July 22nd Ballers Event

[DeaconBlooze]

Big thanks to Chris and Chateen for opening their house. A great collection and great times! Really good to see everyone after my hiatus.

[Chris K]

You guys are the best. Thanks to everybody for making it a great night!

[ChrisS]

Thanks C&C. It was a really nice night. I really enjoyed it.


Thanks for letting me come to your house and letting me put a high score up on one of your machines

[ralphwiggum]

Results

Side Game
Captain Fantastic- Jimmy L. ($20)

Main Event
1. Neo S.- 22 ($70)
2. Sean S.- 22 ($40)
3. Tim E.- 20 ($30)
6. Jimmy L.- 20
6. Brodde P.- 20
6. Tim N.- 20
9. Garrett P.- 18
9. Chris K.- 18
9. Jon Z.- 18
11. Tully- 14
11. Dave B.- 14
12. Chris S.- 12
15. Stephanie- 10
15. Mark S.- 10
15. Chateen K.- 10
16. Dave M.- 8

[Chris K]

Glad you could make it, Chris! I thought something was on fire when you yelled down the hall. I should have known.

[ralphwiggum]

Had a great time last night. Thanks for opening your doors up to a bunch of DIKs. you have amassed a great collection in a relatively short amount of time. Kudos.....

The VR stuff is awesome, thanks for letting me try it out. I definitely have some VR decisions to make in the near future.

[Chris K]

Thanks, most of it is from you guys here.

I wish I had more VR stuff to demo... I just got the new headset a few days ago, and all the old stuff I used to show people on the old DK2 doesn't work on the new one. (Older API.) There's so much more out there, I'm just scratching the surface. I don't even have the wheel hooked up yet!

[ChateenK]

Thanks everyone for coming over. I had a ton of fun and would love to host again. I'm going to enjoy my new diet of pizza leftovers and chips and Twinkies for the next week.

[epthegeek]

Oooh, which VR setup do you have Chris?

I tried out the Vive at a meetup at Scott Danesi's and liked it a lot - but don't have a PC beefy enough to drive it, so I went the cheap route and picked up PSVR since I had the PS4 already. The tracking isn't as solid, but for 1/5 the cash outlay I'm ok with it.

[ralphwiggum]

I believe he gas the latest Oculus (sp?).... Facebook just dropped the price of that one down to $400, which is why I am super tempted.

[epthegeek]

I believe he gas the latest Oculus (sp?).... Facebook just dropped the price of that one down to $400, which is why I am super tempted.

Ah nice. The Oculus is still optically tracked - so if you go that route, be sure to get the 3rd 'sensor' for behind you to do real room scale. A guy I know has both the vive and the oculus with the new controllers - he says he likes the Oculus' new touch controllers more than the Vive controllers, and with the third sensor, the tracking isn't bad.

My hangup on going full PC based VR was having to get a modern PC to dive the thing.

[Chris K]

I had the Oculus DK2 for a long time, but just got the "retail" Oculus, with motion controllers.

You're right about the third motion tracker... if you turn your back to them you can lose tracking on the hands pretty quickly. I'll be experimenting with two-sensor setup placement to help, but a third sensor will be coming as soon as I can find one in stock somewhere.

The computer is an issue for sure, and the bit miners aren't making it any easier. I have a last-gen i7, quad core 3.2GHz, an Nvidia 970, and 16GB RAM and an SSD. It's.... enough. I wouldn't go any slower. The 1070 is the sweet spot IMHO, but the prices have gone bonkers. With the 970 I can max out some games, but not the "AAA" style games. To be honest, lowered detail in VR isn't so bad. You're often so busy focusing on motion that you don't have much time to stare at textures and poly counts.

The Oculus motion controllers are fantastic. The grip mechanism feels fantastic, although everyone who came over on Saturday had some problems wrapping their heads around it at first. The motion tracking is incredibly good. It's accurate enough that I could realistically chop a thrown apple in half with a sword. I can't wait for baseball games!

The most irritating thing so far? Stern has an Oculus VR Pinball Arcade, but they aren't selling it! It's GearVR (Samsung phone) only right now. WTF?

Price tag is something like this:
CPU: $300+
Video: $300-500
Oculus+Touch: $400
(other stuff you already have from an older PC)

I considered the PS VR too, but I don't have a PS4, and there's so much indie stuff on the PC that I figured I wouldn't be exposed to on the PS VR.

[ChrisS]

Results

Side Game
Captain Fantastic- Jimmy L. ($20)

Main Event
1. Neo S.- 22 ($70)
2. Sean S.- 22 ($40)
3. Tim E.- 20 ($30)
7. Jimmy L.- 20
7. Brodde P.- 20
7. Tim N.- 20
10. Garrett P.- 18
10. Chris K.- 18
10. Jon Z.- 18
12. Tully- 14
12. Dave B.- 14
15. Stephanie- 10
15. Mark S.- 10
15. Chateen K.- 10
16. Dave M.- 8

Listen. I know I played like shit the other night but I must have at least scored 1 point.

[Ken]

[Chris K]

Yeah, but you lose a point for every DIK.