Steam Frame, Arm Proton, and Linux VR on steam.

In case you haven't tried, the 2 biggest "vr hacks" for motion sickness are:

Have a small circular rug that's a different texture than the ground its on, so you can feel when you step off of it.

And have a single, small, directional fan aimed at you (not overhead.)

Those 2 help keep you grounded and oriented without taking you out of immersion.

But, some games just suck and the locomotion isn't smooth, and can't be saved.

No. They've told LTT and Gamers Nexus that these will not be loss leaders. They want to make hardware sustainable for themselves

Its possible, iirc steam deck was sold at a loss of $150 per unit.

They haven't said the final price, but they've said it will be cheaper than the index, so definitely the under $1000.

About three fiddy?

What I wouldn't give for a Valve Phone now that you mention it.

Steam Frame is going to have a snapdragon processor and will "be a computer".

So there will be an ARM native Steam client (and Steam OS that may or may not be SteamOS). Just a question on whether that gets a wider release.

But yes. Games themselves will be heavily dependent on FEX.

Eh, if they're doing it for Half Life Alyx, it'll likely work like Proton, where Steam will automatically install a native version if it's available, and you can "force a compatibility tool" if you'd prefer to run the original version through FEX. Presumably any dev would be able to upload a native ARM version for Steam Frame/a hypothetical Steam Deck 2, but I imagine very few will.

Edit: Valve engineers pretty much confirmed this to Gamer's Nexus, as they described Steam automatically installing the best version for your device, and that you can manually override that.

Honestly these days the list of things you can't easily compile natively for ARM is getting pretty scarce. It's actually kind of surprising to me that there would even be a significant need for an emulation layer, versus just working directly on compiler and runtime support directly.

FEX will have a performance penalty for CPU bound games (not for graphics if it supports Vulkan (yay passthrough)) so native is better

Isn’t 64bit Steam Client due to drop for Windows imminently? They end 32bit support at the start of next year supposedly.

Yes, but they're making a build specifically for this set. They own all the source code. Presumably that means they made this version native for ARM.

Considering the big rise in ARM PCs it's completely logical that they start supporting it more too, allowing devs to make and distribute ARM builds.

I think they meant the Steam client.

Plus they already said that they would support game binaries built for ARM. Would be stupid not to.

Thank you.

At the risk of sounding like grandpa, I could have sworn in production used to be “is cooking UP” instead of just “is cooking”.

The fluidity of language.

Oh you mean running directly on the headset? That would be a literal game changer!

If it's like anything else running in WSL, absolutely as slow as balls. Most Linux apps are written with the assumption that filesystem operations are incredibly fast, whereas that's not true with Windows. Most games open one big file and do big reads from it so it's not such a problem, whereas something like Git assumes that touching tens of thousands of files should be basically instant.

Linux can be installed on any computer for free, so I wouldn't call not making a Windows binary exclusive, unless all the games I need Proton to run are exclusive too.

If Windows users want to play Half Life 3 they can just ask Microsoft to make a reverse WINE lol

Of course they don't but it would be funny to see if Windows users spend their time with compatibility layers just this once. You know, for the sake of chaotic good.

Completely stops it launching? Most recently I could get to the main menu but would crash on loading a save, previously I could get to early quarantine zone before crashing on a level transition when I gave up. But if it's that simple I'll have to try unplugging my flight sim gear.