I love the minimal API, but this would really be awesome if it was a hosted fantasy console style environment with zero boiler plate and shareable links. I know that sounds like a minor difference, but having to write even a little bit of boilerplate in a minimalist environment is a source of friction. Also, as said by many people in this thread, a simple sound API (PC speaker style sounds, sfxr, 10 hard-coded effects, etc) should be added.
One question for the many people that believe Facebook should be a completely unmoderated communication channel is... Why are you active on Hackernews? Hackernews has a variety of community and moderator driven censorship tools, and does not encourage free speech in this manner. Would you call for a completely unmoderated Hackernews, maybe with local down votes and upvotes? Eventually the system could serve as a per user spam and filtering system, but arguably that's still censorship because an individually trained AI is still hiding and removing content. Or.. alternatively is Hackernews ok because if you have showdead on you can generally see the full set of content on HN?
You're right that 3DOF needed to exist before 6DOF, which is a much harder problem to solve, doubly so for inside-out. But, PCVR entirely skipped 3DOF as a consumer product, and even though Rift shipped without touch controllers it had tracked controllers 6 months after launch.
Early 3DOF mobile VR was an attempt at getting more users, without actually thinking about the user experience. Early mobile VR advertisements (for Gear VR or Daydream), had people using 3DOF VR headsets like they were standalone 6DOF headsets with full hand-tracking. People walking around their hands in front of the HMD, etc. Marketers knew how the device should work, it actually wouldn't be insane to say the device that people want is 3-5 years out and not release 3DOF hardware
That's a good question, I think once a single VR device sells 10-20M units, VR might get there. However, PSVR is at 5M and Quest is at ~0.5M-~1M units. PC VR (really Steam VR) is at ~2M. Headsets keep selling (for now), and we finally have a system seller game in the form of Alyx, Facebook's multiple game studio acquisitions are also a good sign for high quality content in the future. Theoretically these studios will be able to attract better talent by offering FAANG level salaries (3x-4x most game industry equivalents).
Yes, content is the single biggest problem with VR now. There is a lot of it on some platforms (like Steam and Oculus PC), but most of it isn't very good. On Quest there isn't much to play or experience period. VR needs to get to the point where multiple Beat Saber quality games are coming out every month, and an Alyx level AAA game comes out a few times a year.
Yes, 3DOF was a gimmick and lead to the perception that VR was another 3DTV waiting to happen. Turns out "VR" is, 3DOF devices and phone holder VR of the mid-2010s had a similar adoption and failure curve as 3DTV. I didn't really get excited about VR until I tried Vive, as tracked controllers are important also.
My game, Shadow Physics used Lua as a serialization format as a side effect of the game initially having no level editor or level import capabilities, only Lua scripts to create levels procedurally. Copy and paste was also implemented using Lua, a fun side effect of this you could copy and paste arbitrary Lua code as a live coding technique.
How many "inner-city youths" do you actually know? Or are you playing into a convenient stereotype? I grew up with "inner-city youths" that loved computers, and kids now have significantly more access. You're just wrong here. Also I knew many well off urban and suburban white and Asian kids that did not think computers were cool, so your stereotypes are unfounded
True, this could apply to Apple or Microsoft. Microsoft especially had poor interview practices in the past (lightbulb puzzle style brainteasers). Anecdotally I don't know of any Black parents that discouraged their children from going into tech due to a poor or biased interview experience. I know many Black engineers with a parent that was an engineer and encouraged them to go into th field. Lack of awareness, many people did not know computer programmer was a job growing up, is a bigger issue.
Nitpick, FAANG hasn't been around nearly long enough to have enough parents with workforce age children for this to be true. Especially not for them to have gone through recent (last 5-10 years) interview processes that people complain about.
I know some of the first Black software engineers at Facebook and none of them have kids (they're early 30s). The rest of it is true, people are discouraged both by bias in interviews and internal promotion/politics.
As they said, racism is still an issue, but lack of role models and exposure is possibly a bigger issue. Lack of exposure and role models is a symptom of long term systemic racism though, but it doesn't manifest in the same way many people think of racism. Lack of positive thinking isn't quite the right term here, because it assumes that if Black kids just believed in themselves and thought differently it would fix all issues. It goes back to a stereotype that Black culture doesn't value STEM or intelligence, which isn't the case.
In computer science, access to computers and being able to freely use, modify and program them is critical. Many Black adults had no or limited computer access as children. Even kids that did need to know that's it's possible to create software , which might require an adult that knows it also, and importantly be allowed to actually do so. Computers are expensive enough that many Black families would keep kids from using them for fear of breaking them. People do overcome this and go onto become software engineers or take other jobs in tech, but common stories of Black people in tech include early computer access, many had parents that are software engineers even. I fear that the popularity of mobile means many more kids have a computing device, but it's not readily available for programming. This is probably offset by a bigger educational emphasis on learning how to code.
Black people can have blond hair and blue eyes also. Common in Melanesians but not unheard of in African Americans either. I had blonde hair when I was a baby and genetically I'm 83% African (average admixture across all Black Americans). An uncle of mine had blue eyes when he was born
The UE5 demo doesn't use GPU raytracing hardware and doesn't raytraced triangles. They use a combination of voxels, signed distance fields.
Raytracing accurately describes GPU hardware, it's not a fixed function path tracer, although you can use it to implement a path tracer (Quake 2 RTX for example). Developers talk about using it for non-graphics use cases like physics, AI and audio even.
Class is a problem, but the class issue isn't "poor Black kids from broken homes" (to quote some comments here) vs upper middle class FAANG employees and MIT grads. Being poor and uneducated is a barrier to being an employee in tech, but it's not the only barrier to getting funding. Anyone that can leetcode can get a job in tech. Raising requires a strong network, involves quite a lot of signaling and bias and gut feeling.
You have to be rich for class to be a major advantage when starting a startup, middle class isn't enough unless you're willing to expose yourself to a lot of personal risk. For various reasons middle class Black people with the skills to start a startup are more risk averse than white counterparts. For other reasons those same Black people get less funding than counterparts of other races.
I say this as a Black engineer from a middle class background that has been a founder, worked at FAANG and personally knows many Black founders that tried to bootstrap and failed to raise, even with strong pitches and profitable products. It's possible that these companies are fundamentally worse than all white founded companies that raise, but I rarely see Black people given a chance to fail. Class is not the only issue and it's not the main barrier for most Black people.
Every AAA source licensee that I worked at made large changes to the engine source. There are many AAA titles both shipped and in development that change fundamental things about how the engine works. Look at the GDC presentation about Mortal Kombat rollback network, or its predecessor about running UE3 at 60 fps on console for some good examples. Completely avoiding engine changed isn't the reality for AAA, and I imagine it's only true for small indies. Good news is it's pretty easy to merge small engine changes.
I think when people say they use what's built in, they mean they don't have to purchase anything from an asset store, and possibly mean they don't have to use any external free or open source libraries. Writting tools specific to your game probably counts as using what is built in.
Really depends on your code base and project. Unreal upgrades can be painful if you're using APIs that can or are rewritten, and if you have made engine level changes.
Unity often feels like rolling the dice with upgrades, basic things can break from version to version, but I've done many Unity upgrades with no or minimal issues, and seen extremely painful Unreal upgrades
VR latency is measured in milliseconds, the operation you described can easily take multiple frames to complete even with a very fast, optimized model. Machine learning inference is never free, and often isn't real-time. Training can take hours to weeks depending on the model.
Increased latency due to using complex, deep learning based, entirely computer vision driven hand tracking vs. tracked controllers which partially use accelerometer data to correct drift and account for latency, and use a much faster classic computer vision algorithm for position tracking (https://developer.oculus.com/blog/tracking-technology-explai...)
They mean handtracking. Oculus touch is a tracked controller, which means the controller is tracked and the tracking system has no concept of a hand. You could put the controller on your foot, or the floor or on your dog and it would track in the same way as your hand. Hand tracking uses computer vision to recognize hands, for most humans fingers are included in that
It's unlikely that PC will ever be mass market, but when/if VR makes more in roads in productivity applications PC will be key. There is a lot of promise in art creation, game development and 3D content creation, and of course HN's traditional programmer dream of infinite terminals, but the real killer app is telepresence for remote meetings. All of those use cases need better software and hardware
Internal company politics and prioritization of Quest. It's possible that hand tracking will come to Rift S, but it might be a side effect of wanting to support it with the Quest link cable.
I have multiple VR devices and for some reason, even with SteamVR active and my Index plugged in the last hardware survey didn't register my VR device, so its possible that the number is actually much higher than reported.
This was my experience at Facebook. Attempting things with a small team (or heaven forbid by yourself) was heavily frowned upon because it didn't justify manager and director salaries. As a result you ended up with poorly performing over-engineered code bases that prefered complex, expensive systems that would take multiple teams to build, but for whatever reason complexity that would improve performance was frowned upon. I'm sure this is common at many big tech companies. I didn't work on the mainline FB app but it seemed like part of the culture.
I've been feeling burnout, although not to the same extent as OP, for many of the same reasons. The main difference is I never stopped loving programming or the creative aspects of making things. Ideally I'd like to be a full time hobbyist programmer, but that seems out of reach financially. If you want to get back into making stuff I suggest doing zero pressure hobby projects focused on whatever you enjoy about the process of making (not around a mission, or users and definitely not around money) and don't actually worry about finishing. Just focus on the act of making stuff happen
If anything OP was worse off before they started treatment. Changing or getting off meds could be a valid choice but all the changes seem to have lead OP to a generally better life
Facebook is one of the most active players in the space, Oculus Quest is the best selling VR hardware outside of PSVR and continues to sell out regularly. Facebook is also working on new VR applications and new VR hardware. Not sure where you got the impression that they've quietly stepped away when they are actively working on new products... Maybe the marketing feels reduced?
Building a 2D signed distance field renderer that works similar to Dreams, setting pixels instead of emitting a pointcloud, would allow for complex object trees with lots of edits and perform well on the GPU.