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Oculus Rift Loses Doom 3 BFG Edition From Launch Package, But Gains TF2
skade88 writes "Neoseeker and the Verge are reporting that the Oculus Rift launch will no longer have Doom 3 BFG support. But in some good news to offset the bad, Valve will be releasing an Oculus ready version of TF2 when the Dev kits ship. For those backers who are upset about not having Doom 3 BFG edition support on launch of the Oculus Rift, they are offering the following options:
'$20 Steam Wallet credit ... $25 Oculus Store credit ... or a full refund for your pledge.'"
But I thought Carmack was recently demoing a prototype version of Oculus Rift at some gaming con. Has he opted out of this tech? Why, and for what alternative?
You can simulate doom 3 with a couple of black eye patches
Just in case anyone else was wondering.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
Speaking as someone with more than 800 hours clocked on TF2, I'm pretty stoked. Especially now the native Linux version is out. I hope the Oculus Rift works with the Linux version.
TF2 has caused more disruption to my productivity than any other game, and I was planning on cutting back, but I'll be able to justify to myself testing the Oculus Rift out with it.
Damn you Oculus Rift!
How will I see my TF2 hats?
If so, sign me up, cause I ain't going back to the dark side. Nope.
I admit I'm not that familiar with this project, but is it really as massive as the pictures suggest? Surely they could have produced something less bulky given the state of play with displays etc. these days. I mean I'm not suggesting it would look like Google Glass, but perhaps a the size of a pair of ski goggles... Or is this just the dev kit?
it's different than Sega VR, Nintendo Virtual boy and Google Glasses.
It is SPECIAL
in ways I don't even dream of knowing how. it is special in wonderous, magnificient ways. ways beyond human understanding or comprehension.
it RIFTS your OCULUS and other some such.
when you look from your own eyeballs it makes you think you are in DOOM LAND (or mario land or some other land that is not your own plain-old boring land)
VR land is better than reality because we all know that immersion is the name of the game here.
please don't reach out and touch OCULUS land for it is covered in magical patent juice and will make your children bleed money.
I have not seen it and I am actually intrigued by it. Thought the history of VR Googles was kinda funny though:
it's different than Sega VR, Nintendo Virtual boy and Google Glasses.
It is SPECIAL
in ways I don't even dream of knowing how. it is special in wonderous, magnificient ways. ways beyond human understanding or comprehension.
it RIFTS your OCULUS and other some such.
when you look from your own eyeballs it makes you think you are in DOOM LAND (or mario land or some other land that is not your own plain-old boring land)
VR land is better than reality because we all know that immersion is the name of the game here.
please don't reach out and touch OCULUS land for it is covered in magical patent juice and will make your children bleed money.
-badford
As John Carmack supports the open-source community, he released the source code (not the game assets) into the wild as an open source project. I myself have downloaded, compiled, and played the game using this code and it works well. There is even integrated support for the original version of the Rift inside. While he was unable to release all of the code for the game due to patent issues (lookup Carmack's Reverse), the game is completely playable on homemade Rift units at this time. Once Oculus releases the offical SDK for the Rift, it will be a short time before I or another member of the open-source community takes care of the problem. Just lookup a fork on GitHub called Doom-3-BFG-VR and I will be there doing anything I can to help.
Please, to anyone planning on playing Doom 3 like this, purchase the game and copy the assets rather than finding nefarious ways of finding them. Support awesomeness such as id Software and its remaining founder.
--
Big shout out to John Carmack for the foresight to allow gamers the ability to again enjoy a game which is otherwise, past its prime. For the record, Quake 3 has also been released as well so expect to see MANY mods for both franchises very shortly and again, thank you Mr. Carmack.
I remember playing a version of Doom3, and the BFG wasn't the biggest thing in town: the level I remember was called "Silly Rabbit, nukes are for kids", and if you were exposed anywhere on the map when someone let one off, you were done. You could be inside, but couldn't be exposed to a door or window. I remember dumping off a gob of them myself. Good guys, bad guys, didn't matter, everyone respawns.
Here's a clue. Strapping a tablet to your head is the worst idea in the world. Why are Carmack and Bethesda backing away at the speed of light? Let me guess- someone had a word in their shell-like about the downsides of having ANY responsibility for promoting the use of the device.
Of course, Bethesda can safely sell Doom to customers of Oculus after the fact as an 'innocent' non-endorsing publisher.
A tablet strapped to the head will cause neck strain and damage. There is no doubt about this. Oculus would have to be reworked into something approaching a motorcycle helmet to reduce this, and that isn't going to happen.
THINK! The downside of kickstarter and other community driven projects is that usual issues of consumer safety are ignored. At best, the designers think "we'll worry about these issues at the end of the project". But the USA is the land of lawyers and class-action court cases. It ill behooves any real company to have a close association with any kick-starter style operation. Indeed, even from the POV of legal financial investment, most established companies that considered kickstarters either decided against, or rapidly dropped their kickstarter after a few days.
Carmack was a prize idiot when he suggested he could do VR for pennies when the biggest companies had repeatedly failed with their much more carefully engineered products. Even simple stereo 3D for computer games is in a primitive and most unhappy state- and you'd think you'd get a market for 3D games fully established before you'd worry about moving to the next stage that VR represents.
Just because you can cram more insider acronyms and names in a sentence it doesn't make it more informative or better readable than just using plain English. Think of your target audience. People that know every name and acronym in this summary will most likely have read this news well before it ever made the Slashdot front page. This means that your target audience will be those that not yet know about the existence of this device.
You could easily write something like this and actually inform people without the majority going TL;DR on you:
"Gaming web sites Neoseeker and the Verge are reporting that the community funded VR helmet Oculus Rift will no longer have support for the game Doom 3 BFG when the first units are shipped. In some good news to offset the bad, Valve will be releasing an Oculus ready version of Team Fortress 2 when the early edition of the Oculus Rift for developers ships. For those backers who are upset about not having Doom 3 BFG edition support on launch of the Oculus Rift, they are offering the following options: '$20 Steam Wallet credit ... $25 Oculus Store credit ... or a a full refund for your pledge.'"
That took all of 5 minutes to edit and every nub and their mum will more or less gather what it's about. That's the difference between an article with hardly any news worthiness and something that might draw the interest of most people reading the summary. As a writer, which one would you prefer?
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
I was on the verge of googling it, but then i thought, "eh, i don't care enough, but maybe someone will describe it in the comments."
This is the issue. If the writer doesn't care enough to write properly and explain things, like what a completely arbitrary and obscure name is, then I really don't care enough to bother reading his tripe.
You must be VERY new here. Next you'll be mentioning Slashdot's "editor" staff, which has never actually existed.
It's not "losing Doom 3 BFG support," it just won't be ready at release, and therefore can't be included in the initial package sent out with dev kits.
As someone who worked extensively with VR HMD's (Head mounted displays) and various tracking devices through the 90's (including owning and operating a network gaming center with VR equipment), I can say that in my experience the best HMD I used was a NON-stereo device which used a single high rez (at the time) LCD display. The helmet also had a six axis tracker which had software that emulated mouse movements, so the thing worked with ANY FPS type game. Doom/Quake/Wolfenstein (!) all were great fun, and the experience was quite "immersive" once you realized how to use the HMD properly-- many people, when putting on the HMD, stand there with their head tilted at an awkward angle while playing. I would instruct people to move their entire bodies around as if actually walking around in a 3D space-- i.e. you come to a corner in the game, lean over and "peek" around the edge to see what's there.... it worked... I think the Oculus product is probably great, but if it has some "proprietary" system which doesn't allow off-the-shelf games to work with it without modification, they're most likely gonna have issues selling the thing... sure, a game with added 3D support is fine, but it needs to work with games that don't have that support as well.
To play with an Oculus Rift, I'll just lie down on the fucking tracks.