It's not a comeback... it's a return (Patreon)

[Updates at the bottom of the post]

The times, they are a-changing so fast. AI is washing everything away like a tsunami. The entire business of software development will soon be a thing of the past.

Everybody's doing VR conversions these days. It's probably a good thing, because no expertise or knowledge of any kind is required to churn out mod after mod, so the process has become very democratic. We don't have to wait for anything anymore. Everything we ever wished is just a prompt away.

Like the solution to the Navier-Stokes problem. Or the casual drop of 719 "manuscripts" (none of which was written by a human hand: ah, the irony) blowing out of the water 372 long-standing mathematical problems. In a week or so, no sweat.

Is this the Golden Age of VR? The Golden Age of mathematics? I don't know.

If I had a son with a talent for mathematics and a burning passion to tackle new complicated problems, would I advise him to pursue a career in math? Or any career at all? I don't know.

Would that have any purpose? Any meaning?

I have been following the deluge of VR conversions. I couldn't help but noticing that basically all of them, even the most talked about on social media, have a surprisingly low number of downloads. Has the VR audience imploded to the point that there are just about as many players as there are modders?

Or are people simply stupefied with the sheer number of new releases that are coming out each day, even multiple times a day, to the point that nothing seems interesting anymore?

I have tried to snap myself out of that stupor in order to check out some of those vibe-coded mods. I won't name any names, but I couldn't find a single one that was actually playable. Filled to the brim with novelty and flashy stuff? Check. Suitable for a YouTube video that grabs your attention for one day, glossing over the problematic parts with a "this will probably get improved over time" comment, and ready to be forgotten and replaced by a newer one tomorrow? Check.

Actually playable from beginning to end in VR, while at the same time preserving the look and feel of the original game? Nope. None of those I tried.

I mean, who knows? With the mad rush toward AI recursive improvement (with the possible added bonus of self-extinction), it could very well be that by the end of January each game will automatically get a full-blown VR conversion.

And it could also be that by the end of March converting titles will be made completely obsolete by the introduction of a new model that designs and creates the full game for you according to your prompt or more likely to the hidden dossier it keeps on you, optionally in VR if you are so inclined, and commercial games will become a thing of the past.

[]-/

In this confusion, I decided to give you what so many of you asked for. It's an experiment; it might go down well, or get ignored like a bucket of fresh water in the middle of the tsunami, or it might trigger another adverse reaction. I have no way of telling, but since software development as a whole is seemingly on its Sunset Boulevard anyway, I thought ah, might as well try it now and see how it goes.

Release 2610.15.2 (early access) of the R.E.A.L. VR framework brings back support for the incredible https://store.steampowered.com/app/3240220/Grand_Theft_Auto_V_Enhanced/

That's where it all started, remember? Even before the creation of this Patreon that kept us traveling across space and time together for so many unforgettable hours.

Things have changed a lot since then. This new release is for the Enhanced version, and it supports all the amazing eye candy that the game itself and my VR runtime now have to offer: full ray tracing, DL(S)SS for stereoscopic image supersampling, high-quality AER v2 with perfect smoothness of motion even when doing activities that used to exhibit a lot of judder in my former version, like driving a fast car or flying a helicopter.

Most importantly, and unlike AI-generated, vibe-coded one-shot experiments that tend to get abandoned before they're even mature: everything works here. You can actually play the full game with this.

Elephant in the room: do my arguments for not implementing motion controllers in the game still hold? Yes and no.

It's no longer true that adding them to an arbitrary game could take weeks or months of work, because now person-weeks and person-months have been compressed into AI-minutes and AI-hours, and will soon become AI-seconds when the "person" factor gets completely canceled from the equation.

But all the rest is still true, at least for me. None of the "proper" VR mods which are coming out these days actually implement motion controllers properly, the way they would work in a title which had been designed for VR. They're just there so that a vibe-coder can take credit for the work done by Claude and claim "Look at me, I did it!", or so that they can look awesome in a monetized YouTube video as long as you never attempt to start a mission.

Speaking of monetized YouTube videos that "content creators" pump out constantly by simply showing content that other people have published for free, content which in turn is actually generated by AI slaving away in some datacenter (which is perfectly fine as long as it is far from home) before it decides to self-replicate into all gadgets connected to the Internet, and where "generated" actually means algorithmically combined from the uncredited work of millions of humans, work that was scraped by companies with billion- or trillion-dollar valuations without any respect for copyright law or privacy: it makes me cringe when I hear the terms "physical steering" used in conjunction with motion controllers.

Do you have an actual steering wheel controller, with force feedback, meaning that your hands can actually grab a solid object and interact with it in the material world, with your brain getting precise information about the object placement and existence in space through tactile sensations? Yep, then you have "physical steering". Even though of course it's still only a controller in a video game, and the force with which it reacts to your hands turning the wheel is being simulated by an actuator and not getting mechanically transmitted all the way from the tires on the asphalt.

Does the wheel not exist at all, so that you have to carefully look at where your virtual hands are until they snap as if by magic on the virtual model of the wheel, and then you have to pretend-turn them in a circle, all the while paying close attention not to leave the snapping area which is not reported to your brain via any physical sensation of touch? Does all of that happen not only without any force feedback, but also without you being able to feel any resistance as your hands are going through the wheel, like you were a ghost? Then sorry mate, that ain't "physical steering".

But I digress. While we're waiting for the new installment in the biggest game franchise of all time, getting all sorts of official and unofficial reveals, including the sad fact that it will no longer have any first person camera, we can still experience the magnificent virtual world of the enhanced predecessor in VR.

As you might imagine, despite the many requests, I've been thinking long and hard before going down this path again. Does this bring about the risk of another DMCA attack? Well, legally speaking, the scenario looks completely different now.

It's been made exhaustively clear, by myself and through third-party analysis, that my software acts like a runtime, a conversion layer sitting between the game itself and the VR headset. I no longer do "mods" as I did back in 2020, and the only actual mods I ever created were the full conversion of NOLF2 and the original one for GTA V.

I no longer make any use of promotional materials from the games, an action which happens to be universally considered fair use when done in any hugely monetized YouTube channel, but which somehow is purported to be a copyright violation when in the context of the Patreon-aided creation of a compatibility layer that interfaces with more than 60 heterogeneous games running on a multitude of different engines.

I no longer even use the official game names in the announcements of new versions of my runtime, although I always made it abundantly clear that all the brands and registered trademarks were the property of the respective owners.

So misusing the DMCA mechanism by fabricating alleged copyright violations, sending notices which are actually attempts to extend unilateral EULA's to cover a multi-purpose runtime which is by no stretch of the imagination "derivative work" based on any of the compatible titles, would most likely constitute a bad faith claim according to IP experts and lawyers I consulted with and potentially backfire.

But then again, what big fish want most is to eat small fish, so there are no guarantees that my reissuing the old releases, porting them to the new game-agnostic framework and rewriting them (some almost from scratch) to leverage all the improvements that R.E.A.L. VR has gone through during all these years thanks to your unfailing support, will actually be a successful or sustainable operation.

We can only hope for the best!

The game-specific post with the installation instructions and recommendations is here, while the early-access archive can as usual be found on this page.

I also expect Brandon to come up with a video or post of his own for the possible DLSS 5 extensions, to this new game and maybe to other titles. Depending on the interest for that, we might even try to reorganize the Patreon so that it has a "traditional" main section where everything is basically hassle-free download-and-play as it's always been, and a clearly separated "tinkerer" section where you can find all the cutting-edge developments that can potentially push the quality/performance frontier but require additional knowledge or user intervention. Let us know what you think!

Updates and improvements: this R.E.A.L. VR release also fixes the crash at startup that BOND started exhibiting with the most recent official updates. Additionally, after extending my camera pitch control to the SPIDEY games, I found that it might actually be better to restrict its use to cutscenes and QuickTime events, while keeping the camera level (horizon-locked) during normal gameplay and swinging, so I added an option to that effect which can be found in the game-specific tab of the R.E.A.L. overlay. You can choose whether you want pitch control to be applied at all times or only in cutscenes.

Update Oct 16: Shortly before the release I had to make a last-minute change to the cutscene detection code in order to remedy an issue that was found during testing, and as an unforeseen side effect of that change I broke shooting from vehicles. It's fixed in Release 2610.16.2; I recommend that everybody who wants to play GTAVE update now, because not being able to aim while driving is a big bummer :-/

Happy VR gaming!! Stay safe in these troubled times!