Post by Pigmagnet on Oct 5, 2016 14:59:06 GMT
... because, as someone who has been drooling over it for almost 30 years, now that it's on the doorstep, I'm not so sure I need it. Allow me to elaborate. I'm not trying to piss on your chips.
Anyone else play Driller in the late 80s? I played it on the 48k Spectrum. I include a video of the gameplay just below this sentence (you only need to glance at it to get the idea, no need to watch the whole thing):
I know, now it looks unbelievably crude. But at the time it was a minor miracle that it existed at all on an 8-bit computer. And unless I'm misremembering, it was the first game to run from the first-person viewpoint, with solid graphics as opposed to wireframe. Ignore cockpit games - I mean the first game in which you saw, and interacted with, the world from the perspective of a person actually in the game world. There was a penalty, of course, with a frame rate that would drop to one frame per several seconds. But it was an event, there had been nothing else like it in the home market, and you put up with the speed the game ran because you had no choice. It's hard to believe if you weren't there at the time, but this was truly groundbreaking stuff.
So to say 'imagine being able to put on some magic goggles that would put you right in the game world' was the stuff of science fiction. And it really was. There was no internet in the 80s (at least not for public use). No widescreen tellies. PCs ran in 16 colours if you were lucky. Prototype mobile telephones were very expensive and the size of housebricks. We always knew that affordable VR technology would be a long time coming. 30 years later... and with home VR now here, I haven't been quite as excited as I've always thought I would be, and I couldn't put my finger on the reason why.
But the penny has just dropped. We're at the stage now where even the soon-to-be-obsolete 1080p resolution is almost good enough to make photo-realistic worlds to game in. Any new racing game will put you in the driving seat of a car that's been done up to look just like the real thing. Any FPS will allow you to turn in any direction and let you peer down the barrel of any number of guns and shoot the buggers aiming to do the same to you. And I'm now not convinced that an extra dimension to the turning of my head is going to make that much of a difference.
It almost hurts to admit, but convincing worlds that can now be drawn in flat 2D have made VR, for me, not the essential bit of kit I always thought it was. Discuss, if you have read this far and can be bothered.
Anyone else play Driller in the late 80s? I played it on the 48k Spectrum. I include a video of the gameplay just below this sentence (you only need to glance at it to get the idea, no need to watch the whole thing):
I know, now it looks unbelievably crude. But at the time it was a minor miracle that it existed at all on an 8-bit computer. And unless I'm misremembering, it was the first game to run from the first-person viewpoint, with solid graphics as opposed to wireframe. Ignore cockpit games - I mean the first game in which you saw, and interacted with, the world from the perspective of a person actually in the game world. There was a penalty, of course, with a frame rate that would drop to one frame per several seconds. But it was an event, there had been nothing else like it in the home market, and you put up with the speed the game ran because you had no choice. It's hard to believe if you weren't there at the time, but this was truly groundbreaking stuff.
So to say 'imagine being able to put on some magic goggles that would put you right in the game world' was the stuff of science fiction. And it really was. There was no internet in the 80s (at least not for public use). No widescreen tellies. PCs ran in 16 colours if you were lucky. Prototype mobile telephones were very expensive and the size of housebricks. We always knew that affordable VR technology would be a long time coming. 30 years later... and with home VR now here, I haven't been quite as excited as I've always thought I would be, and I couldn't put my finger on the reason why.
But the penny has just dropped. We're at the stage now where even the soon-to-be-obsolete 1080p resolution is almost good enough to make photo-realistic worlds to game in. Any new racing game will put you in the driving seat of a car that's been done up to look just like the real thing. Any FPS will allow you to turn in any direction and let you peer down the barrel of any number of guns and shoot the buggers aiming to do the same to you. And I'm now not convinced that an extra dimension to the turning of my head is going to make that much of a difference.
It almost hurts to admit, but convincing worlds that can now be drawn in flat 2D have made VR, for me, not the essential bit of kit I always thought it was. Discuss, if you have read this far and can be bothered.