We’re back from E3 and discuss the announcements from the major console companies, VR news, and recap some of the demos we played. Plus, thoughts on DJI’s new robot, the making of Chernobyl, and the future of maker faires.
One Day Builds
Adam embarks on one of his most ambitious builds yet: fulfil…
Show And Tell
Adam recently completed a build of the royal St. Edwards cro…
Making
Viewers often ask to see Adam working in real-time, so this …
One Day Builds
Adam and Norm assemble a beautifully machined replica prop k…
One Day Builds
One of the ways Adam has been getting through lockdown has b…
Making
Adam unboxes and performs a quick test of this novel new hel…
Making
When Adam visited Weta Workshop early last year, he stopped …
One Day Builds
Adam tackles a shop shelf build that he's been putting off f…
Show And Tell
Time for a model kit build! This steampunk-inspired mechanic…
One Day Builds
Adam reveals his surprise Christmas present for his wife--a …
Will, Hasselblad is Swedish, not German.
Maker Faire could 100% work well as a 501(c) 3 nonprofit. In fact, that’s probably a much better structural fit for for the type of mission it represents. Nonprofit status would simplify a lot of its operational issues, allow it to engage in grant seeking and public fundraising campaigns, allow corporations to sponsor as a part of their corporate charitable giving, and allow for university and government funding possibilities. In fact, when I first heard about Maker Faire I assumed it was a nonprofit organization because so many of the small orgs putting on mini maker faires round the country are nonprofits.
Speaking from the nonprofit perspective, a “shit ton” of money has already been thrown at it. it seems a bit blinded by the Silicon valley focus on everything being either a product factory or a media empire, neither of which is a good fit for it. Becoming and educational nonprofit would be a much better fit for what Maker Faire is trying to do.
I’m a flight simulator enthusiast and want to respond to the request for comment on the Microsoft reveal at E3. The communities were a little surprised, this reveal at E3 came during the same weekend as FlightSimExpo2019 in Orlando, Florida. It left many wondering ‘why’.
Microsoft tried very hard to monetise the third party market unsuccessfully and maybe this is a way of piloting (pun intended) the series into software-as-a-service that seems to be a profitable model. As much as I’m excited by the technology that seems to be behind this (2 petabytes of cloud data, Azure AI scenery generation, could this actually be used for other titles), the value will come if the client platforms are open. The question around how open this new platform will be is what everyone want’s to know. “Wait and see” is the feeling. And yes it looks good (even if the video shows way over the top AO ambient occlusion effects). Lot of questions, the context of the announcement (E3 and XBOX Game Pass) and nothing else has left a void. Sometimes that gets filled with flights of fancy, wishy thinking and unfounded drivel.
A virtual Earth as a service that can be used in multiple genres, wishy thinking maybe, would be something special though, wouldn’t it? Cautiously optimistic.
thanks for the insight from the FS community. the virtual earth stuff does look super cool…
Also a flight sim enthusiast. That reveal came from nowhere! The flight sim community assumed that MS had discontinued any development of the flight simulator franchise after the abysmal failure of Flight. There are really only two options in the flight sim world these days, FSX (13 years old!) and Xplane. There are commercial derivatives (Lockheed Martin’s Prepar3d for example.)
FSX has by far the largest addon (free and payware) community. Simmers will spend $$$ on all sorts of extras be it hardware or additional content. The addon content opportunities are effectively limitless – when you have the whole world to play in and all the history of aviation to fly virtually. I would say these come down to scenery packs, aircraft and airport addons. With Azure and streaming the terrain from the cloud, this means no more GBs of tiles stored locally. This could be a game changer.
I would also say that without a huge gaming rig, generally the performance of flight sims suck big time. All the current titles are effectively limited to single core performance. If MS can crack multicore, especially with threadripper style CPUs (or at least more cores becoming more beneficial), this could also be a big advancement. I find it interesting that it will be an XBOX title. I can’t see the average XBOX owner spending money on a yoke/HOTAS/pedals and the performance of next years PCs will be far superior to the console, even the XBox 2. Maybe streaming/cloud computing will take some of the traditional burden off local compute power to benefit both.
I agree with Cautiously optimistic!
So I just wanted to post in response to what you said about streaming not being a minor part of the appeal of the quest. For me personally the only reason I bought VR this year after the index sold out was because of ALVR getting a quest alpha. I want portability, but I also don’t want to be able to play things like elite dangerous or blade and sorcery. A mobile only VR “console” is not worth the current price of 2nd gen headsets though they have come down a lot since the vive.