Valve extensively dabbled with AR games in the pre-Index times and ultimatly those efforts resulted in a spinn-off company that failed. Valve probably made the right call to not persue this further.

The promise of AR seems to be mostly outside of gaming, so why would Valve as a pure gaming company be interested in that?

I think their open approach to software and hardware and the extension slot in the Frame will lead to it being a nice option for AR researchers and tinkerers, but I think it is unrealistic to expect that innovation to come from Valve itself.

SteamOS is arch based, but not arch. We will see how far this will affect upstream, but since SteamOS mainly focusses on Flatpak for apps, there is no real need for a huge ARM repo.

The exciting part is the software (open ecosystem, native Linux, FOVeated streaming). That they chose well tuned but not high-end hardware at a hopefully reasonable price-point is IMHO good for the by now relatively mature VR gaming space.

So uh, ahem.

Yes.

Valve can indeed count to three.

No, the Steam Controller doesn’t fully count. This is 2.5 at best.

And see how the Steam Frame only has two screens and not three?

No, they could compile Steam for native ARM and launch the x86 games via FEX from within.

Remains to be seen which way they go, but I see no big reason why they would not do that.

Valve Says No New First-party VR Game is in Development: Valve launched Half-Life: Alyx (2020) a few months after releasing Index, but no such luck for first-party content on Steam Frame.

Bummer…

On the Linus Tech Tips video they revealed that it is using the open-source FEX x86 emu (which development supported by Valve).

Looks pretty promising and no huge surprises. Will be interesting to see the price points of each.

This is really the best news announced today: Native Linux on the Steam Frame (and not Android)! The open-source x86 on ARM emus are good enough for gaming, so that should be fine for legacy VR titles.

It looks fine as in the default Piefed theme, yes. But they used to have a very nice custom theme.

Their theme broke with the update?

Hmm, I guess it depends on the price then. Thanks for the summary.

In related news, the excellent Homeworld 1 &2 remaster is currently 90% off on Steam.

Anyone knows if it is actually good? After the Homeworld3 flop I am a bit hesitant to try.

Probably? I have not tried it myself to be honest.

I am not sure how intercompatible the modules are. It might be that you have to chose between them.

It is a modular system that includes a module for microblogging. But it can also be turned into something else.

Recent models run surprisignly well on CPUs if you have sufficient regular RAM. You can also use a low VRAM GPU and offload parts to the CPU. If you are just starting out and want to play around I would try that first. 64gb system RAM is a good amount for that.

It also further links to another issue about individually blocking users and communities. Apparently that is quite inefficient in the current version, so maybe that adds to your problem?

What you can try is to clear your browser cache for the main domain. In the past there was a bug in Lemmy that caused Firefox based browsers to accumulate many gigabytes of cache data and that slowed down the loading of the page significantly. In the latest version there are some fixes for this and it shouldn’t effect app usage, but I suspect this problem still persists to some extend.

Aside from general issues others have mentioned, our instance (slrpnk.net) is seeing some especially high database load in the last couple of days and I also noticed the subscribed page to be even slower than usual. I tried to figure out what it causing it, but so far there is no clear smoking gun, but I suspect some AI scrapers found a way to target the Lemmy API directly so our current scraper protections for the webinterface are inadequate.