GC has a lot of issues, especially in engine level code, but in practice every game I've worked on or shipped has had at least one garbage collector running for UI or gameplay code. Lua, Actionscript (Scaleform), Unreal Script, Javascript, managed C#. Every game had GC performance issues as well, and we wrote code to generate minimal or no garbage
They are sold at a loss or at best at cost. $200 is possibly extreme, but I couldn't find a BOM estimate for Quest, so it could be much higher than that. This isn't unusual, most game consoles are sold at a loss initially. Also, even though I said "Quest" in my first post I meant "Quest 2" as the original Quest is being phased slowly out, and Quest 2 has sold significantly more units. The current retail price of the 128 GB model is $299, and 256 GB model is $399. So if you're bothered by my price difference assume I was talking about Quest 2 256 GB sold at cost. Regardless, it would cost them more than they want to spend. If you watched the keynote yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg specifically mentioned not wanting to lose too much money on hardware while still selling it at the lowest price that makes sense... Giving away hardware for free is the complete opposite of that strategy.
It seems like you aren't associated with Epic? What's the long term outcome here? Have Epic take your PRs? Get hired\acquihired (it's unclear if you are a company or a group of hobbyists)? It seems like when WebGPU is production ready Epic will support it as well as WebXR...
Epic's goal is very obviously to disrupt Steam and app stores as well... Ignore all of this if you actually are an Epic employee of course :)
Just to clarify, we're a funded startup and we've already had calls with them showcasing our platform. The goal is to get our SDK and tools in the hand of every UE developer out there.
Quest is basically a game console and not a peripheral. Even "dumb" non-standalone HMDs like Index have complex software stacks for tracking, input and rendering (compositor). HN loves the narrative of a VR device being "just" a monitor but that's really not the case. If this rule is applied to VR as it exists in 2021 (not 2013 DK1 which kind of was a 2nd monitor + HID) then it has to apply to all PCs, game consoles, smartphones, IOT devices etc. I'm not saying that legislation shouldn't happen but it does have ramifications for users and for security. On Quest you could do this, but social features and store might stop working at some point, and newer games and applications would definitely stop working, especially ones that use new features implemented in software like hand tracking.
TLDR this legislation could be fine but it would have to target Windows, Android, Steam, Playstation, Mac OS, etc and has ramifications that eventually software might just stop working. It might accelerate the push to move everything to the cloud also and make all devices dumb terminals that play video.
I believe this is what OP means by "covert" levels. There are no official levels but you were equivalent to senior principal even though you had no official level. Either all ICs are doing senior principal level work, which probably can't be true because no org has that many jobs with that scope of work and generally you're talking about cross org, architecture level work, multiple "lower level" engineers need to support and implement that work at that level. All flat organizations have implicit hierarchies, especially once they grow to a certain size
Their claim was that the 20% raises were explained by the person jumping a “secret” level, and my counterclaim was that that wasn’t the cause, because one year everyone in my group got a 20% raise and also because I didn’t have any levels, secret or otherwise, left to go.
VR with pass-through might still win this because it's more practical for work scenarios. Arguably this is still AR, but subtly different than HMDs with transparent displays.
Playstation uses PSSL, which is basically HLSL with some slightly different semantics. It's possible to compile hlsl as pssl with a single (small) header file with some preprocessor defines in it. PSSL and HLSL are not developed in lock step though so all valid PSSL is not valid HLSL and vice a versa even without defines. It's not possible to actually get into details without breaking NDA and I haven't actively done Sony development since PS4 days (5-6 years ago)
Vulkan supports both officially, although GLSL support is better. To be fair Vulkan kind of assumes the game engine shader compiler does most of the heavy lifting and using either glsl or hlsl directly in a small Vulkan application is a pain compared to OpenGL or DirectX.
Miegakure was first shown at GDC in 2009. The first blog entry is also April 2009, so not as early as 2003, but it definitely began development in the late 2000s. It's been at least 12 years in development
I can't recall where I first saw it, I think it was linked by this Linux gaming site (happy penguin?), or maybe it was some gamedev site. Anyway it might have been 2009, both years seem equally forever ago to me.
