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Hey!  I talked about this game a little earlier in the introductions, and just wanted to say that it was finally released today.  It's an interactive exploration of an eccentric town that was founded by witches in the Peruvian desert.  It has a photo-conversation mechanic, where you take pictures of things and show them to characters, who describe them in a free-associative way.

Here it is:  http://store.steampowered.com/app/406730

Cathedral-in-the-Clouds is a digital art project (not a game —at all).
A cathedral in virtual reality forms the home of an ever expanding collection of virtual dioramas intended for contemplation. Many of these dioramas are inspired by religious imagery but the experience does not require faith. The dioramas are individually distributed, for free, via a variety of media.

The project is  explained in detail on the Kickstarter page.

Please back this project and/or spread the word!

Style over substance, always. If I wanted substance I wouldn't be reading/watching/playing fiction.

And, it's out!

You can find it here: toburninmemory.com.

[Agree.]

There are many traditional highly stylized forms for art to take. But to begin with these forms are very old, and have evolved slowly over time, and is what gives them both their legitimacy and allows their audience to appreciate them (literacy.) And to end with, anything can be adapted into these forms, so on some level they are unimportant, and perhaps what matters more is whether a particular audience will be able to appreciate them or not.

I like an understated visual style myself. This is so there is no possibility that style washes out what is communicated.

I read of hundreds of new games every year. I don't really feel like toiling with any of them. I think the main reason why is video games tend to treat novel visual styling as a gimmick, a way to get you to look at them. In theory we are supposed to celebrate this exploration of possibilities, but to me I feel like this is stealing the focus away from where it belongs, which I believe is the message, or the juxtaposition and composition of ideas (for me it goes cleverness, synthesis, everything else.)


Agree. Looks are hurting this medium.
Disagree. Games should be loud and proud.


PS: I don't mean focusing on visuals. I mean if every single movie used a different kind of graphic to sell itself, would we still take them seriously? If you want to show off novel graphical effects, that's what the old demo scene was all about. I feel like "indie games" are more guilty of this than anything else. And I feel pretty strongly about this, so I want to post it up here where people might read it and think about it. Perhaps this boils down to selling products with screenshots, and in a way proves the entire enterprise is wall-to-wall devoid of real substance; perhaps even doomed on some level.

["It is important to notice that a change of 10% in an object´s dimension is clearly perceivable at first sight, as it is the overall distortion with a 60° visual angle or the maximum punctual distortion with a 50° visual angle. To avoid this excessive distortion, the visual angle of the observer should be always under 40°, and the closer it is to 30°, the better."]

Funny,

Here (https://youtu.be/Y2gTSjoEExc?t=2m50s) is an illustration of what I'm trying to describe in Reply #5 (just above) THAT I just happened to watch today/the next day! It's so weird it seems like cookies are tracking everything I do, but no, just cosmic weirdness.


EDITED: For the record I still can't tell how much of my uneasiness is this versus probable distortion. I've tried doing experiments outdoors and the video game still feels off. What I'm playing with is the same thing more or less, except looking up and down, which feels far less intuitive...

Okay, here is a disappointing answer. I find that if I use a view angle that is say 10 or so, this final distortion goes away, and it looks realistic. The only problem is this is unplayable, and almost feels like an orthographic projection. It's disappointing. It feels like the projection matrix method is either flawed, pick your poison, or maybe using a flat screen is flawed and only an infinitely small angle is correct. I know photographs can appear distorted depending on the lenses but they don't seem to be so treacherous as this. I'm so disappointed with these results, I wonder if there are alternatives...


EDITED: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective_projection_distortion#Mathematical_description

There is a table here that shows this relationship. Funnily it goes to 10 degrees where distortion is fairly minimal as I described. I wonder why looking up and down along poles brings out the distortion so acutely for me. I will be very happy if VR remedies this. Oh well, ignorance was bliss (on the bright side, VR is just around the corner. I really hope it does the trick.)

"It is important to notice that a change of 10% in an object´s dimension is clearly perceivable at first sight, as it is the overall distortion with a 60° visual angle or the maximum punctual distortion with a 50° visual angle. To avoid this excessive distortion, the visual angle of the observer should be always under 40°, and the closer it is to 30°, the better."

It's hard to tell people this sometimes, but often with software we find ourselves wishing for science fiction, or systems that won't be available for decades to come. Computers have only been around for 30 or 40 years however you count them, and they haven't changed much in all of that time.

I think everyone wants this outcome. It's just a hard problem. Quest3D sounds like an anomaly that is also a toy system, as these things tend to be. You may have been smarter to just have kept using Quest3D. I think publishing on many platforms is overrated, and people can find their way to a Windows system, or just do without X game until they can.

Quest3D would've forced you to continue acting in the space of artists instead of commercial video game makers, and I think it would've been healthier, especially if you'd known where you'd be years later after Sunset.

(I find that constraints is the secret to unleashing creativity. Quest3D could've been the perfect constraints. Fluxus made me wonder if https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluxus was still active.)

There is an interesting phenomenon that seems like more distortion to me, but the more I think about it, the more I think it must have more to do with the vestibular system being out of sync. It may be useful to distinguish between the two if so.

Basically IRL when you look up and down [I guess it's just part of how up is always up (relative to gravity I guess)] you see the lines that are moving because of perspective as staying put, but if you really pay attention (and maybe it helps to wear glasses) you can see that they are changing by a great degree. I don't think this happens at all in games, and probably doesn't happen with movies either if so. I wonder if it happens with VR or not. It seems like it WOULD since up remains up, which is also true for a monitor, but with head tracking the picture is in sync with your head, so it seems like it should work (and might even feel a little eerie at first.)


PS: For me the net result of this effect is it doesn't feel like perspective is changing as much as your view is just panning in 2D across a panorama. That is that's how it feels IRL, because you're always renegotiating up, so you don't see the relative changes of edges along the way.

I posted something and then removed it after I realized that the ideal ratio I'd found experimentally was 3:2. But although 2:1 is unacceptable, I still basically find 1.75:1 to be fine as long as the vertical is a hard 30 degrees. After doing the math for 1080 you end up with 1890x1080, which is virtually 1920x1080 (16:9.) So at hard 30 you squeak right in.


PS: I should put back that for the record I don't believe this can be cancelled or corrected on a flat screen (without introducing new problems; I'd expect curved lines or links of vertices that curl.)

No, the distortion is a well documented problem and it is very extreme distortion. It happens because if you draw a circle around the head in your graphic and expand it until the top and bottom of the display touch at two points on the edge of the circle, the display isn't curved so it causes distortion.

Ah, that. You could counter that using warped fragment sampling ( just like VR ). But you'd still need head tracking to determine the curvature accurately.