Steam Frame (Valve Index 2)

I think a lot depends on what Valve want to achieve. There are times when companies are seeking market share, others when it is profit or is it simply to hold retention and keep a foot in the market.

Personally I think its the latter and I do agree VR is niche and even then remains split between affordable and HQ.
 
BigBANGtheory said:
I think a lot depends on what Valve want to achieve. There are times when companies are seeking market share, others when it is profit or is it simply to hold retention and keep a foot in the market.

Personally I think its the latter and I do agree VR is niche and even then remains split between affordable and HQ.
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The problem with the 'affordable' VR headsets is that most of the users are kids and all they play is Gorilla Tag. They don't buy games, and the poor discoverability on the Meta store is making it even harder for developers to make money.
 
i dont think valve know what the product is.
i feel they put it together with a general idea,
but now expecting people to find the niche or were it sits in the market.
 
LostCorpse said:
i dont think valve know what the product is.
i feel they put it together with a general idea,
but now expecting people to find the niche or were it sits in the market.
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It's got an obvious VR as a gaming screen for 2D games focus, due to the way the controllers are a split gamepad.

Ironically that doesn't interest me at all.
 
Ravenger said:
It's got an obvious VR as a gaming screen for 2D games focus, due to the way the controllers are a split gamepad.

Ironically that doesn't interest me at all.
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For me that screams a need for colour passthrough, just like media viewing on the q3. Just seems odd not to have it, can't imagine it would have raised costs that significantly?
 
Unseul said:
For me that screams a need for colour passthrough, just like media viewing on the q3. Just seems odd not to have it, can't imagine it would have raised costs that significantly?
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Couldn't agree more. Apparently the reason they don't is a) black and white cameras are better for tracking and b) they used a more powerful phone CPU which doesn't support as many cameras as the lower power XR specific chips.
 
Ravenger said:
It's got an obvious VR as a gaming screen for 2D games focus, due to the way the controllers are a split gamepad.
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on the surface yes.
but it gives a lot of extra flexibility and repairability options also.
not every game or app needs 2 controllers or all the buttons.
plus look at Nintendo wii or the switch
 
Ravenger said:
Couldn't agree more. Apparently the reason they don't is a) black and white cameras are better for tracking and b) they used a more powerful phone CPU which doesn't support as many cameras as the lower power XR specific chips.
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But it's already been stated that you can add more cameras in the future due to excess capacity and the module option?

Tracking in the dark is nice, but far far more niche than decent mixed reality. Even the simple act of grabbing my controllers after putting the headset on, is far superior with the q3.
 
If it ever got colour passthrough I'd consider it but with black and white, definite no as I use passthrough a lot. The Index also had an expansion port, like the Frame will have, but the Index got nothing made for that port afaik.

Even if the SoC on the Frame can't do full on MR but can do colour passthrough, it not having it is an own goal imo. Makes me question why its not there, they haven't saved much by having a black and white camera as opposed to colour.

I just think Valve didn't think there was a need for it, that it's not their intended audience, there are no MR games on Steam etc and MR is still new and a niche of a niche, I love it though!
 
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Ravenger said:
The problem with the 'affordable' VR headsets is that most of the users are kids and all they play is Gorilla Tag. They don't buy games, and the poor discoverability on the Meta store is making it even harder for developers to make money.
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yeah see that's what I thought as well but social media is plagued with content creators and devs invested in the Quest platform drum beating out a different message along the lines of 'all VR belongs to us' :)
 
As I suspected, for games developed for Touch controllers they map the dpad to the X & Y buttons. Not ideal as a dpad just doesn't feel the same as separate buttons, but I guess you don't tend to mash VR controller buttons like you do on a regular gamepad, at least in VR games.
 
melmac said:
interesting, from that it looks like they are encouraging developers to develop their games for Windows X86 and let FEX and Proton do the heavy lifting rather than make a mobile optimised game.
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not quiet how i interpreted it, they are leting the devs decied how they want to code it. see link

What games can run standalone on Steam Frame (Steamworks Documentation)

partner.steamgames.com partner.steamgames.com

We think customers are better off if a developer can focus on the one best version of their game, rather than making and maintaining many separate builds-- especially if one build ends up as a second-class experience missing some testing or updates. We've spent a lot of effort making it as easy as possible to run that best version on Steam Frame. For most developers that probably means running Windows x86 via Proton and FEX.

For VR developers that have already spent the effort to make a mobile optimized version of their game for other hardware (typically Android Arm64), we think it makes sense to run that version on Steam Frame.

Steam Frame natively runs a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 (Arm64) chip on SteamOS (Linux Arch-based) and includes a range of compatibility layers for other Operating Systems and architectures.

Windows via Proton
Windows games can be run via Proton. Proton is a compatibility layer that allows Windows games to run on Linux by using a modified version of Wine and a collection of high-performance graphics API implementations such as dxvk which translates DirectX to Vulkan (Steam Frame's native graphics API).

Android via Lepton
Android games can be run via Lepton. Lepton is a compatibility layer that allows Android games to run on Linux. It is implemented as a container to minimize overhead.

x86 via FEX
x86 (32-bit and 64-bit) via FEX. FEX translates x86 compiled games to Arm64 instructions, but forwards API calls to native host system libraries like OpenGL or Vulkan to reduce emulation overhead, and leverages code caching to minimize in-game stuttering as much as possible.
 
LostCorpse said:
not quiet how i interpreted it, they are leting the devs decied how they want to code it. see link

What games can run standalone on Steam Frame (Steamworks Documentation)

partner.steamgames.com partner.steamgames.com

We think customers are better off if a developer can focus on the one best version of their game, rather than making and maintaining many separate builds-- especially if one build ends up as a second-class experience missing some testing or updates. We've spent a lot of effort making it as easy as possible to run that best version on Steam Frame. For most developers that probably means running Windows x86 via Proton and FEX.

For VR developers that have already spent the effort to make a mobile optimized version of their game for other hardware (typically Android Arm64), we think it makes sense to run that version on Steam Frame.
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The opening phrase is "we think customers are better off if" Which is encouraging them to do a certain thing.

I am not saying developers aren't free to decide whatever they want to do, but the opening sentence is encouraging them to develop the best version of their game and not have multiple builds and, as stated by Valve, for most developers that's going to be Win x86.
 
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