oculink?

i met my beautiful heavenly angel soulmate wife there :) ive never known a kinder; more selfless and generous person than her- and we've been very happily married for 2yrs now; we're not anything like youd probably imagine ppl from there are like; we're mostly pretty normal; just a bit broken by different things in life- but what brought us together is we love in the same all consuming overwhelming way; most people just cant accept that kind of love much less give it; but we drown ourselves in it everyday

my wife just got us both quest 3s's for valentines so we could go to a virtual mini concert together on vrchat; we also have been exploring various user made worlds there; including places ported from games from my childhood like phantasy star online (theres even a vr playable implimentation of the basic gameplay); its been amazing fun and really a special experience to be in those spaces physically with my heavenly wife; i wish we had met back then; but she was a toddler in russia at the time

vrchat is what people actually want to go to

i was pretty impressed by it but my wife was semi-disgusted; which is funny to me because shes loved most of the little occasional ai/mixed art experiments ive done; even one that was a img2img picture of us in a pretty fall park date setting i thought the resident rvil and assasins creed shadows stuff looked the best it did an incredible job on the trees in the background in the high up forest shot; still looking very much like original but with far more realistic lighting that would simply not be possible by conventional means in any existing engine i dont think its even necessarily just re-rendering frames like a filter i think its doing it at the shader level because all the vectors and other info is involved; its not the same as just pitting out a random image; and most of the character closeups looked convincing snd good to me; but some were weird and offputting too; i think this kind of thing really has to be tuned carefully maybe if you could only apply the effect to certain classes of objects in the scene and it was very tunable; which it sounds like thats what theyre trying to offer with their toolkit; this could also enable some very unique and never before seen art styles and effects etc; with far less work; and possibly eventually with far less demand on the hardware this is not quite the same as ai video generation stuff; and if you can integrate your own training assets you coukd customize it even further consider how amazing the order: 1866 on ps4 looked; atleast the characters in cutscenes; we get that now in realtime i understqnd peoples fears and disgust but i think most of it is just blanket ai hate like usual; and if that were less prevelant and extreme people might have more nuanced opinions of this tech (also if ai wasnt killing accessibility to hardware with the chip crisis) im interested to see it in non photoreal games; and i think if they had actually showed some game development integration of this stuff and the tools they have for developers to tune it- maybe there would be dlightly less backlash; bc most ppl will just dismiss this as enslopification even if it atleast in some situations can deliver really beautiful results (like those trees)

my wife and i play infinity nikki and every month incredibly detailed and beautiful fashions are added to the game; the most elaborate (and thus most work and talent that took to make by a team of probably dozens of people) can only be gotten by the gacha system; you pay about $12 for 10 pulls; and you must acquire all 10 pieces of the outfit to fully unlock it including its special ability(might be a movement boost or something that makes one small part of the game more convenient; like say a screen clearing attack); the majority of what drops are duplicates of things you already got from previous attempts; those duplicates turn into points which can be exchanged for a crafting or upgrade materials; you wont get duplicates of the 2 outfits on the "banner" (featured stuff your trying to get) until you completed it; and the duplicates of the high level outfit (5*) are required; in a full second copy; to unlock the final evolution of said outfit which is even more elaborate with extra effects etc vs the other 2 recolors which you get simply from doing enough pulls generally by about 120-160 pulls depending on luck you have completed the 5* and also 1 or 2 of the 4*; you also get other bonuses every 10-20 pulls like makeup and a version of the outfit for your cat companion in the game; plus a famcy temporary placeable interactive object which can be used for taking photos or putting in your private island this totals to like $150 for a single 5*; my wife is our only income as im quite disabled; and for mosr of last year each month both of us would pick 1 5* to get and go for as long as it took you also get rolls or diamonds which convert to them (120?=1 pull) from doing the story content; sidequests; minigames etc that are added each month and the daily rewards for login and play; if you keep up with that stuff it can be enough to get a 5* every other month; but there are limits on how much you get for free there are like a dozen kinds of currencies for different things and its confusing at firsr to learn what theyre all for; theres also a shop that has updated accessories and other stuff every month including a few low value less fancy outfits you can get for a few $; but those arent buyable with the freely earnable currency its pretty crazy dropping $300/mo or more so we are cutting back this year after the current chinese newyear update passes in a few days; its a singleplayer game but it has co op; its really an incredibly beautiful world and the most amazing art in the fashions that ive ever seen; puts hollywood and real fashion brands to shame; they are so creative and delicate and varied; from big poofy flowing dresses to cute miniskirt jpop idol outfits; and all that recenue lets the developer fund a huge team doing major fully voiced (in 4 languages) updates every month; plus a bigger one each year; ive never seen a game offer so much at such a pace all the beauty and making fashions together to take photos with the elaborage photo mode together; it keeps us coming back; and the memories are worth the money; but we should be a bit more choosey; we have like over 20k pieces now after the first year of the game so its alot to work with to mix and match new styles; you can also save your photos in the open world and other players will see a icon where you took it and the can click and see your photo and like it; friend you; or even refreate the exact angle and pose and camera settings and take a picture with your clone ghost; which then gets added on kinda like a reply its fun and beautiful and it lets us go places i probably never could physically with how disabled i am im not trying to be an ad here just express the value proposition and jow most of these gacha games operate (most others give characters/skins or weapons instead of elaborare mix/match fashion)

why dont they sue infinity nikki instead that takes $300/mo from me and my wife why dont they sue riot games and sega abd every gacha game on the market why pick on valve and counterstrike; valve is a really tiny company that has only done good for gaming

the writings on the wall

if its not convertible why would you want to use touch unless your in bed or just scrolling something

my wife and i spend hundreds every month on fashion in Infinity Nikki; a fashion open world rpg; it has some of the most beautiful outfits ive ever seen in ny life and the most intricately detailed clothing ive ever seen in a game; easily hollywood level of detail in the designs its a singleplayer game but has some limited co op with photos together and exploring the big beautiful world and doing minigames; platforming challengine; a small amount of fairly easy combat stuff; etc we enjoy it alot; theres tons of new fully voiced stiry content and new areas every month with new outfits to slot machine gacha for; i think its worth the money its just like another bill; we dont watch tv (except the olympics and startrek) but we do spend about as much or more on having pretty outfits in a very relaxing game; though the daily stuff to keep up with free rewards can be tedius at times im sure thr crowd here would think us nuts and consider all of that worthless; but i see it as just investing in a kind of art; i may not "own" it forever; but for the few years we will play this game together its worth it and keeps us coming back because sll the money they make from selling the pretty dresses funds an incredible amount of top quality content that vastly surpasses most similar games in adjacent genres; theres really not anything quite like it and im grateful we can enjoy it together

can we move the taskbar back up there too please

this seems unreasonable? the court decided that because terms of service agreements im guessing; but all uses and communities are not the same thing what if this was a subreddit of a charity or something? or a person or a tiny religion? how do you copyright or trademark something as nebulous as a community? its not a website or brand its just a forum that has a name

fucking uk please dont enshittify steam you already make the whole world click annoying cookie popups most people get most steam games on frequent sales at fantastic prices and that ends up helping the developer alot by getting them new players who then get their friends to get the game too; some at full price steam is the only non-enshittified platform of its kind; yes theres lots of slop low effort asset flip games but its easy to find what you want and even some of those asset flips can be legitimately good its hugely hugely democratized access to the market of players; and tons of tiny indie games have found thousands or millions of players to experience incredibly diverse games and worlds and stories; so make great games would never have reached what they are today without steam; like undertale/deltarune and countless others from solo developers or very small teams; these tiny games dont have publishr support do they cant go on other platforms often times; until after enough success and revenue on steam allows the developer to afford everything needed to port to another platform; obviously across other pc stores like egs/gog/winstore and just selling on a website is easier to do but that also incurs cost and none of those have anywhere near the market of vast players that steam does is steam a monopoly? almost; but occasionally a monopoly is actually good for the customer and the products on offer because valve has stayed very tightly focused on delivering the best games buying and distribution service and app possible; along with new hardware like steam deck to bring those games to more players and people who otherwise wouldnt get a gaming pc due to the much higher costs vs locked down consoles this seems like some advacacy group just trying to make a big buck how would unlocked dlc even work? product codes? that complicates things alot for the developers of those games just to get a handful of sales on another platform that will probably shutdown in a few yrs with no users egs only survives because fortnite but its still a lousy store and app compared to steam; gog survives because of its focused niche on drm free actual ownership and retro title fixes to work on modern windows (with mixed results) steam is all that keeps relatively open pc gaming standing; it would all but die off without it; and you can bet nvidia and microsoft and meta and amazon would love to move everyones games to laggy artifacted cloud streaming with unplayable latency for any genre thats frame sensitive

this sounds interesting to me what if we built simple simulations of biochemical reactions into how the models reach their conclusions and make connections could we then better imitate/simulate larger processes like emotion and get better results; and tune for things we want like ethics

is this some different matt walsh? shouldnt the hateful maga one be thrilled to see righties take over media?