last time. On the upside, only people who already have the Rift should be ordering the Touch controllers, so there should be a reduced number of people ordering the device.

On the Vive side, Valve is talking about bringing SteamVR (And the Vive) over to Mac & Linux/SteamOS, which is very nice for me, I’d love to be able to use Linux to play VR games. Also new motion controllers for the Vive have been showcased, much smaller than the ones that came with the vive, and with a strap that goes around the hand, along with the wrist strap. From what I have been reading, the new design is to keep themselves compeditive with the new Touch controllers for the Rift. I’m looking forward to seeing what is coming down the road for VR.

Lots of Minecraft VR News today

Posted on August 15, 2016 by Peder Erickson — No Comments ↓

Today 3 Minecraft VR related things happened.

The first, and probably the largest one is that the official Minecraft VR version came out today, it uses Minecraft Windows 10 edition, and you need to own a copy of Minecraft Windows 10 edition to play the VR edition. As an interesting sidenote, if you have the old Java/PC version of Minecraft, you can still get the Windows 10 edition for free, which will also get you the VR version for free.

As a sidenote, the official Minecraft VR version is exclusive to Oculus, It doesn’t appear that Vive users will get to play this version, at least for now…

The next news item is that the people behind the older Minecrift VR mod for Minecraft was notified by Mojang that they are to stop using the Minecrift name, as it’s too similar to Minecraft and could confuse people, and they can no longer use their domain, minecraft-vr.com. They were told that they could rename the mod and continue development, as long as the new mod didn’t start with the word ‘Mine’. The developers of Minecrift decided that they are tired of working on that mod anyways and are stopping all development of the mod, and shutting it down. It’s a sad day as Minecrift was one of the first games I played on my Oculus DK1 back in the day. It was very fun back then. The DK2 made it more interesting as I attempted to look through smaller spaces, and would glitch through various blocks on purpose.

The final Minecraft VR news item for today, The ViveCraft mod released a big update for their 1.10.2 version, they say that they’ll be bringing the new changes to their 1.7.10 version as well, but are having trouble with some of the features as of this time.

Personally after playing some of the official ‘Minecraft VR edition’, Minecrift and Vivecraft, I highly prefer the Vivecraft mod. Roomscale movement makes the game so much more interesting, and some utility mods can help a lot as well. The official Minecraft VR edition does have the largest viewing distance, and runs extremly smoothly, but there are too many things that I miss from the Java version to get too invested in it.

Well, that’s all for now, I’m looking forward to doing more mining & crafting tomorrow night. 🙂

Rift hardware DRM removed?

Posted on June 24, 2016 by Peder Erickson — No Comments ↓

I woke up this morning to some interesting news, it appears that Oculus removed the hardware DRM that they had added to their store in Version 1.4. If they meant to do this, it’s very nice news, as this should make it easier to use other headsets with Rift games. It is still recommended to not buy Oculus games unless you have a rift yourself as there is no guarantee that programs such as ReVive will keep on working, at least if Oculus adds native support for other headsets or VR runtimes.

On another note, Oculus started a sale, which’ll be going until June 5, almost perfectly matching the time for the Steam Summer Sale. The Steam sale has a featured VR games section as well, I’m thinking that I may be grabbing some more VR games soon…

Yet another … odd Oculus Event

Posted on June 13, 2016 by Peder Erickson — No Comments ↓

It has been a while since I posted, there hasn’t really been much news as of late, at least nothing that has caught my attention, except for another ‘Oculus Exclusive’ issue that just popped up earlier today.

First of all, Fallout 4 is going to be getting VR support, so far they have been talking about the Vive only. Thankfully as SteamVR should work with most VR headsets, the game will be available to a large playerbase. I believe that I will probably get it, I wonder if it’ll be a DLC for Fallout 4 or if it’ll be an entirley new purchase. Time will tell, I guess. I think that it’s interesting that they are only talking about the Vive, while it appears that most other companies are talking about Oculus support at E3 this year. I guess that Oculus has a larger marketing budget than HTC/Valve…

On the other hand, as most anyone who keeps up with VR knows, Oculus wants to have Exclusive games. Today a game that was going to be sold as a Vive game, Giant Cop, suddenly switched to being an Oculus ‘timed’ exclusive, much to the dismay of many players who had pre-purchased it, planning on playing it on their Vives. Those people will not be able to play the game (at least not without breaking DRM) because of the fact that it suddenly became exclusive to the Oculus Rift and Touch controllers.

Personally I *really* don’t like how Oculus is attempting to corner the VR market by making most games exclusive to their headset, making it impossible for people with other headsets unable to legally play the games that they purchased. I do have a Rift, but I have been having trouble wanting to put it to use. I really don’t feel that it’d be a great idea to buy games on their store, as the more people who buy from them, the more incentive they’ll have to do their anti-consumer business practices.

Another interesting tidbit of news that came up due to the ‘Giant Cop’ fiasco, the developers of ‘Serious Sam’ came out to say that Oculus came to them with ‘a shitton of money‘ to make their new game, ‘Serious Sam VR‘ an Oculus exclusive title. They declined to do that, though they said that it was extremly difficult to turn down the amount of money that Oculus was offering. Personally I’m glad that they’re not planning on making their game exclusive, and I’m planning on getting it, as I want to support developers who are good to their userbase.

A few other notes that came up over the last couple of weeks, new Vive orders are shipping within 3 business days, and Oculus appears to be starting to get ahead on their shipping now as well. In the end, I want VR to florish, both headsets are very nice, I’m just having difficulty wanting to support one of the companies. Both headsets have pros and cons… I’ll have to make a post about that soon…

For now, have a nice day.

Oculus Oculus Oculus…

Posted on May 21, 2016 by Peder Erickson — No Comments ↓

Oculus really needs to learn that irritating their customer base generally isn’t the best way to make their product popular. Yesterday they released Oculus Home 1.4, which introduced some DRM features that broke a 3rd party ‘hack’ called ReVive, which allows people to run their Oculus games on the Vive, and other OpenVR compatible headsets. Interestingly, the developers of ReVive managed to break the DRM for Unreal Engine VR games already and are planning on doing one for games made in the Unity engine as well. In the end all that adding the new DRM did was cause a lot of anger against them in the Vive, Rift and some of the PC gaming subreddits on Reddit. It doesn’t appear that the anger has spread too far beyond Reddit, but I feel that those people represent a non-insignificant number of people that would have purchased games from the Oculus store.

My Rift arrived on the eleventh, I haven’t gotten to use it or my Vive much because I came down with a fairly nasty bug the previous Saturday. It is a very nice piece of tech, but it’s difficult to want to buy games for it after reading how Oculus has been treating their biggest fans.

I used to be a big fan of Oculus, but between the huge shipping delays (My device arrived more than a month after they started shipping, 7 minute preorder.), Retail bundle orders, allowing purchase of a Rift at retail stores before day 1 preorders finished shipping, and now the new DRM… yeah they have not been treating their customers very well.

I’m not saying that HTC has not had any of these troubles with the Vive, but they have been largely responsive to issues that have appeared and there is usually only 1-3 days of drama before the issues are fixed. Oculus on the other hand has almost been solid drama since late March, as they don’t reply to issues often, and when they do, their response is very sub-par.

After I have had more time to try out the Rift, I’ll put up a review, and my thoughts on the headset itself, this mostly has been what I’m thinking about the company today. As I said before, the headset itself is very nice. it is very well built, and the fabric is a nice touch, and the image is very clear on that headset, more to come in a later post.

Also, here’s an interesting image posted by the user ‘Damo3000’ on the Oculus Subreddit for this event…

View post on imgur.com

For now, have a nice day. There’s more to come soon.

I’m very happy today…

Posted on April 18, 2016 by Peder Erickson — No Comments ↓

When I woke up this morning I found out that my Vive will be shipping soon! I don’t think that I’ve been so happy to see a large charge before…

Too bad it appears that my Oculus won’t be here until May, something must have gone very wrong on their end to be so slow on sending out preorders. My Vive was preordered sometime between 15 and 20 minutes after the preorders opened, while my preorder for the Rift went through at 7 minutes. I understand that manufacturing companies will be better at their logistics, but come on… Oculus has Facebook backing them, You’d think that they’d be able to sort things out at least a bit better.

I guess that for now I’ll be comparing the Vive to the Oculus DK2 for the time being. On another note, the DK1 doesn’t work in Oculus Home, effectively making the device a brick for anyone who upgraded. It isn’t an awesomely high-end device, but it should still be able to work. I wonder how long it’ll be until someone makes a wrapper that makes the DK1 work again.

On yet another VR Related note, people have managed to get the Vive to work with some Oculus Exclusive games. You can take a look if you want, I find it very interesting. I wonder how well this will work in the future. Hopefully Oculus will add support for other headsets, I’m sure that more people would spend money on their store if they could play on more than one type of device.

Oculus Rift Release day and Windows Upgrades

Posted on March 28, 2016 by Peder Erickson — No Comments ↓

Some people are having a lot of fun today as the people who Kickstarted Oculus are receiving their Rifts, sadly I wasn’t one of the kickstarters, it had ended shortly before I found out about it. It also appears that I’m a bit farther back in the group than i thought I was, my rift is still in ‘Preorder’ status, and if some of the stuff that I’ve been reading is true, it’ll be a competition between the Oculus and Vive on which will arrive first. April will be an interesting month for myself.

On another note, My laptop did upgrade to Windows 10 today, evidently using sleep mode can screw the upgrade up a bit. On the 16th it did attempt to upgrade to Windows 10, but for some reason the installer failed to start. After that, it stopped for ten days before prompting me again on the 26th. It didn’t upgrade then either as I had put the laptop to sleep mode. When I opened it this morning, the 28th, I used it for a couple of minutes before it restarted automatically. when the screen lit up, I saw this…

I’m not sure if I’ll keep it on 10, or if I may downgrade it back to 8.1. If I had been running Windows 7, I think that I would have cancelled the upgrade long before it attempted to upgrade. I highly prefer the appearance of 7 over 8, 8.1, or 10.

If anyone wants to know how to cancel the upgrade, follow these steps:

First, on the screen above, click on ‘I need more time’

Next click on ‘Reschedule’

And then you can click on ‘Cancel scheduled upgrade’. I didn’t do that as I wanted to see if it really did what people have been complaining about on Reddit. Yes it does just reboot the computer, weather you were using it or not, had any documents open or not… it’s really not nice how they go about pushing the upgrade out. On the other hand, you would *really* need to not be paying attention to not notice the screen that covers everything up for an hour before it upgrades, if you were using it. If it upgraded during the night while you weren’t using it, then that would be a bit more difficult to notice and stop.

Minecrift Mod is coming to Vive

Posted on March 6, 2016 by Peder Erickson — No Comments ↓

The Minecrift mod for Minecraft has allowed people to play the Java version of Minecraft on the Oculus Rift. Playing Minecraft on the Rift is very fun, they recently released an update which made it compatible with the Oculus SDK 0.8, after a fairly long wait. Now on top of that, they’re planning on supporting the HTC Vive as well. from what I’ve been reading, it will only support head tracking at first, but they are planning on adding vive controller support in the future as well.

I’m also looking forward to seeing how Minecraft looks on the Oculus CV1 and Vive headsets, it looks very nice on the DK2, and is playable on the DK1. Although the lack of positional tracking on the DK1 can be a bit … difficult at times.

If anyone wants to take a look at the Minecrift mod for Minecraft, you can find it here. You can also view their openVR/Vive progress here.

HTC Vive preorders open tomorrow

Posted on February 28, 2016 by Peder Erickson — No Comments ↓

I’ve been looking forward to this for a while, the Vive will be open for Preorders starting on Feb 29, and will be shipping in early April. I am looking forward to getting both headsets in March/April of this year.

Click on the image to go to the HTC Vive website.

On another note, they have also revealed all of their pricing information. It will cost $799 in the US, and more in most other parts of the world. I can cartainly see why people are talking about not getting the first gen headsets, as they are fairly expensive.

You can view all of their pricing info on the HTC Vive blog. I do find some of the markups odd, though many countries do have import fees that can really increase the price of devices from foreign counties.

That’s all for now, have an awesome day.

The HTC Vive will reportedly cost $799

Posted on February 21, 2016 by Peder Erickson — No Comments ↓

I find it funny that people were going on about how the Vive would cost so much less than the Oculus back when the price was revealed back in early January. I felt that the fact that there’ll be more hardware coming with the Vive would cause the price to be higher, and it appears that I was correct. I find it interesting that so many people are getting very agitated about the high prices of the upcoming VR Headsets, but VR is a fairly new technology. Back when the price for the Oculus was revealed some people pointed out that DVD players, Bluray Players, and HDTVs were all extraordinarily expensive when they first became available. Some of those pieces of equipment could cost in the thousands of dollars back in the day.

I for one am planning on ordering the Vive when pre-orders start at the end of February, I’d love to compare the Oculus CV1 to the Vive. I’m hoping that the facial padding is a bit better than in the Oculus DK2, as it has started to pull free from the plastic and has become a bit of a nuisance. It’ll be fun getting to play games in higher quality VR in the near future. Preorders for the Vive will start February 29, and they’ll start shipping in April.

Oculus