The holiday season has started, and we are nearing the end of the year. Which is always a good time to look back at the previous year!

You might have noticed that I’ve been a bit more active since March 2023. That’s the moment I challenged myself into writing a post at least once a month. This also explains the random Pocket Ball post from November ;).

2023 has been an interesting year, I’ve worked on many projects and became a proud dad once again.

Let’s talk about some of the Highlights.

Retro Trophies 64

I’ve always been nostalgic for retro games, with the N64 era in particular. But whenever I replay the old games I miss a sense of achievement. This gave me the idea to implement a trophy system for the N64 Everdrive.

I dived into the N64 homebrew scene and discovered the amazing libdragon SDK, which makes interacting with the Everdrive SD card (which contains save data) a breeze.

Now all I had to do was figure out the save format of the games, luckily the N64 didn’t have much storage space which made the saves pretty easy to bi-sect and in some cases this was already done by others. I’ve shared my research on GitHub in the N64 save file repository.

After a few weeks of research and coding I released the first version of Retro Trophies 64.

OASE Engine

I’ve mentioned OASE for the first time ever on my blog. OASE is my custom engine implementation of GTA: Vice City.

I didn’t take enough time to work on this project this year. The changes I did make where minor; tweaked the start menu and added loading / saving of the original settings file.

Model viewer

I took a step back from the engine and decided to rewrite some of the model loading and rendering code from scratch. This gave me the opportunity to fix some of the design issues I made in the past which blocked a lot of innovation in OASE.

Personal life

I became a proud dad of a beautiful baby girl. She’s the reason I haven’t been able to work on my projects as much, but it’s all worth it. Waking up and seeing a big smile on her face when I get her out of bed is the best thing someone can imagine. <3

Ever wanted to play pool with more than two players? We got the perfect game for you!

Pocket ball

Pocket ball is a variant of pool that can be played with 2-6 players (we think the ideal player count is 4). All you need is a pool table and 9 pieces of poker chips (or beer caps) for each player.

I’ve created a page where I’ll write down a guide on how to play the game.

As some of you might know I am big VR enthusiast. I’ve been following Oculus since the kickstarter days and owning every headset from the DK1 to the Oculus Quest 1. Yes you read that right I don’t own a Meta Quest 2, the improvement from Quest 1 to Quest 2 just didn’t convince me to spend a few hundred euros.

Enters the Meta Quest 3; the combination of better lenses, higher resolution and MR options sparked my interest. I’ve been playing around with the headset for a week now and thought I would post my first thoughts.

The hardware

It’s so tiny! It’s much smaller than the previous headsets and has nice ergonomics, the weight distribution is much better and feels less like a brick hanging from your face. Wish we could say the same about the headstrap. This must be the worst strap yet. It’s floppy, painful, hard to adjust and just not comfortable at all. I know Meta makes up for the low costs of the headset by selling accessories, but this just leaves a terrible first impression and doesn’t sell headsets.

The lenses and resolution are a nice bump up but didn’t impress as much as I expected. Due to skipping the Quest 2 and hearing those amazing stories about the lenses, I expected the bump to be very impressive like going from SD to HD, but I didn’t even notice it that much (Should I get glasses?). I am more impressed by the step up in overall graphic performance. Games optimised for Quest 3 look so much better with more modern graphical features.

Battery life is decent. Due to having 2 kids I don’t have time for long play sessions anyway, but I can imagine that for people with a bit more time to spend on gaming the battery life is on the short side.

Last but not least the new controllers. They are pretty nice, the tracking rings on the old controllers did not bother me that much, but it’s easier now to bring the controllers closer to your face. The haptics and battery life are a nice improvement.

The software

Oef, where to start. This is still one of the weak points in my opinion.

Booting up the device for the first time prompted me to open the app on my phone (I don’t want to use my phone when setting up a fancy new device!). After connecting the Quest to Wi-Fi using the app, the app got stuck in some weird loop that kept asking me how I wanted the Quest to connect to Wi-Fi. The Quest was already connected and working perfectly so no idea why the app insisted it wasn’t. Talking about app issues; I tried to claim Asgarts Wrath but after clicking ‘claim’ the app got stuck in a loading state, yikes.

After those annoyances the setup was smooth sailing. I set up my guardian and room using the new pass-through scan which felt mind-blowing.

First encounters the introduction app for MR was amazing. Seeing all those little creatures and being able to run around your own living room without being afraid of hitting something was great. A minor nitpick; when the game is over, a scoreboard and links to other “experiences” are loaded. This causes some frame drops. Frame drops in itself aren’t that bad if you are not in a VR experience, but in VR they feel bad and for such a small experience it shouldn’t happen. Again it’s one of the first things people try when opening the headset, everything should be buttery smooth!

The lack of pre-installed / launch software is insane. People that buy this device need to be able to jump into an experience right away to be amazed by the possibilities. Lucky’s tale was an excellent game to be included in the original Oculus Rift. It’s insane that the game that is included will launch 2 months after the headset! I was lucky that I already bought a few games for the Quest 1, so I had something to play. A new user should immediately be welcomed into some awesome experiences. I can imagine an onboarding where you watch a movie on a virtual screen, play a flat screen game, an FPS shooter, some wizardy handtracking game. Something that shows what VR and MR is capable of.

The OS itself still feels very bare bones. It’s just not intuitive to use, the screens focus on selling new content instead of providing quick access to your games and friends. Managing and resizing apps is much harder than it should and switching games still provides a laggy experience.

Summary

I really like the device, the ergonomics (except for the strap) are much better, the improved graphics are a nice bump, and it gives a nice taste of the possibilities of mixed reality. But man does Meta need to step up their game if they want to stay in the game once Apple releases their new Vision Pro. Apple is known for a buttery smooth user experience, ease of use for new users and a huge community of developers creating apps. All things in which Meta is lacking.

People that follow me on Twitter might have already seen some screenshots. I’ve been working on a simple model viewer for DFF files.

This viewer uses a completely new DFF loader (which is a lot more memory efficient) and simpler way of rendering. At this point there is basic animation support for GTA: III models and VC support is in the works.

I am planning to incorporate the new loading and rendering code into OASE.

The OASE project page is up. It doesn’t contain much information yet, but I’ll try to add more info regarding the project, maybe even make it a bit of a devlog.