Happy 4th of July! (Patreon)

[Updates at the bottom of the post]

Even if you're not in the States, now you can have your very own fireworks!!! Just use your rocket launcher, or your plasma gun, or judiciously apply some amount of chainsaw to the demons until fireworks pop out of their chests []-D

Yes, you guessed right: v2607.4.2 Early Access of the R.E.A.L. VR framework supports https://store.steampowered.com/app/379720/DOOM/ also affectionately known to most players as DOOM (2016)!

I won't lie to you: it's gonna be a carnage, and it's gonna be fast, and brutal, and relentless, and all of that is gonna happen RIGHT IN YOUR FACE. Please don't choose this game if this is one of your first experiences in VR, haha.

I've fallen behind on tracking CD https://store.steampowered.com/app/3321460/Crimson_Desert/ because every time I have a new release ready for testing they seem to put out another patch. Now with v2607.4.2 Early Access you can safely update the game to their newest 1.13.00 version, which I hope will last at least until tomorrow morning.

And speaking of brutal and fast carnage: please be sure to check out the amazing new VR conversion released by Flat2VR Studios and Mutar!!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3844750/FlatOut_4_Total_Insanity_VR/

I have no affiliation with them, other than the fact they've always been very supportive of my work, but please, please, please for the love of God and all things holy and 3D, just buy the game! It's fun, it's one of the very few arcade racing games (not sims) that we have in VR, and they really knocked it out of the park by even releasing a PS VR 2 version!

But even more importantly, it's everything we as a community always asked from VR titles. The conversion is competently written by people who really understand how VR works and what the strong and weak points of the medium are. It's not a sloppy, half-assed port by some publisher who is not really interested in VR and just wants to cash out on every possible niche. It even supports motion controls. It has a very low price point. The developers listen to their user base and immediately implemented requests like compatibility with wheel controllers.

Yet (let me tell you, this saddens me to no end), the game is getting almost no coverage from the press and from YouTubers :-(

And though I have no official data on its sales and would be very happy to be proven wrong, SteamCharts lists it as having about 5 players worldwide (!) during the last month. In other words, nobody is buying it, and those few who have bought it are not playing it or talking about it.

What gives? When CDPR pulled their stunt on my supporter base, demanding immediate removal of Cyberpunk 2077 from my framework and persistently refusing to get into any kind of licensing agreement with me so that one of the most widely loved VR conversions on the Internet could continue to exist, thousands of VR enthusiasts screamed bloody murder and buried me under every possible insult/meme/verbal attack you can think of, and then some. It was all my fault.

Mods need to be free, they said. I should be sued into oblivion. I should be asking for donations, not support, because the proper way to do this kind of stuff is to get into an agreement with the publisher. And with motion controls! Otherwise it's utter crap.

Flat2VR did it the proper way, and I 100% side with them.

Yet the VR community is not buying the game and playing it?!? YouTubers who pretend to be about VR are not even covering the release? What is WRONG with you people? Put your money and your time where your mouth is. Instead of always whining and asking for more free stuff, show some support to the developers who are actually turning your dreams into reality. Okay, "virtual" reality, but you know what I mean []-)

This might sound like a rant, and people who are dead set against me will no doubt read it as further confirmation that I'm a clown. I don't care about that. But what I care about is VR not just surviving, but thriving as an artistic medium and a gaming paradigm, and that cannot happen if the fans don't pull together and show some appreciation and support for the people who share that same ideal.

Because if you don't have $20 to invest into rewarding and recognizing the brilliant work of both coders and business developers who worked their asses off to make a VR title as close to perfection as can humanly be, or if you have a public presence and cannot be bothered to yell from every rooftop until the title gets the public recognition it deserves and other publishers begin to feel the pressure to put out something similar themselves... if you are a "fan" and decide not to do any of those things, then you should not go around complaining that VR is dead. You are actively contributing to killing it.

Please don't do that. Don't kill it. It's already on extended life support. Don't pull the plug on it. I love it dearly. You love it. We love it. Don't kill it, please.

And don't hide behind the silliness of "mods must be free". This is not a mod. FlatOut 4 Total Insanity VR is a full-fledged honest-to-God conversion. You don't like my business model? Fine, here's a different one. Go for it. Show the world that you care. Not just on X and Reddit where your words just circle down into a perpetual, self-referencing, AI-spun whirlpool of doom. Use your real money and make your actions count in the real world. One way or the other, there must be a business model for VR to continue to exist.

[Update July 5. INDY: Release v2607.5.2 early access fixes INDY's black screen at startup.
ASW: The R.E.A.L. VR framework automatically disables Asynchronous Space Warp when available, because ASW is not compatible with alternate eye rendering and it causes more judder. I don't have any use cases where ASW offers benefits with R.E.A.L., but in case you want to suppress this automatic disabling for some reason, you can now add a NoAutoDisableASW=1 line to the [RVR] section of the .ini file. Make sure you know what you're doing if you change this setting: it is only meant for power users, and most players should be fine with the default behavior.]